Personal Statement

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Dharma

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Just starting to brainstorm a bit for my PS and wondering what I should focus on. I have a few ideas but being that it's only one page, I need to focus the topic a bit.

Should the PS be built around what has led me to psychiatry? I want to tell a story about my drive through a few battles and life experiences and how it's led me to where I stand today but how that fits in exactly w psych may be tough to pull off in a page or less.

I know I don't want it to be a "I love psych" statement bc I'm sure there's plenty of those already.

Any thoughts?

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Personal statements rarely knock anyone’s socks off. They can hurt you if they are poorly written or have a lot of spelling errors. They can be too long or too short (make it one page, but not much less). Most talk about a memorable psych patient or some personal experience with a friend or family member with a mental illness. You are right in trying to not make this sound like a question and answer section of the Miss America pageant “I just want to help people”.

About four years ago there was a lot of chatter among program directors about discovering personal statements that were plagiarized from the internet. Finally, one of the most senior program directors said “My wife who is an educator for the last 30 years just asked me what all the hub bub is about and I told her that our applicants where plagiarizing their personal statements from the internet and she responded. Duuuh.” :p
 
Just starting to brainstorm a bit for my PS and wondering what I should focus on. I have a few ideas but being that it's only one page, I need to focus the topic a bit.

Should the PS be built around what has led me to psychiatry? I want to tell a story about my drive through a few battles and life experiences and how it's led me to where I stand today but how that fits in exactly w psych may be tough to pull off in a page or less.

I know I don't want it to be a "I love psych" statement bc I'm sure there's plenty of those already.

Any thoughts?

I got asked about my personal statement at a substantial part of my interviewing so I recommend not writing ANYTHING you aren't confortable or don't want to talk about face to face or in person.

Your personal state is a reflection of who you are without them having to talk to you. It's almost like an online dating profile but more formal since this is a job application process. You wouldn't want to write one page defining yourself as a life of difficulties necessarily or define yourself in relation to your psychotherapy sessions (as another forum right now discusses). That would make you unappealing to a suitor.

Ideally you want to show that you are an interesting person and apple to accomplish things. You want the reader to want to meet you to keep talking to you. Trust me, what I got asked about from my PS had NOTHINGbto do with psych.
 
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