Secondary essay question about caring for dying patients

[libraryismyhome]

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I have been working on this one essay for the past 3 weeks.

It was such a difficult question to answer since it was making me to read essays written by medical students or residents about them taking care of dying patients and failing to save them, so they were providing emotional solace to families. The question was about describing lessons I gained after reading these essays and explain how am I going to incorporate them to make myself a better doctor. However, I found them pretty inert, boring and learned nothing new.

Instead of settling with a conventional method of embellishing my essay with talking about my volunteering experience at hospice and nursing home, I decided to dig into many NY times bestselling books written by doctors and tried to learn and glean information from them and incorporate it in my essay. So I am almost done with squeezing every info I learned in 500 words.

But I don't know whether I should cite these books or not. If I have to then sure. But, would adcoms dislike me for reading books written by doctors? If they do then I would go back to embellishing with my exp with terminally ill patients at hospice and nursing home.

 

[gmcguitar4]

I do not think you should reference nor use information from books. The point of the secondary is so the adcom's get a picture of who you are, how you would handle pressure/respond to certain situations, and for many schools, why you want to go there. The only one that should require research is "why that school?" The rest should be from your life experiences/thoughts. Citing the books not only a very bad idea, but it also wastes word space. The adcoms don't want to read citations from other books.

So for this secondary..they asked you to read a couple of essays regarding medical students and residents interacting with terminal patients and how you feel about them? Since you did volunteer at a hospice and a nursing home, I think that is a great way to go about answering the question. But instead of describing a bunch of situations, maybe choose 1 or two that impacted you the most. Even if it wasn't that much, just more so than the others. Relate that to what these med students/residents are saying in their essays and the lessons you learned. Something along those lines you know?

 

[libraryismyhome]

I do not think you should reference nor use information from books. The point of the secondary is so the adcom's get a picture of who you are, how you would handle pressure/respond to certain situations, and for many schools, why you want to go there. The only one that should require research is "why that school?" The rest should be from your life experiences/thoughts. Citing the books not only a very bad idea, but it also wastes word space. The adcoms don't want to read citations from other books.

So for this secondary..they asked you to read a couple of essays regarding medical students and residents interacting with terminal patients and how you feel about them? Since you did volunteer at a hospice and a nursing home, I think that is a great way to go about answering the question. But instead of describing a bunch of situations, maybe choose 1 or two that impacted you the most. Even if it wasn't that much, just more so than the others. Relate that to what these med students/residents are saying in their essays and the lessons you learned. Something along those lines you know?

yeah,, you are right. thank you for your prudent advice!!!

 

[poohbear12345]

This is for UF im assuming?