How to Write a Personal Statement for Medical School?
Your medical school personal statement
needs to sell. Every single word has to sell your reader and answer the
question: "Is it worth my time to read one more word of this essay?"
To be persuasive is to sell your reader on your next sentence, your next
paragraph, your next idea of your medical school essay.
How do you write a medical school personal
statement that will capture your reader? You need to be in tune with your
audience and you need to be willing to completely clear your mind from all of
your worries, doubts, fears, apprehensions, expectations of what you think a
medical school essay should be, and you've got to come at it from the point of
view of this older, experienced, seasoned, maybe cynical admissions committee
member who has read 5,000 essays, and is kind of dreading having to read
another medical personal statement.
Take a minute and think about what most
students are electing to write about in a medical school personal statement.
5,000 times, a medical school admissions committee member sees: "I want to
be a doctor," "I want to help people," "I have wanted to be
a doctor for a long time."
To an experienced admissions committee
member, these cliched reasons say, "I know I want to be a doctor but I
don't really know how to express why I want to do it. I don't have specifics,
clear motivation. I don't have a specific orientation. I just want to do
it."
To write a medical school essay that's
great, you've got to transcend generalities like that in order to be
persuasive. Because if you don't, what's going to happen is your reader is
going to say, "I've read this medical school personal essay a million times
before."
And although it's a nice medical personal
statement, it has nothing new, nothing unique to you. It causes your reader,
the person who's going to determine whether or not you get an interview, to
look at other aspects of your application to try and get some sense as to who
you are. And that is going to be experiences, it's going to be grades, it's
going to be MCAT score. Your reader, the committee member, is really going to
be stuck, struggling to figure out why you're applying.
How to write a medical school personal
statement that works:
Let go of all of your worries and your
doubts and come at it from the point of view that you have read 5,000 medical
school essays in your life and you know they're all about the same thing. (I
want to be a doctor, I want to help people.)
You've got to stand away from that position
and really develop your medical school personal essay as though it were a
dialogue between you and your reader. But since you can't wait for the reader
to ask you questions, you have to anticipate what they might say by mentally
asking yourself questions and answering them.
So what are the questions that a medical
school admissions committee member might ask you in a conversation?
Consider these as you write your essay for
medical school:
1.) "What do you really want to do in
medicine?
2.) How are your grades different from
everybody else?
3.) What are your original motivations and
4.) How have you confirmed those
motivations?"
The reader of your medical school
application is expecting a degree of proof and really wants to know how you
know. It's not enough for you to say you want to help people. How do you know
what you want to do in medicine, what have you done that leads you to know
that?
How to write your medical school personal
statement: Persuasion
The most persuasive way to answer this
question is by sharing experiential knowledge. You would say to an admissions
official in conversation, "I know because I've done it. That's how I know.
And I can give a specific story."
How to write your medical school personal
statement: Tell stories
Storytelling is how we relate to each other
socially. We tell stories to each other all the time. A highly persuasive
medical personal statement means that you're pulling the reader into your life
story as it intersects your purpose for medicine, the reason why you're
interested in pursuing medicine. The most persuasive storytelling you can do is
to write about what you have done in your life that relates to your interest in
medicine. Okay, so that's persuasion.
How to write your medical school essay:
High-impact language
Use high-impact language. Bottom line for
high-impact language is specificity. You want an emotional kind of absolute
quality to your speech. You want to elevate your essay so that when you read it
you feel like you're not just a little bit committed to your topic, but you're
10,000% committed to your topic. This is really hard for a college student to
do because college students don't want to be 10,000% committed to anything.
But you've got to sound:
1.) Like you care a lot, and
2.) like you're completely devoted to it.
An example: "I am completely devoted to medicine for the rest of my life.
It's everything for me because it's the only thing that's going to allow me to
express who I am personally and professionally."
High-impact language has this very strong
absolute, emotionally rich, concrete side to it where as a reader I am
completely engrossed, engaged, enmeshed. I buy it. I believe you.
Some of the best places to look for this
kind of writing is where there is someone who is making a very impassioned
speech. One of the best places that I know is in the most powerful, compelling,
moving speeches of our time. Like Martin Luther King's "I Have A
Dream," or speeches by Gandhi, or speeches by John F. Kennedy, or speeches
by Barack Obama. Speeches that really elevate you and make you feel that
there's hope for you, hope for us and that there's something bigger to strive
for.
How to write a medical school personal
statement: Motive
Third is having a compelling motive. It's
the underpinning of the whole essay. Unless you speak to a compelling motive,
the default result from the reader's point of view is this student is writing a
general medical school essay, but doesn't really know why.
You've got to be willing to flaunt the
motivation and be really willing to shout at the top of your lungs standing on
a chair in the middle of a crowded auditorium. Be THAT committed to what you
have to say.
All of this sounds incredibly unrealistic
and incredibly overdone, but once you put these concepts down on paper, the
very act of reading mutes so much of the impact of language, that you've got to
be willing to trust that you can be very committed and very over the top in how
you articulate, and it will still carry off.
I'm confident you can write a memorable and
persuasive medical school personal statement if you follow these guidelines.
Check out the following link if you want more tips on how to write the personal
statement.
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