Rewrite Personal Statement and Works/Activities?

[bonoz]

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I know for a fact what my biggest weakness was last cycle. It was my under-30 MCAT score and the fact that my second MCAT was LOWER than my first (total score).

With that being said, I really gave it my best when I wrote my personal statement and works/activities description. I wrote my personal statement based on a childhood experience and how my interest in medicine stemmed out of it, and was further confirmed through my experiences in the lab, classroom, hospital, etc. I also avoided long sentences such as the one preceding this one. 😀

My question is.. do I need to change my Personal Statement and other things? I feel like I did my best on those and others have given it good feedback as well. What should I do?

What about works/activities?

and what about Letters of Recommendations?

Cheers

 

[codenamekris]

when i re-applied, i kept the same letter of recs but added two that reflected what i had been doing since i first applied. my undergraduate school committee letter was also updated.

the backbone of my personal statement and activity descriptions remained the same, but i still edited them and added to them. i also took off some of the activities that seemed completely irrelevant two years after college (like im sports) and added activities that reflected what i had been doing since i applied the first time. i did an mph degree (2 years) in between my two cycles, though, so i had quite a bit to add...

 

[sustentacular]

I was wondering this too. If you're applying to schools you didn't apply to last time they won't realize you're submitting the same stuff.
For the most part I've changed what I thought to be a weakness in my PS (ie. stating what specialty I wanted to go into). And added something about an EC I've been doing for the past year.
My ECs I didn't change much except for updating a poster to a publication and adding some volunteer work I didn't have before.
I added two LORs to my committee packet (I thought this would give me too many but my advisor said he couldn't remove any of the old ones.)

 

[bellakk]

I didnt make the final waitlist cut for one of my schools so I am looking into reapplication. I emailed the admissions advisor of my top-choice in-state school about reusing my PS and here is what she said:

"Your personal statement should pretty much stay the same unless you want to add to it. Your reasons for becoming a physician should be the same as last year."

I will tweak it a little since I think most of the body paragraphs are well written. I will probably change my intro because it talks a lot about some ECs I did in college and I think it is important to talk more about what I'm doing now instead of then. I will add sentences about how I have grown and matured even just in this past year and how I still feel the same calling to become a physician and how excited I am to start my Special Masters Program in the fall to show my ability to handle difficult graduate coursework.

Basically if you think it is well written and does a good job of expressing you, I would keep it.

I do have a question about secondary essays though, do you guys think this same advice applies to them as well? Many schools asked why their school and I feel like I dont know any more information about the schools now that I did when I wrote the secondaries last year, so keep those the same as well?