I fear my personal statement isn’t relevant enough to neuro. How can I fix it?

[folgersormh]

---

Members don't see this ad.

Obviously can’t give specific advice without me sharing it, but overall I’m worried I focus too much on irrelevant things. Here is my outline:
1.
- Why medicine (very very brief).
- In one sentence mention wanting to go into FM originally, but passion shifted to neuro

2.
- Interesting science and detective work
- Anecdote about a complicated patient
- My role in his care to come up with a differential

3.
- Love the role of empathy and support needed to help patients in neurology
- anecdote about difficult emotional case
- my role in providing patient comfort
- acknowledgment that many diseases cannot be reversed but still can have a meaningful impact on care

4.
- Interested in neuro research
- briefly talk about my research and desire to continue similar work (very brief paragraph but research is important to me)

5.
- what I want in a program
- what I bring to the table

I feel my PS is more shoe-horning in experiences. And I feel “interesting science and diagnostics” is very shallow (didn’t use those exact words but that’s the gist), and mentioning the more social side of Neuro feels cheap because every field needs that. But I did genuinely want to do FM up until really the end of 3rd year, and even then it was really hard to decide. But what I liked about neuro over FM was the diagnostic difficulty and the social interactions were more impactful because lots of patients had high needs and needed multidisciplinary approaches to adequately help them, which isn’t unique to neuro but definitely felt the most meaningful to me on my rotations. And I just like the neuro population.

Any tips to make it more relevant to neuro? I don’t have an aha moment or this “the clouds opened and I felt this was the only path” feeling. Honestly I’d probably be almost as happy in FM or IM as I would in neuro, just not as happy.

 

[Asklepian]

But what I liked about neuro over FM was the diagnostic difficulty and the social interactions were more impactful because lots of patients had high needs and needed multidisciplinary approaches to adequately help them

Find a way to include this in your statement. Especially impactful if you do this very early on and perhaps can transition smoothly to it when you mention you were interested in FM, but found what you were really looking for in neuro.

Hard to comment too much without seeing the content, but I would avoid spreading too thin and instead hone in on a few key points which effectively add up to "I desperately want to be a neurologist and here is why".

 

[CnsCrit]

Agree with the above, and overall I would say the way you laid it out sounds pretty good, you make some nice points. Remember your PS is a relatively small piece of the whole residency packet, the truth is it won't make a huge impact in most academic programs unless it is truly bad or very unique (which is difficult for vast majority of applicants). The more objective data in your application has a better chance of helping you stand out.