Shaving a PS

Started by Balantidiumcoli
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Balantidiumcoli

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10+ Year Member
Anyone have any good advice for how to shave down a PS? I'm currently working on mine for the upcoming cycle and presently have 2500 words (and counting, I still haven't finished writing everything in yet), well in excess of the 4500 character limit.

I'm trying to narrow it down but I feel as though it's really hard to give a good portrait of who I am without putting all of that content in there (and for the record, no I don't really like myself that much).
 
Balantidiumcoli said:
Anyone have any good advice for how to shave down a PS? I'm currently working on mine for the upcoming cycle and presently have 2500 words (and counting, I still haven't finished writing everything in yet), well in excess of the 4500 character limit.

I'm trying to narrow it down but I feel as though it's really hard to give a good portrait of who I am without putting all of that content in there (and for the record, no I don't really like myself that much).
Click to expand...

Take advantage of the PS reader thread when it pops up for next cycle.

Sent from my SGH-T999 using SDN Mobile
 
Get it all in, then cut it with a knife.

Are there synonyms that you can use that are shorter?

I found that there were many cases where I could combine two sentences with a semicolon and cut out a couple dozen characters. They add up.

I wrote three different personal statements. I really stressed over the first two, but could never fit everything in that i wanted. Then a few weeks before submitting I scrapped them both and started with a clean document. It ended up being about 10 characters too long, so a couple of minor fixes and it was perfect. Several proof-readers each made VERY minor corrections, and it was done. Everyone said that my last attempt was the best.

I think the process of writing the first two got the BS out of my system. The third one hit in a moment of pure inspiration. I was half asleep one night, woke up with an idea and was clear enough to write down the core of the idea before falling back to sleep. It was pure gold.

The essays that I threw out were not useless, I used themes from my original two PS to form the themes of my secondaries.

So I would say to finish writing the one you are working on. Get it cut down to close to the correct size, then pitch it. Use the lessons that you learned in editing the first one to write a new one. Use shorter words, better sentence structure, complex sentences, etc. then you won't feel like you must be so complete. The PS is not to show your whole life, just a slice of why you want to go to med school.

Good luck. There are several threads on how to write a good personal statement. Be sure to read them all.

dsoz
 
Additionally, have several people who aren't your friends, family, profs, etc read it. They need to be people you don't know. If they know you, they read into things, and think its "fine" and it may not be when read by an adcom... Likely you have a bunch of stuff in there that isn't really important to the goal of saying "Why Medicine" and that SCREAM that message loud and clear to an adcom... It likely has a bunch of accolades about why they should pick you and about how wonderful you are, which is not the purpose of your PS, that is the purpose of your application. Your PS should scream at them that you have the passion and drive for medicine, and the events in your life that support those things...
 
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