Secondaries- goals

[ris11]

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How do we approach secondary applications which write questions like “what are your future goals” beside the obvious (I want to become a physician)? What are these medical schools looking for?

 

[Pile O' Nephritis]

Take this with a grain of salt, because I haven't even matriculated to my medical school yet. I think ADCOMs want to know what kind of professional goals you want to accomplish, and why you need to be a physician to achieve them. And they are hoping for something more impressive than "maintain a stable job and spend time with my family". They want to know what you will do *besides* learn the curriculum and match into a specialty.

Do you want to be a researcher in a specific field? Serve a specific population or geographic region? (How? What have you done so far towards that goal?) Affect public policy or public health? Be a physician-entrepreneur? There are more possibilities, but these are the ones applicants tend to mention the most.

Start with where you envision yourself in 20 years and see if any of it would catch the eye of our imagined admissions committee.

 

[ridebiker]

I've been talking about the kind of doctor I want to become (family medicine), the reasons why (personal and clinical experiences) and then my vision for what my career would look like (small community, hopefully open a free clinic, health education, etc). Just be authentic about what you want to do! And make sure you have at least some experiences or stories to back up your "why"

 

[polymerization]

I think what this particular question is evaluating is the understanding that you've internalized the norm of academic continuity; i.e., you know that as a doctor, major academic resources were invested in educating you. That comes with a responsibility to pay that investment back to society in intellectual work. The question is trying to get you to ask yourself how you envision doing this form of service, and why.

This question is asking you to confront your mortality in a way. What do you hope to leave behind? How are you going to move the profession and your chosen patient population forward? You have to have preferences to compel you to work with some people over others, on some specific type of problem (vs all of the other kinds of problems that can happen to a person).

In other words, if you say you're interested in everything, you're really saying nothing particularly stands out to you—which is rhetorically the same as saying you're not interested in anything. Whether you choose to be interested in the intersection of psychiatry, innovation and social justice like me, or you choose to be wrong (I'm only half joking)—you get to choose what it is that you want to teach us, your future physician colleagues and collaborators.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

What is your purpose as a physician? What are your expectations for medical school? Why this school?