How to ace the med school personal statement
OK, so a lot of my friends are applying to medical school this year, and I’m getting requests for tips on how to write a killer medical school personal statement. I’ve read and given feedback on all of my friends…and honestly, I still don’t think I quite know how to distill the essence of a good read into a formula, but I wanted to share what I’ve learned along the way and what I wish I’d known before I even started. Disclaimer: I’ve never sat on an admissions committee, so take this with the usual grain of salt. I do, however, refuse to give the sugarcoated advice I’ve heard come out of countless mouths, so expect this to be (at times, harshly) realistic about what a medical student would do if he could do it again.
(1) THINK, DAMNIT.
Allow me to wax philosophical for a minute.
When you start, do NOT immediately try to write something about yourself. I’m all for getting random thoughts and ideas down on paper, but don’t start hammering out a first draft from the get-go!
Hold your eagerness/nervousness in check and just think, damnit. This is, quite literally, an essay that can determine your future. It deserves some respectful introspective contemplation. Think about why exactly you want to spend a small fortune and nearly a decade of your life, and what you will bring to the profession. Quite frankly, if you don’t already question whether you really want to be a doctor or not, you’re either not thinking hard enough or you’re naive, neither of which improves your odds. Ignorance is not a sin, but it is one hell of an inconvenience, so let me give you this fact: over half a dozen people in my class left in the first eight months. Being accepted to medical school was what they worked for years to earn, spent thousands of dollars on–an opportunity hordes of other pre-meds would’ve been happy to take. Cogitate on that for a moment. If there is anything else you could possibly see yourself pursuing as a career, do that instead. Please?
(2) What drives you?
Start by identifying your passion(s)–what makes you tick drop everything else for the sake of making it happen? This is your hook, so don’t just reply “medicine”. What exactly about medicine makes you think its the career of your dreams? What is your vision of how you will impact medicine in 10, 20, 30 years? Dream big, and build those castles in the sky. The whole point of the admissions process is to determine whether you’ve really got what it takes to build foundations underneath them.
Please, for crying out loud, write something original. Seriously, I don’t care if it’s true:
- Don’t write about how you’ve wanted to be a doctor since you were a teenager/child/fetus. Not only is this thesis commonplace, and therefore boring, I honestly find it extremely insulting. Why? Because nothing in the world really prepares you for the emotional, physical, and mental rigors of medical school. Med school is not the heavenly ideation pre-meds often dream it is; if it was, people wouldn’t quit. If it was, people wouldn’t have mental breakdowns. If it was, the percentage of docs saying that they wouldn’t do it again (if they could go back in time) would be way lower. Honestly, it’s kind of hellish. You study more than you’ve ever studied in your life. You stress more because if you screw up, someone might actually die someday. Emotionally, something will eventually crack you as you begin to see incurable patients. The list goes on. As much as every doctor tries not to be jaded, can you see why the bright-eyed notion of “just knowing” you’ve always wanted to be a physician could be downright aggravating? Show some respect for the challenging realities of the medical profession.
- Don’t write about how you or a relative underwent a traumatic medical experience that inspired you to be a healing force in the world. I’m perfectly aware I’m touching on an emotional hotspot with this advice, and that it’s probably going to piss people off. Let’s put it this way: I did this. If I could do it again, I would do it differently. Everyone has bad medical experiences if they live long enough, so please, get over yourself (I mean that in the kindest way possible >.<). In the grand scheme of things, one physician more or less is not going to make a particularly large dent in the healthcare needs of the 6 billion+ people in the world, and if everyone who had a relative die of cancer chose medical school, the average IQ would top 130 and we wouldn’t have the shortage of healthcare providers that we do now. If you’re going to write about a medical experience, don’t make it your sole focus–weave it into the framework of how you plan to use that experience to improve healthcare.
- Don’t write that you come from a proud family of doctors and you want to follow in their footsteps. This just makes the reader think you haven’t the brains to think for yourself. I don’t care if you’ve spent hundreds of hours shadowing dozens of doctors–you’ll still sound like you’re choosing medicine because it’s what family expects you to do, instead of you really wanting it. It kills any chance you have of sounding charismatic, and instead you come off as annoyingly naive. =__=;
Basically, from the moment someone starts reading, you have about 30 seconds to impress them enough to keep reading, so don’t write on the same premise as a thousand other applicants. It’s trite, mundane, and uninteresting. If a significant part of why you want to be a physician happens to stem from a relatively common theme, fine, that’s not the end of the world–spend fewer words discussing your inspiration and quickly shift gears to specifics about you that will convince the reader they’ve got a genuinely special story in their hands. It’s your response to adversity that will make you stand out, not the fact that you’ve faced it.
(3) What have you done to fuel your passion?
So. You’ve told me what you’re really into, what gets your juices going. Maybe you’ve said you’re really interested in the evolving interface between medicine and technology. Or maybe you’re in love with the idea of joining the CDC’s crack team of epidemiologists. Or your dream is to improve the treatment of AIDS in inner city slums. Awesome! You’ve identified your mountain.
…what’ve you done to start climbing? Are you just pontificating or are you being realistic? If you don’t write about any computer science experience, epidemiology research, AIDS fundraising work, or something along those lines, my skepticism will start increasing. The medical community can be idealistic and appreciate hope, but if your personal statement and resume don’t seem to match, you can bet your readers’ bullshit alarms will start going off loud and clear.
Now, that said, a caveat: if you have extenuating circumstances that have prevented you from being able to start climbing, explain them. Put your heart into it, and appeal to your reader’s sense of compassion. True story: a student with a 28 MCAT was accepted to an extremely prestigious private medical school. On first glance at her numbers, you might wonder why they didn’t throw out her application immediately. Her statement, though, told the tale of a brave young woman who was working full time outside of class so she could support her four younger siblings. Of course she didn’t have the time to properly study for the MCAT–expensive prep books and courses were also out of the question when that money could feed a sister or brother for months. Upon acceptance, she quickly rose to the top of the class. A truly. incredible. applicant.
Second caveat: don’t repeat anything that’s said in the rest of the application. This is something I see so often, done for the sake of “emphasis”. The personal statement just becomes another resume. Fact: you’ll seem like you have nothing else in your arsenal, and at the end of the day, you’re beating a dead horse. If you’re going to write about an activity in your personal statement, don’t give away the thunder before the reader even gets there. The application process gives you so little space to squeeze in everything you want to share about your life–you don’t have the luxury of repetition. Hit the relevant high points in the extracurriculars section and then expound on those points in the essay.
(4) Unify.
I don’t want to sound like a high school English teacher, but assuming you’ve managed to intrigue the reader beyond the first five sentences and kept them furiously reading to the point where they develop nystagmus, at the end you absolutely need something to tie it all together. By the time the reader hits the end of your statement, they should have a caricature of you in their head, a distinct voice they can imagine reading the essay aloud, and the last few sentences are your one shot at combining the different elements of yourself into a complete persona. In other words, if your reader ever meets you, you want them to be saying, “You’re just like I’d imagined!” If you haven’t done this, you need to keep writing.
Loosely speaking, you utilize pathos in talking about your passions, logos in explaining how you’ve pursued them and how they’ve driven you to the field of medicine, and your ending is your biggest opportunity to show you have some legit ethos to balance it all out.
Do NOT:
- Say, “In conclusion”, or give a summary. You’re not in 5th grade anymore. Show some creativity.
- Use a cultural or cliche statement/quote to connect. First of all, this type of writing is an insult to both your and your readers’ intelligence, and second, your reader could be someone unaccustomed to your idioms–a huge chance of misinterpretation. I’ve yet to see someone pull this off, and it just makes me roll my eyes.
- Be satisfied with an essay that, when you send it out to friends/family for feedback, doesn’t elicit a “Damn, that was solid.” response from at least 2 people. “Pretty good!”, “Nice!”, “I liked it!” are not good enough; if they’re not followed by supportive criticisms, they’re actually signs you need to pick other people to read–people who aren’t afraid to jab at weaknesses in your writing.
Be brutally honest and ask yourself:
- Would I want to meet me if I read this essay?
- Do I leave the reader believing in my potential to change medicine for the better?
- Do I seem to match a stereotype, or do I really stand out as awesome?
Addendum #1: A personal statement doesn’t have to be entirely about medicine. In fact, I’d say the ones that aren’t tend to be more interesting and give better insight into an applicant’s psyche. The majority of mine was actually about how much I liked puzzles, and I used the conclusion to establish a healthy connection between puzzles, my personal experience, and how it all came together to push me toward medicine. It turned out to be a pretty good way to slam home a unified point at the end, and I think it worked. So write about whatever will best give the reader a sense for who you are. As long as you build them a bridge to healthcare by the end, you’re set, and come to think of it, this tactic gives you an excellent inherent opportunity to give the reader an “Ah-ha!” moment in the conclusion. 
Addendum #2: In terms of length, make it only as long as you need to sufficiently cover your points. Doctors are people who love precision, and giving in to the compulsion of using all the space allotted definitely does not help you. To the contrary, it only makes you seem like an unimpressive rambler. It does NOT hurt you to be slightly under the word/character limit (unless you take this to the extreme and submit a few sentences or something…I suppose if you’re the next Hemingway this is fine, but $10 says you’re not).
Addendum #3: If you send me an essay for personal feedback, I unfortunately can’t guarantee a response. If I do accept your request, I’d like a skype username from you, as I prefer talking with people directly instead of typing everything up in a long e-mail (it’s just more time-efficient).
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This post just took ~10 hours to write. If you can spare a moment, please, leave your thoughts in the comments about whether this was helpful or not. Is there anything you wish I’d touched upon? That I could write more in detail about? That I’m flat-out wrong about? Any and all thoughts are welcome!
about 3 months ago
Really helpful Jae! Thanks for spending the time to write this up. I like the realistic voice you have because I am honestly sick of the sugar-coated advice I have been getting from other sources.
One thing I am left wondering is: does this personal statement need to be all about medicine? What if I want to talk about non-medical related things such as certain experiences which may help the reader get a better sense of my persona? How much space should I devote to that?
Seriously I would like your input about that, haha.
about 3 months ago
I personally don’t think that talking about how an experience made you think that medicine was for you is a bad essay topic. I think that if you tell YOUR story, and don’t just leave it as, “I had this experience so now I love medicine and want to be a doctor,” you can make it work. But I think you have to show you understand both sides and have taken them into account as you made this determination about who you are and where you want to go. (If you recall, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of both sides of an argument and then determining which side to choose is what the MCAT essay expects you to do, unlike the GRE writing prompts, which expect you to poke holes in arguments. I find the MCAT essay style was a prelude to thinking like a doctor.)
About Tony’s question, I think a personal statement should reflect you–your strength, your enthusiasm, your beliefs, your priorities, your background, and in a way that is mature, self-aware, and sober. I don’t think it HAS to be about medicine. It has to be about YOU. In the end, they should understand that you are the type of person that has the stamina, the staying power, the courage, the curiosity, the intellect, the compassion, the stubborness, the focus, the flexibility, the grit, and whatever else it takes to make it through medical school and be a great doctor.
I think committees do actually want to know why you want to be a doctor, but hate drivel. I think if you make a personal statement that at the end ties in with being a doctor, perhaps that’s enough.
about 3 months ago
@Tony: I’ve written an addendum at the end to help address that issue–thanks for the question and feedback! Let me know if it answers your question adequately. Turns out there’s some truth to the statement “write about whatever you want”.
@Jenny: Agreed! Thanks for helping Tony out as well!
about 3 months ago
In my country we don’t get into Med school through a similar application process that you have in the US. Its mainly a matter of cracking the most difficult exam ever! -and if you get a good enough rank, you’re in!
Since I’m applying for a Residency program in the US this year, this will pretty much be my first shot at writing a personal statement. I have been looking for advice for a while. And this is as good as it gets. Thanks for the time man!
Keep up!
about 3 months ago
Hey! Great post and really helpful. Thanks for taking out all the sugarcoated BS and giving it to us straight. I was wondering, I write for a student-run premed blog (Premed Hell), could I repost this on our blog (with credit to you of course?)
about 3 months ago
Absolutely, feel free! Whatever will spread the message far and wide–I’m just glad you find this helpful enough to be worth sharing! All I ask is for a link back to the original post in the credits, as I sometimes tweak posts with addendums and whatnot as feedback comes in. Thank you for reading!
about 3 months ago
Thanks for writing this, Jae.
I felt pressed to re-read my statement after reading this post. I don’t particularly remember what guidance I was given for writing (except for a few people to review the end result) but I ended up never writing about medicine except in the philosophical sense: as the great intersection between the humanities and sciences. In fact, I never gave the origin story of myself. All of my reviewers hated that but I never rewrote it to tell my medical origin story. I knew it was a risk and yet I think only one interviewer ever found it negative. Oh, and I used ‘in conclusion’ lol.
But that’s enough about my choice.
If I ran a blog I’d not only want to see this, but also a post on the fallacy of the premed track (almost wrote tract) in general. It took many months, but if I were back in day one of my freshmen year of college, I’d have gone into something entirely different than my degree. I like what I studied, but there was more that I would have done had I not had the premed/MCAT requirements. I also had the unique opportunity of NOT being a biochemistry premed, rather a ‘pure’ chemistry (as the grad school applicants jokingly called it) student watching the majority of my class’s future applicants at a distance. I say it that way because I never saw most of them once senior year hit and I was taking nothing but instrument and inorganic labs and my electives.
If no such publication exists, there need’s to be a no-nonsense guide to getting into medical school. First Aid for the AMCAS (and your premed years)? I know I felt disheartened for a few weeks after realizing how restricted and formulaic my college prehealth committee made things feel, even when pushing the phrases encouraging to seek all I wanted to do with electives and volunteerism and such. In my experience, the prehealth office was the worst part of applying to medical school. They were SUGARCOATED. However, there needs to be a book that not only contains all of the sugarcoated generalized advices given by most premedical societies, offices, and highly successful people, because those have some small but legitimate worth and can even get somebody charged for a career they would have never thought possible, but also contains a much larger section of no-nonsense, pooled experiences and advice from all types of medical students.
I would have loved to see, in once place, the experiences of the top medical students and their story of getting into medical school, as well as the ‘average’ medical students and their stories, but also the stories of medical students that left their near-decade-in-the-making hopes and dreams behind. I want other people to get some real sense of the academic challenges, emotional trials, and mental stressors that make up the immediate decade of their life and forever onward with stories and reflections backing up all of that generalized no-nonsense advice. I remember a packet that was given to me by my prehealth committee that could be seen as no-nonsense, but it really carried no weight. It was just advices without stories and reflection.
I hope this ramble hasn’t been too unreadable! I was happy to read your reflections on the personal statement and think that so much more can be done for the other aspects of medical school. We came here to help people… helping future students get a real appetizer is the best way, in my opinion.
about 3 months ago
Thank you so much pragmatic approach to personal statements, man! If you don’t mind, I’ll be referencing this on my site (with full credit, of course). I’m sure a lot of applicants wish you wrote this last summer… before they turned their AMCAS/TMDSAS in.
about 3 months ago
This was great. I wish I had read this before I wrote my essay. As I was reading this, I kept thinking to myself how terrible my essay must have seemed to the Baylor adcom. My second interviewer was probably laughing before I even walked in the door. I’ve learned a lot from this post and I hope the residency personal statement carries a little weight so that I can use this advice in the future.
about 3 months ago
I literally found your blog while procrastinating MCAT studying, and I’ve found it amusing and compelling. As a pre-med on the brink of the application process, this was good, useful, honest advice. Things that I “know” but have trouble forcing myself to do. I KNOW that it shouldn’t be a resume repeat, but I keep trying to force more experiences in. I thought that this was just honest and heartfelt and will help me as I evaluate my essay and my editing staff.
Thanks!
about 3 months ago
Glad to be of service–best of luck on the MCAT and your applications!
about 3 months ago
Awesome post, Jae! Having read far more than my fair share of personal statements, I can say you are right on with your sugar-free comments.
Two things I rarely see in personal statements, but would LOVE — 1) A forward-looking essay … it’s great when a student writes about his/her awesome volunteer experience and all, but I get interested when a student has the b**ls to declare what they hope to do in their medical career. You’re going to be a doctor for 20+ years … what are you willing to declare that you’ll accomplish in that length of time?
2) Passion. Most of the medical school personal statement I read are bloodless, safe, formulaic essays. (I spoke about passion in your medical school personal statementt at Rutgers if you want to listen to the audio). Have some guts. Be unrealistic. Go for it! Show readers that you are fired up about making meaningful contributions to your patients’ lives.
about 1 month ago
It was nice, very helpful. Thank you