PS writers block...help

[Ari1584]

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So i bought the barrons book on best personal statements, made lists of my accomplishments, why i want to be a doc, my goals, etc...but i cant seem to correctly organize all of my thoughts and ideas into one cohesive essay. I started my PS like 6 times already. I dont normally have this much trouble writing and i am running out of time! I want to submit my app the first week of june.

I have so many things to say, and i am not sure what i should include in my PS and what i should leave out. I mean, i dont want to re-list all of my experiences from my work/activites section, and i want to leave some things to answer in secondaries. Ugh...i have a horrible case of writer's block and have no idea how to cure it!

 

[nystargate]

Don't stress yourself out just because THIS essay is for med school. With your list of accomplishments, think about the most significant/life-changing ones and reflect on what you learned or how that experience changed you. For example, I started off my PS describing my experience on the psychiatric floor of a hospital I volunteered at and how it was completely different than what I expected. From there I got into discussing medicine and the essay flowed smoothly. I included my volunteering experience on the list of 15 activities, but I expanded on that in the PS. Don't try to incorporate all 15 activities into the PS because that's just a bad idea. Again, focus on the main ones, reflect and then start typing.

 

[amakhosidlo]

Heh. Join the club.
I just attended an info session with our school's adcom head, who basically told me to throw my PS out the window and start over. 🙁

What's been sorta working for me since is to write an autobiography about your experiences, maybe a paragraph or two each, then distill the basics for each down into maybe 2 sentences. Then replace the rest with why the given experience was important to you, and finish up with how it applies to medicine and shows that medicine is right for you.

Rinse. Repeat.

Then when you've got a PS-size piece of writing, separate your experiences out, and try to link them together in a sort of logical progression (Independent of chronology, that's the mistake I was making) that eliminates the monotony of detailing every bump on your path to medicine. For example. If you were on a sports team (even intramural), you could go on about what it meant to work as a team, and how you worked to overcome obstacles together, then segway into one of your volunteering experiences, going on about how you saw allied health pros + docs all work as a team, with docs leading said team, then go into your best leadership experience, what you learned, and how the whole rigamorol you just described showed you that you're a great team player that people look to for leadership and that's why you belong in medicine...

...and I just made that up off the top of my head
Why I can't distill my own experiences that easily...still escapes me..🙄

As much as I hate to admit it, I wasted my money on one of those d*mn books too. The only section I'd pay attention to is the "what not to do" section. Oh, go read pandabear's blurb on statement writing too, definitely gave me an idea of what to stay away from...

 

[BlueElmo]

Hmmm. I actually found the Barron's book really helpful.

 

[nick_carraway]

I didn't find the Barron's book too helpful.

What I did find helpful is just writing. Writing crap. Share it and take criticism and chuck your drafts and start over again. It's a pretty tedious process but going through the motions really does help.

My first application, I went through 4 complete rewrites. This cycle, I've gone through 2.

My suggestion would be to start small. Try writing a 2 minute elevator pitch to try to sell yourself to an adcom. You'll figure out what achievements, what memorable parts of your life you want the listener to remember. Take those few tidbits that you're proud of/excited by and expand upon them in the form of a PS.

 

[MILK07]

This might not work for everyone, but I know I was having a lot of trouble getting all the ideas swirling around in my brain down on paper without sounding like an AP english essay.

My solution: A bottle of red wine! I drank some wine, felt inspired, sat down and wrote for an hour straight. A couple of days later, I went back through it and fixed the typos and spelling mistakes. Obviously it went through a lot of polishing after that but it really helped me to just SAY what I wanted to say.

Just a suggestion!

Good luck!