I have written a few drafts of my personal statement, but I am stuck on one thing in particular. Although I graduate in the normal 4 years, I finished my degree requirements in 3 pursuing another career. Before I graduated last year, I decided to pursue medicine so I did all remaining the prereqs this last year. In my transcript there is a clear lapse in the sequence of my prereq classes (i.e., took chem 2 in 2012 and orgo 1 in 2015). Should I include how my pursuit of another career led me to realize that medicine is for me? I know the PS should be about medicine, but my journey is a large part of how the decision of medicine came about. The other career was in healthcare as well, so its not like I made a complete 180 flip in my career choice.
Personal Statement help
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Your personal statement should not be about medicine, it is about WHY you specifically want to be a physician (as opposed to a nurse, other healthcare worker, banker, lawyer, etc). So go for whatever you think best tells the story of "why" you want to do this.
I don't think anyone would care if you took the pre-reqs in a weird order so don't include it unless it helps answer the "why medicine" question.
I don't think anyone would care if you took the pre-reqs in a weird order so don't include it unless it helps answer the "why medicine" question.
Thanks, so I should't mention that there was a point in my life I was NOT pursuing medicine? Otherwise, my extracurricular look like I have been slacking on the medical and research activities and I crunched them all in the end...
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I think your personal statement should be about medicine as well as why you want to be a physician. I'm pretty sure you can mention your career change, as that's important to why you're applying now.
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No I'm saying talk about it in the light of why you want to be a physician. Like talk about how almost becoming a whatever made you realize what you really want to do is be a doctor or however you want to phrase it.
The point is the PS should be about WHY you want to be a doctor not just how you've fulfilled the requirements
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Don't worry about anything else, just write what made you decide you want to pursue medicine..
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I think it's fine to mention that there was a point in time where you weren't pursuing medicine. While the main goal of the personal statement is to say why medicine, it's also about showing growth and that you understand what you are getting into in medical school.
I wrote my personal statement about my journey to realizing why medicine was right for me. I was honest and included a period of doubt that I had about going into the profession and then explained all of the things I did to clear up the doubt. I think adding all of the extracurricular activities that you did that are not related to medicine could actually really help you here. They can make your application stand out diversity wise and show that you are willing to change and grow.
Mentioning that I had a time of not pursing medicine in my personal statement didn't hurt my chances at all--it actually gave me more to talk about in my interviews. I hope this helps!
