When I was writing personal statement last year I made all sorts of mistake. Luckily I had a few people who helped me pulling through. Recently Ive also being volunteering as PS reader on SDN. In the spirit of sharing and for posteritys sake, Im sharing my take on writing a decent PS.
Lets start from the basic, or why write a PS. Yes it is required by all medical schools. But more importantly, it is also an opportunity to sell yourself. This cannot be emphasized enough. Your job as a writer is not to write a sob story, nor is it to claim all the wonderful things about being a doctor entails. It is fine to do these, but please, do not forget the chief ingredient of the statement, which is the writer (or, why s/he is a great candidate to study medicine). Thus, while a few sentence about how you are sad to witness the passing of your beloved family member due to cancer is absolutely appropriate to be brought up in the PS, I would view it as mortal sin if you do not talk about how this event has made you more mature (by volunteering with cancer patients, doing cancer research, advocating for cancer related policies etc).
Now that we have a goal (sell yourself to the medical school), lets talk about theme. Two things Ive seen people doing with PS are: going into incessant detail, and cramming all the ECs theyve done into the essay. Both are very bad. Your actual reader may spend anytime between 2 minutes (that resident who volunteered) to 30 minutes (director of MSTP) reading each of your essay. Youll want your essay in a form that is easily remembered when the admissions convene to discuss about your file. You want Person XYZ wrote a wonderful essay talking about how shadowing and doing clinical research gave him/her greater conviction about medicine. Therefore, you would ideally want to focus on two to three event/activities to talk about. I believe, among these, at least one should be medically related (shadowing, clinical research, working as EMT) and at least one should be service related (teaching kids in inner city, working in hospice, working as EMT). If your activity has both components: hospital volunteering, EMT etc, then you are covered with that one activity and has greater freedom in choosing the others. The reason I recommend talking about these activities is because most medical schools have it in their mission to produce medical profession who serves others. So while doing research and weight lifting are great, schools want to know that you know what health profession is about and that you are pursuing it to serve others.
Ok, now youve decided on the things you want to talk about, lets focus on each activity/experience that you want to write about. The PS is not AMCAS activities section, so again, dont go into all the detail about what you do. Use two or three sentences max, to briefly describe. What you want to achieve, is to talk about your feelings about the experience. From there, you can then choose to do a few more things 1) how those feelings help you affirm your dedication to medicine; 2) how you believe the things you learned/experienced help you become a better physician; 3) how you hope to integrate those activities with medicine and so on and so forth.
Once you get all of these done, the hard work, believe it or not, is done. You will then need to craft a good hook for introduction, and a good conclusion. I would not recommend putting conclusion in the introduction because it reduces the interest level of your essay. After that, find all your friend who majored in English/writing, or find your helpful TA in writing classes, or find help people who are good at writing, buy them coffee, sit them down with your essay, politely ask them to spend 5 to 10 hours revising the word choices/sentence structure of your essay.
There you have it, your PS is done. A few more tips
Your goal, aspiration, feelings must be based on the things youve done, things youve experienced and things you have witnessed. You are not applying to college anymore. Do not claim you love research if youve never spend more than a summer in the last four years working in the lab.
Revise, revise, and revise again. Ten revisions is the norm, go beyond the norm.
Let everyone you know read it, take all the criticism and use them constructively. Do not attribute one readers criticism with he doesn't get how medical school PS is written.
A lot of school has essay about diversity/how are you special kinda question. So save one unique experience for those essays rather than write it in your PS. Same goes for tell us about a set back.
Be positive. Medical schools want students who are bright and energetic. If you faced a set back, describe it as objectively as possible. If you had to take a gap year, you did it to further explore medicine, not because you are unsure if you can get into medical school.
Related to above, dont say hoping to get into medical school, I pursued XYZ. Yes, you may be helping grannies so you can get into Harvard, but that doesn't have to be public knowledge
Dont be arrogant. Dont belittle other profession, dont belittle your friend, and for the engineers out there (yours truly was one), dont belittle the humanities major.
Dont criticize physicians in your PS. Not because physicians are beyond reproach, but because as applicant to medical school, we really dont know all that much about medicine. We are applying to study medicine so that one day, we will have the chance to find out what medicine is about.
For the MD/PhD applicants out there, your PS (as opposed to the why MD/PhD essay) should talk about medicine. Leave the science to other essays.
Dont rush through your PS in the hope of submitting it early. To medical school, nothing says not interested more than a PS with spelling mistakes. First week of July is not late(despite what SDN makes you feel).
Lets start from the basic, or why write a PS. Yes it is required by all medical schools. But more importantly, it is also an opportunity to sell yourself. This cannot be emphasized enough. Your job as a writer is not to write a sob story, nor is it to claim all the wonderful things about being a doctor entails. It is fine to do these, but please, do not forget the chief ingredient of the statement, which is the writer (or, why s/he is a great candidate to study medicine). Thus, while a few sentence about how you are sad to witness the passing of your beloved family member due to cancer is absolutely appropriate to be brought up in the PS, I would view it as mortal sin if you do not talk about how this event has made you more mature (by volunteering with cancer patients, doing cancer research, advocating for cancer related policies etc).
Now that we have a goal (sell yourself to the medical school), lets talk about theme. Two things Ive seen people doing with PS are: going into incessant detail, and cramming all the ECs theyve done into the essay. Both are very bad. Your actual reader may spend anytime between 2 minutes (that resident who volunteered) to 30 minutes (director of MSTP) reading each of your essay. Youll want your essay in a form that is easily remembered when the admissions convene to discuss about your file. You want Person XYZ wrote a wonderful essay talking about how shadowing and doing clinical research gave him/her greater conviction about medicine. Therefore, you would ideally want to focus on two to three event/activities to talk about. I believe, among these, at least one should be medically related (shadowing, clinical research, working as EMT) and at least one should be service related (teaching kids in inner city, working in hospice, working as EMT). If your activity has both components: hospital volunteering, EMT etc, then you are covered with that one activity and has greater freedom in choosing the others. The reason I recommend talking about these activities is because most medical schools have it in their mission to produce medical profession who serves others. So while doing research and weight lifting are great, schools want to know that you know what health profession is about and that you are pursuing it to serve others.
Ok, now youve decided on the things you want to talk about, lets focus on each activity/experience that you want to write about. The PS is not AMCAS activities section, so again, dont go into all the detail about what you do. Use two or three sentences max, to briefly describe. What you want to achieve, is to talk about your feelings about the experience. From there, you can then choose to do a few more things 1) how those feelings help you affirm your dedication to medicine; 2) how you believe the things you learned/experienced help you become a better physician; 3) how you hope to integrate those activities with medicine and so on and so forth.
Once you get all of these done, the hard work, believe it or not, is done. You will then need to craft a good hook for introduction, and a good conclusion. I would not recommend putting conclusion in the introduction because it reduces the interest level of your essay. After that, find all your friend who majored in English/writing, or find your helpful TA in writing classes, or find help people who are good at writing, buy them coffee, sit them down with your essay, politely ask them to spend 5 to 10 hours revising the word choices/sentence structure of your essay.
There you have it, your PS is done. A few more tips
Your goal, aspiration, feelings must be based on the things youve done, things youve experienced and things you have witnessed. You are not applying to college anymore. Do not claim you love research if youve never spend more than a summer in the last four years working in the lab.
Revise, revise, and revise again. Ten revisions is the norm, go beyond the norm.
Let everyone you know read it, take all the criticism and use them constructively. Do not attribute one readers criticism with he doesn't get how medical school PS is written.
A lot of school has essay about diversity/how are you special kinda question. So save one unique experience for those essays rather than write it in your PS. Same goes for tell us about a set back.
Be positive. Medical schools want students who are bright and energetic. If you faced a set back, describe it as objectively as possible. If you had to take a gap year, you did it to further explore medicine, not because you are unsure if you can get into medical school.
Related to above, dont say hoping to get into medical school, I pursued XYZ. Yes, you may be helping grannies so you can get into Harvard, but that doesn't have to be public knowledge
Dont be arrogant. Dont belittle other profession, dont belittle your friend, and for the engineers out there (yours truly was one), dont belittle the humanities major.
Dont criticize physicians in your PS. Not because physicians are beyond reproach, but because as applicant to medical school, we really dont know all that much about medicine. We are applying to study medicine so that one day, we will have the chance to find out what medicine is about.
For the MD/PhD applicants out there, your PS (as opposed to the why MD/PhD essay) should talk about medicine. Leave the science to other essays.
Dont rush through your PS in the hope of submitting it early. To medical school, nothing says not interested more than a PS with spelling mistakes. First week of July is not late(despite what SDN makes you feel).
