So my personal statement is mostly a summary of the activities that I was involved in college and how they led me to pursue medicine. However, these activities are also the ones that I have in my extracurricular section and are the three of my most meaningful activities. Therefore when I'm describing how they were meaningful (in the extra 1300 or so characters) it would be a repetition of my PS, what is the suggested method for this problem?
Personal Statement and Most Meaningful Activities
- Thread starter ACal
- Start date
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2008
- Messages
- 346
- Reaction score
- 3
Yes...please do not put your resume in paragraph form. I have been bombarded with these types of essays. I can't even read them anymore 😴
There must be more you can say about your most meaningful experiences. I used the exact same experiences I discussed in my PS as my three, and I just chose to talk about what else was meaningful. I definitely couldn't fit it all in my PS and still keep it coherent. I treated those boxes as an opportunity to write a "mini-PS" specifically about each experience.
- Joined
- May 16, 2012
- Messages
- 85
- Reaction score
- 0
I have the similar problem. The most meaningful activities I had are my ph.d. study and two clinical volunteer (each last about 1.5 years) experiences. I wrote the two clinical volunteer experiences because they are important for my decision to pursue a medical career.Also they are the only clinical-related experience I had. I wrote the ph.d. study because I want to become a physician scientist and I had spent such a long time in my life doing the ph.d.. If I do not write these three, I don't how what else I should write?
Any suggestions?
Any suggestions?
Last edited:
Well my PS isn't a "list" of the activities, I just have the experiences in there as part of the reasons I chose medicine. I mean isn't it obvious that your most meaningful activities are the ones that influenced you to choose your career? I don't see how I could answer that question without mentioning those experiences...
- Joined
- May 15, 2011
- Messages
- 9,906
- Reaction score
- 10,039
Not necessarily. My PS didn't mention any of my most meaningful experiences, it was focused on personal experiences that happened before and during high school that influenced my goal of being a doctor. You'll find a lot of people who were influenced based on experiences with a family member or friend who had an illness or something.
If your most meaningful experiences were what motivated you to go into medicine, of course you have to talk about them, but your PS should not simply be a paragraph-style resume. Try to come up with a theme or focus for your PS (yes, "Why Medicine?" is the prompt and main theme, but a central theme often makes everything more cohesive). You can take one experience and make it more personal, describe what you were feeling and thinking, tying in other experiences that relate. You just don't want a PS with each paragraph describing a different activity and why it relates to medicine (extremely boring). The PS needs to flow like a story.
I'd say to focus on one or two of your most meaningful activities and go into detail about one or two specific examples/experiences that occurred within those activities. Depth is important. Otherwise the PS just comes off like a list.
And since AMCAS only allows for 3 most meaningful experiences, of my top 4 most meaningful, 3 went in that section while the other was the topic of my PS.
And since AMCAS only allows for 3 most meaningful experiences, of my top 4 most meaningful, 3 went in that section while the other was the topic of my PS.
