mentioning a late friend in personal statement or interview

[nomoreentropy]

one of the reasons i am so adamant about wanting to go to medical school when the time is right is that one of my friends recently (about a month ago) lost a 3 year battle with cancer at 19. would this be more relevant in a personal statement or interview? just curious even though i won't be applying to medical school for many years.

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[mauberley]

one of the reasons i am so adamant about wanting to go to medical school when the time is right is that one of my friends recently (about a month ago) lost a 3 year battle with cancer at 19. would this be more relevant in a personal statement or interview? just curious even though i won't be applying to medical school for many years.

If it's central to your motivations to pursue medicine, by all means weave it into your personal statement. Interview topics are largely at the whim of your interviewer, so if you left it until then, it may never come up.

 

[2050vlsb]

If it's central to your motivations to pursue medicine, by all means weave it into your personal statement. Interview topics are largely at the whim of your interviewer, so if you left it until then, it may never come up.

+1

The prompt for your AMCAS PS is essentially "Why medicine?" .. so if your friend's battle with cancer has significantly impacted your decision, that's where you'd want to mention it. Recognize that, while your experience must certainly have been difficult and emotional, confronting an illness is a common motivation and something I'm sure med schools see a lot of you. Therefore, you'll want to make sure you go beyond just talking about your friend, i.e. that their experience encouraged you to explore medicine further etc.

 

[familyaerospace]

A friend of mine passed away a little over a year ago. She is mentioned (not specifically by name, but by an initial) in my personal statement. Her death was the one that pushed me over the edge from "Should I go into medicine? Or Psychology?" to "Medicine or bust" and it happened that her death was able to be used as a perfect supporting evidence of a big point I made in my personal statement.

 

[hmockingbird]

I would include your friend in your statement if like you said, this relates to why you want to be a doctor. Just remember to make the point of this reference as how it changed your outlook and convinced you to go into medicine.

I think it's fine to mention in an interview to the "why medicine?" question. It might be a good idea to practice though, so you are able to talk about your friend without getting overly emotional (heh, bad undergrad interview experience here...).