I am writing my personal statement and I have gotten feedback from a few people. One of these people is an admissions officer and they said it was great. My undergrad pre-med advisor, on the other hand, sent me a list of things to change. I have also had some other people look it and the responses seem to range heavily, minus some issues of flow which seems to be unanimously agreed on. I am a reapplicant and I am trying to write the "perfect statement" here but there just seems to be no consensus on these things. How did you guys decide who to trust for a final word? How many weeks did you spend writing/rewriting? How many different versions?
How do you decide?
- Thread starter Lorko
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2016
- Messages
- 24,742
- Reaction score
- 44,493
1) Pre-med advisers are notorious for giving terrible advice
2) Admissions committee members are in a great position to critique, but they are still individuals and will vary in preferences; however, they are still better than pre-med advisers or random people
3) Other people are generally not in a very good position to judge writing, particularly personal statements
Who are these other people? Successful med school applicants? ADCOMs? If they haven't been accepted to med school, served on an admissions committee, or have written professionally, their opinions are extremely qualified. As someone who has written for a living, I find that most non-writers are terrible at giving writing advice.
Edit: Also, as has been pointed out, only a few personal statements blow ADCOMs away. It is very unlikely that yours will be one of them. You should instead aim to have one that does not turn them off.
2) Admissions committee members are in a great position to critique, but they are still individuals and will vary in preferences; however, they are still better than pre-med advisers or random people
3) Other people are generally not in a very good position to judge writing, particularly personal statements
Who are these other people? Successful med school applicants? ADCOMs? If they haven't been accepted to med school, served on an admissions committee, or have written professionally, their opinions are extremely qualified. As someone who has written for a living, I find that most non-writers are terrible at giving writing advice.
Edit: Also, as has been pointed out, only a few personal statements blow ADCOMs away. It is very unlikely that yours will be one of them. You should instead aim to have one that does not turn them off.
Two physicians I work with today read it and they thought it was great.
I had an english tutor read it and she said it was great.
Two successful med school applicants said it needed some work.
Another admissions committee member said it read ike 90% of the statements she has seen. Which she said was not necessarily a bad thing.
I had an english tutor read it and she said it was great.
Two successful med school applicants said it needed some work.
Another admissions committee member said it read ike 90% of the statements she has seen. Which she said was not necessarily a bad thing.
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,831
- Reaction score
- 9,999
Ignore the premed advisor.
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2017
- Messages
- 546
- Reaction score
- 1,096
I had a few versions going and I had a number of folks read my top 2 or 3. I put a higher weight on people who had relevant background and provided good advice, but otherwise I tallied the votes and went from there. I liked using multiple versions because just asking for feedback is too open-ended to yield highly usable data. After a couple iterations, I had a statement written, and I used the scraps of the other versions when I assembled secondaries.
