Organization in the Personal Statement?

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goblinxoxo

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I'm applying next cycle, but writing a personal statement now to submit as an assignment in a course I am currently taking in undergrad. My intro focuses on one moment that initiated my interest in medicine, and then I was going to choose three most memorable experiences (pretty much two extracurricular activities and a study abroad experience) to highlight aspects that helped me further develop my interest and skills. Each of these paragraphs will address "why medicine" in the specific context of the activity. The conclusion will tie all of my experiences together and directly answer why medicine.

1) I have this organized chronologically right now, but is it better to arrange the paragraphs in order of most importance? (i.e. most inspiring activity first and so forth)

2) Should I include what skills I gained from the experiences (like communication/problem-solving/etc) to highlight what I bring to the table, even though this could be described in my application?

3) My intro highlights an experience when I was ill as a child. Should I continually bring this idea back throughout my paper, or is it better to bring this back in the conclusion when I am tying everything together?

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I'm applying next cycle, but writing a personal statement now to submit as an assignment in a course I am currently taking in undergrad. My intro focuses on one moment that initiated my interest in medicine, and then I was going to choose three most memorable experiences (pretty much two extracurricular activities and a study abroad experience) to highlight aspects that helped me further develop my interest and skills. Each of these paragraphs will address "why medicine" in the specific context of the activity. The conclusion will tie all of my experiences together and directly answer why medicine.

1) I have this organized chronologically right now, but is it better to arrange the paragraphs in order of most importance? (i.e. most inspiring activity first and so forth)

2) Should I include what skills I gained from the experiences (like communication/problem-solving/etc) to highlight what I bring to the table, even though this could be described in my application?

3) My intro highlights an experience when I was ill as a child. Should I continually bring this idea back throughout my paper, or is it better to bring this back in the conclusion when I am tying everything together?
I think after you write the first draft you'll get a better understanding of how you want it to be organized. I've read some that worked well chronologically, but I don't know if ordering by importance is a common method.

Let some editors ready your draft and they'll help you with organization.

I think you don't need to bring the idea of the intro back to every paragraph, just tie it together at the end.
 
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I'm applying next cycle, but writing a personal statement now to submit as an assignment in a course I am currently taking in undergrad. My intro focuses on one moment that initiated my interest in medicine, and then I was going to choose three most memorable experiences (pretty much two extracurricular activities and a study abroad experience) to highlight aspects that helped me further develop my interest and skills. Each of these paragraphs will address "why medicine" in the specific context of the activity. The conclusion will tie all of my experiences together and directly answer why medicine.

1) I have this organized chronologically right now, but is it better to arrange the paragraphs in order of most importance? (i.e. most inspiring activity first and so forth)

2) Should I include what skills I gained from the experiences (like communication/problem-solving/etc) to highlight what I bring to the table, even though this could be described in my application?

3) My intro highlights an experience when I was ill as a child. Should I continually bring this idea back throughout my paper, or is it better to bring this back in the conclusion when I am tying everything together?

So, I am not an adcom, and someone with more experience may want to weigh in. I just really enjoy writing and had a ton of people who sit on admissions boards or interview for my med school read mine. Their advice to me was that chronological personal statements come off as slightly boring. You are also going to have the opportunity to write about important involvements in your application apart from the personal statement, so keep that in mind. It is most important that the writing and ideas flow. That could possibly be chronological if you can do it well, or it could be idea and personal development stages oriented. For my statement, I identified what I wanted each paragraph or section to say. Mine went like this:

1. I have faced hardships that have demonstrated the importance of medicine and have made me a more empathetic person.

2. I took my interest seriously and was involved in things that made me a better person and potential doctor and I came out with great skills because of it. Here is how these experiences shaped my perception of medicine and here is how they will apply to being a doctor. (Don’t make this part formulaic and you likely don’t need to go into too much detail as to the involvements themselves because you will have the opportunity to do that elsewhere). This, or the first paragraph, would be a good place to talk about major life experiences, hopefully not academic related, that made you interested.

3. Here is what I hope to be when I am a doctor and how I will achieve (this was my conclusion and was the shortest section).

Other tips:

The “hook” idea that is spread is kind of unnecessary. Your first paragraph doesn’t necessarily need to be exciting. Rather, the statement itself should be memorable in a good way. You should still have a strong first sentence though.

I came up with three things I though were really important to why I wanted to be a doctor and used that as my basis. One was an involvement as a caretaker, the second was family experiences with medicine, the third was my current involvement with an inter professional team.

Hopefully some of this was helpful? I never know if I’m avtually being helpful or just annoying. Haha. I’m sure it will be great especially with you getting such a head start on it!
 
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I'm applying next cycle, but writing a personal statement now to submit as an assignment in a course I am currently taking in undergrad. My intro focuses on one moment that initiated my interest in medicine, and then I was going to choose three most memorable experiences (pretty much two extracurricular activities and a study abroad experience) to highlight aspects that helped me further develop my interest and skills. Each of these paragraphs will address "why medicine" in the specific context of the activity. The conclusion will tie all of my experiences together and directly answer why medicine.

1) I have this organized chronologically right now, but is it better to arrange the paragraphs in order of most importance? (i.e. most inspiring activity first and so forth)

2) Should I include what skills I gained from the experiences (like communication/problem-solving/etc) to highlight what I bring to the table, even though this could be described in my application?

3) My intro highlights an experience when I was ill as a child. Should I continually bring this idea back throughout my paper, or is it better to bring this back in the conclusion when I am tying everything together?

EDIT: I come from an undeserved background with family hardships that I've overcome that I could write about. Is it less boring to talk about this in place of talking about extracurricular? I was originally writing about tutoring/teaching, a study abroad experience, and being an ED scribe. If I talk about overcoming the hardships, I would swap it for study abroad.
Thanks for your help everyone!
 
EDIT: I come from an undeserved background with family hardships that I've overcome that I could write about. Is it less boring to talk about this in place of talking about extracurricular? I was originally writing about tutoring/teaching, a study abroad experience, and being an ED scribe. If I talk about overcoming the hardships, I would swap it for study abroad.
Thanks for your help everyone!

I think hardships are more interesting and better address your maturity and growth as an individual. You also don’t get another opportunity to mention those until the interview and schools want to know you’ll be a compassionate person who can also academically keep up. I would almost keep the studying abroad if it had a significant impact on your understanding of medicine over the tutoring or teaching portion unless they were significantly more impactful than what one normally assessed tutoring to be? Does that make sense?
 
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I think hardships are more interesting and better address your maturity and growth as an individual. You also don’t get another opportunity to mention those until the interview and schools want to know you’ll be a compassionate person who can also academically keep up. I would almost keep the studying abroad if it had a significant impact on your understanding of medicine over the tutoring or teaching portion unless they were significantly more impactful than what one normally assessed tutoring to be? Does that make sense?
Thanks! That helps a lot. Tutoring was very inspiring to me so I kept that and I ended up using the study abroad to highlight how it helped me overcome personal hardships
 
1) I have this organized chronologically right now, but is it better to arrange the paragraphs in order of most importance? (i.e. most inspiring activity first and so forth)
Whatever makes sense for your story and how you came to decide to be a doctor is fine. I did mine chronologically because it was a progression from thing 1 leading me to get involved with thing 2 which made me realize thing 3.

2) Should I include what skills I gained from the experiences (like communication/problem-solving/etc) to highlight what I bring to the table, even though this could be described in my application?
Yes, yes, yes you should do this. This should not be a list of things you did in undergrad. You should be talking about HOW the experiences led to your interest in medicine and how they helped you develop as a person.

3) My intro highlights an experience when I was ill as a child. Should I continually bring this idea back throughout my paper, or is it better to bring this back in the conclusion when I am tying everything together?

You don't need to continually call back to your childhood illness, but whatever the point of the story is should tie into the "big idea" of the essay, as should each of your body paragraphs. Your intro should build up to your thesis statement (which should be something along the lines of "I want to be a doctor because....") and every experience, anecdote, etc. should connect back to that thesis.

Also, while I don't mean to diminish the impact of your childhood illness, just FYI this is a super common "trope" we see in personal statements. That doesn't mean your PS won't be good, and you certainly don't need to reach for something more unique if this is genuinely what started your journey in medicine. But just a heads up because I feel like some applicants do this kind of story specifically because they feel it sets them apart from others, when it really doesn't.

This is so helpful and reassuring! Thank you! And lol I knew the sick kid story was a little cliche and I didn't want to use it. My other option was talking about how I wanted to be a marine biologist for a while, but I couldn't expand this enough to tie into the choice for medicine. Hopefully the way discussed my illness is a little more impactful but I'm just gonna keep it for this assignment, and think about another/more effective intro topics before I actually apply next cycle. Thanks again!
 
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