How much to reveal on secondaries

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crixyphoid

Histrionic Confabulations
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So I am still doing secondaries (I know I'm late but I'm an Aug MCATer) and I'm wondering how much drama is too much to reveal? All the advice says be personal and honest, and that sad stories are ok to a degree- but what is too much? For example, showing the dark sides of a brother's drug addiction. Does showing too much end up looking desperate? Overly eager to please by revealing skeletons?

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Be discrete. Particularly about other people's business (your brother's addiction, etc). Last year we had a major discussion about an applicant who discussed his father's incontinence after surgery. Some thought it was an acceptable discussion of a medical condition and some others thought it was TMI that the dad may not have wished to have revealed about himself.
 
Be discrete. Particularly about other people's business (your brother's addiction, etc). Last year we had a major discussion about an applicant who discussed his father's incontinence after surgery. Some thought it was an acceptable discussion of a medical condition and some others thought it was TMI that the dad may not have wished to have revealed about himself.

Lol, perfect example >). I agree, you should use your best judgement. If your brother's drug addiction has had a profound impact on your life, or if this significantly contributed to your desire to practice medicine then I'd say it's fair game. The other thing to consider is whether it is expressly relevant to the question being asked on the secondary. I wouldn't use this situation for a generic "Is there anything else you'd like us to know?" question. On the other hand, a question such as "Tell us about a situation where you had to make an ethical decision" might perfectly fit within the realm of your brother's problem and how it affects you.
 
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LizzyM, or other adcoms, would it be okay to say "close family member" or something instead? I mean, was your problem primarily the mention of an embarrassing condition, or was it that the applicant identified the person who had it? Just curious.
 
Is it ok to change your relationship to the person in a discussion? On one of my essays for one of my schools, I mentioned a family member's problem and how we dealt with it, but I changed which family member it was. It didn't change the line of the story at all (or any of the other actors in it), and it made me a bit more distanced from the person (instead of the opposite trend, which seems more like cheating). In any case, I'd rather not get accepted into a school than publicize that person's real story.
 
Alright...what about a compromise.... Use the true relationship, the true situation, but add at the end "information shared with permission." I really don't see why confidentiality should be a HUGE concern for the following reasons: 1) we are applying to medical school...everyone reading our application should have some grasp of confidentiality concerns, 2) I would be shocked if a parent would object to their child using their health condition to help them get into medical school, 3) personal medical stories can be the single most important factor in a pre-med's desire to become a doctor. Anyone care for a rebuttal?
 
Alright...what about a compromise.... Use the true relationship, the true situation, but add at the end "information shared with permission." I really don't see why confidentiality should be a HUGE concern for the following reasons: 1) we are applying to medical school...everyone reading our application should have some grasp of confidentiality concerns, 2) I would be shocked if a parent would object to their child using their health condition to help them get into medical school, 3) personal medical stories can be the single most important factor in a pre-med's desire to become a doctor. Anyone care for a rebuttal?

there are certain conditions that are more "socially acceptable" than others. i am fine with sharing my own conditions (which have really been the main influence pushing me towards medicine), but it is not my decision whether or not i should use the family member's. even if he/she said it was ok, it happens to be very private info that some other members of my family would not like to have shared.

beyond that, the true identity of the person is not something that ___ med school admissions committee absolutely needs to know in order to evaluate whether or not i'm a good candidate for their school. my decision-making ability/maturity can be evaluated perfectly well from my story without that bit of information. i'm trying to exploit family members as little as possible in this whole process. :p
 
Alright...what about a compromise.... Use the true relationship, the true situation, but add at the end "information shared with permission." I really don't see why confidentiality should be a HUGE concern for the following reasons: 1) we are applying to medical school...everyone reading our application should have some grasp of confidentiality concerns, 2) I would be shocked if a parent would object to their child using their health condition to help them get into medical school, 3) personal medical stories can be the single most important factor in a pre-med's desire to become a doctor. Anyone care for a rebuttal?

and btw, the type of confidentiality that medical workers are used to dealing with has nothing to do with a footnote to an essay. if you know anything about hipaa, you'll remember that there are very specific procedures one has to follow to ensure that information is confidential; it's not really fair to the adcom to ask them to go above and beyond the standard protocol to protect my particular "privileged information," when it wasn't even necessary to release it in the first place.
 
there are certain conditions that are more "socially acceptable" than others. i am fine with sharing my own conditions (which have really been the main influence pushing me towards medicine), but it is not my decision whether or not i should use the family member's. even if he/she said it was ok, it happens to be very private info that some other members of my family would not like to have shared.

beyond that, the true identity of the person is not something that ___ med school admissions committee absolutely needs to know in order to evaluate whether or not i'm a good candidate for their school. my decision-making ability/maturity can be evaluated perfectly well from my story without that bit of information. i'm trying to exploit family members as little as possible in this whole process. :p

Fair enough. My only counter-argument is that we aren't sharing the conditions with society, but rather other doctors or at least closed admissions committees. Our entire application is confidential; think about it, we include our name, phone number, address, social security number, grades, etc. I agree that it would be best to talk with the affected person beforehand, but in the end I think medical school applicants can expect a certain level of discretion on the part of medical schools/adcoms.
 
Fair enough. My only counter-argument is that we aren't sharing the conditions with society, but rather other doctors or at least closed admissions committees. Our entire application is confidential; think about it, we include our name, phone number, address, social security number, grades, etc. I agree that it would be best to talk with the affected person beforehand, but in the end I think medical school applicants can expect a certain level of discretion on the part of medical schools/adcoms.

alright, then how about this: i just didn't really want them to know who it was.
i was just wondering if the sort of information falsification that i did was ok. and btw, it wasn't in my main essay, just one of the secondary ones that the school required.
 
LizzyM, or other adcoms, would it be okay to say "close family member" or something instead? I mean, was your problem primarily the mention of an embarrassing condition, or was it that the applicant identified the person who had it? Just curious.

I don't like having an applicant identify someone who has an embarrassing condition. Do I want to meet Mr. Smith at the white coat ceremony & remember back to Jackie Smith's essay about how difficult it was for her dad to recover from prostate cancer, particularly the incontinence he experieinced for months after the surgery? Could she have written about the problem but not been so graphic?

In some cases it doesn't seem like "close family member" is specific enough. In those cases, maybe an applicant can skim over the really juicy details. Say that your brother's carelessness (and not his crystal meth habit) caused the loss of your family home in a fire, or that your family was fractured when your father met someone else and divorced your mom (don't mention that dad's new love is named "Greg"). Now maybe the big news flash is that your dad is gay but that, in my mind, is TMI that can be left out of the story without changing the nature of the story which is that your parents' breakup has had an effect on your relationship with them and with your ability to relate to others.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Last year I learned some personal information about someone I thought I knew well after I read her grandchild's med school application. Need I say that I wish the grandchild had been more discrete?
 
I read one applicant's personal statement who used names quite a bit. She mentioned her sister's name and illness and even the names of patients she interacted with at the hospital. And she got into 5 allopathic schools.

So, I am not so sure how admissions committes react generally to the disclosure of illness and names. But in her case, it clearly didn't affect her application negatively at all.
 
I read one applicant's personal statement who used names quite a bit. She mentioned her sister's name and illness and even the names of patients she interacted with at the hospital. And she got into 5 allopathic schools.

So, I am not so sure how admissions committes react generally to the disclosure of illness and names. But in her case, it clearly didn't affect her application negatively at all.

I think it could certainly have affected her application negatively without necessarily leading to rejections across the board. The adcoms may have had misgivings about the PS but accepted her on her strengths in other areas.
 
I think that disclosing a name won't lead to an outright rejection or tarnish an otherwise good personal statement. I have seen quite of few personal statements on the net that mention names. And the applicant that I know got into 5 allopathic schools in the US, and 3 in Canada. While, confidentiality is a very important part of the medical field, some may not see it as a blatant breach in the case of a confidential application.

BUT it could in some cases, affect an adcom's opinion to some degree (i.e. subtracting some points from an application for poor judgement on the part of the applicant).
 
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