Tip #1: Organize your essay around a theme. Try a book ending or a hook phrase, but avoid cliches.
Your essay should have a theme because you want adcoms (admissions committee) to remember you. For me, I wanted my themes to be the doctor’s skill of compassionate listening and lessons of accepting mortality in medicine.
A book ending is helpful to make a personal statement memorable. What does this mean? You want a beginning, middle, an end. The best endings are the ones that connect it back to the beginning AND bring together all the stories you share in the middle, aka a book ending. It’s like reading a good novel or series. I’ll give Harry Potter as an example, though of course your essay would be far shorter and less complex. In Harry Potter, the story starts off as the scar that Voldemort left on Harry. We see how he grows throughout the series, how every obstacle he faces is related to bringing down Voldemort. In the end, we see their final battle and in the movie Harry says, “let’s finish this how we started it: together”. In your introduction, you can talk about how your desire to pursue medicine came about or what planted the seed for it. In your body paragraphs, you can talk about experiences you sought out that continued to reaffirm why you want to pursue medicine or discuss a few experiences that culminated into your desire. Careful to limit your body paragraphs to 3 experiences, as your essay is a personal statement, not a description of your CV/resume.
Hook phrase is essential for catching the reader’s interest. Avoid cliche, dramatic hooks such as, “Blood exploded everywhere.” It has to be a hook that has substance and contributes to the prompt of “why medicine”. Sometimes it’s hard to know what is cliche or dramatic, which is why it is important to have several other pre-meds or med students look over your essay.
Tip #2: Show, don’t tell.
You have probably read about this tip a thousand times, but more often than not, I still find that the telling outweighs the showing in personal statements. Hopefully, providing some examples will be helpful. Here is a snippet from my own personal statement.
Amy was a 96 year old that I met at a nursing facility while scribing. She always greeted me with big, bright eyes and asked me when I was going to take her shopping. When her doctor and I came to see her after she endured a heart attack, I could not fathom how this was the same Amy I first met. She was dying. Her eyelids were heavy. Her color, gone.
Cheung, Kelly. Personal Statement. AMCAS, 2017
This whole paragraph is all to SHOW that Amy is dying and that we had a relationship because she would often ask me when I would take her shopping. But if I simply stated she is dying, that would just be telling, not showing. The bold phrases are how I attempted to SHOW.
Tip #3: Talk about how the experiences made you FEEL and/or what you LEARNED from it.
Yep, no escaping your feelings, here. If you aren’t comfortable talking about your feelings, that is okay. The one time you SHOULD is in your personal statement. Why? Because the admissions team will be reading thousands and thousands of essays and one of the ways to set yourself apart is to make them FEEL something by showing YOUR OWN FEELINGS. This helps them remember you. Wow. That essay about X made me feel Y because of Z.
She admitted she was “ready”, but her family disagreed with Amy’s desire for a DNR order. The way Amy faced mortality so fearlessly shocked me. I felt conflicted. Frustrated with her family for being selfish, I also sympathized with their wish to keep Amy alive.
Cheung, Kelly. Personal Statement. AMCAS, 2017
Note: DNR stands for Do Not Resuscitate. It’s basically a document that tells the medical team what to do if the patient’s heart were to stop beating or if the patient stopped breathing. A DNR means providers would not attempt to resuscitate or bring her to life if her heart/lungs stopped and she died.
In bold are the feelings.
Tip #4: Active voice, not passive voice.
Active voice is when the subject acts on the verb, rather than the subject being acted UPON by the verb.
Write: The way Amy faced mortality so fearlessly shocked me.
Instead of: I was shocked by how Amy faced mortality so fearlessly.
Sometimes it’s unavoidable and that is okay! Just try to maximize active voice as much as possible.
Tip #5: Answer this question: Why medicine and why NOT pharmacy, physician assistant, physical therapy, etc.
If you are in the medical field, of course you want to help people. The same could be said for other professions, so you want to dig deep and answer this question of why other fields aren’t for you. For instance, some people want to be a physician instead of PA because they enjoy the leadership. Some people want to go into medicine instead of pharmacy because of the desire to participate in diagnosis and treatment versus only treatment. Hopefully you see the point.
DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT WRITE “I WANT TO HELP PEOPLE” ANYWHERE IN YOUR ESSAY! This is too generic, even if it is true. Instead, try to identify reasons that are SPECIFIC to the physician profession, such as leadership or lifelong learning.
Tip #6: Take a break from your personal statement and re-read 3 days later.
If you are like me, you probably read your essay a million times and changed something each time. Sometimes you can become so fixated and immersed in your essay that your editing and perspective can lose its effectiveness. Even if you have several people editing it, at the end of the day, YOU have the final say and YOU must love it. If you have been tirelessly working on your essay for weeks, take a break from it for a few days and come back to it. You will have a fresh perspective of your essay. There have been many times when I came back to it and I was like, “this sentence is terrible, why did I write that?”.
Tip #7: Save the most important points of each paragraph toward the end of the paragraph.
If you are describing an experience you had with a patient for example, you should mention the revelation you had from it, how it made you feel, etc., towards the end of the paragraph. Some people mention it in the beginning of the paragraph and then fill in the details, but a good way to maintain interest in the reader is to leave the “good stuff” and substance for the end.
General Do’s and Don’ts
- Do
- Start brainstorming early
- Have people from different fields read it (law, medical, family friends, pre-meds, med students, non-med students)
- Choose a few quality experiences rather than discussing several
- Don’t
- Use these words/phrases in your essay because they have been overused and/or are generic:
- empathy
- help people
- sparked
- ignited
- fueled
- amazing
- interesting
- superhero
- save lives
- Procrastinate
- Submit with only a couple drafts (I had 12, most people have at least 5 drafts, but the number is less important than the essay’s readiness)
- Treat your personal statement like it is a resume
- Use these words/phrases in your essay because they have been overused and/or are generic:
I hope this helps! Good luck and I believe in you! Let me know if you have any questions.
so so helpful!! thank you so much 🙂
yay i’m so glad! <3