MD/PhD Essay & Significant Research Experience Essay Comments

[SynBio]

I have made my MD/PhD essay into more of a philosophy essay which talks about how wanting to do a md/phd program developed because of the specific experiences I have had. Any opinions on this? Does it look strange if you leave out future goals for this essay?

For the Significant Research Experience Essay I was thinking spending around 1-2 paragraphs per project (five projects all from the same lab).
-Describe goal of project
-Describe work that I did
-Describe what project resulted in (poster, conference paper, publication, etc)
-Describe time spent on project?

The last one I am a little unsure on since this is in the works/activity section. Any opinions?

I have found one example essay online, so if any one has links for others it would be appreciated.

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[SynBio]

essay examples

 

[staygoldponyboy]

Yeah, that's basically what I did. Don't overthink it though. Just get it in. You'll have to re-write this essay over and over again on your secondaries in various forms. Some just ask you to boil down your interests into one sentence. One school I'm interviewing at even has me schedule a pre-interview phone conversation about my research interests, even though at this point I think I've written about it several times for the same application. I'm definitely not complaining (so stoked to be interviewing) - just letting you know that those essays will be the first of many essays you'll write to the same school about the same thing.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

For the MD/PhD essay I talked about how I became interested in the combined degree and why I wanted to pursue it.

For the significant research essay I talked about all my projects. A quick explanation what they were about and what I found, followed by a short description of my major responsibilities in each project, and what I got out of it in terms of papers/posters, experience, and what I discovered about my interest and motivation for research from doing each project.

At least in my case the significant research essay didn't have much in common with my entries on the work and activities section. It went into more detail about what I did in each experience. This was especially true for one of my experiences in which I participated in several projects. In the W&A section I couldn't go into any detail on those projects, but in the SRE essay I could talk about each one.

 

[SynBio]

Thanks.

One more thing was the ending to the significant research experience essay. Curious how others have ended it? With a concluding paragraph wrapping up overall goals learned from all experiences or simply ending it on the last lab experience paragraph with no concluding paragraph?

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

Thanks.

One more thing was the ending to the significant research experience essay. Curious how others have ended it? With a concluding paragraph wrapping up overall goals learned from all experiences or simply ending it on the last lab experience paragraph with no concluding paragraph?

I just ended it abruptly with the last lab experience. My impression was that the SRE is just meant to be a description of each experience, and rather disjointed. I used the "why MD/PhD" essay for talking about my overall motivations and goals. But that's just what I did and for all I know I could have done it all wrong.