· “Be yourself” “Offer a unique angle” “Show, don’t tell” “Get personal” “Don’t use clichés” “Be interesting” “Check for grammar and spelling errors” · Dr. Viveta Lobo, an emergency medicine physician with the Stanford University School of Medicine in California who often mentors premeds, says the key thing to know about a personal statement Author: Ilana Kowarski Medical School Personal Statement Examples Example Personal Statement 1 “This realization became clear to me in the mountains of Nepal, but the decision was an evolution that began long ago
The Ultimate Medical School Personal Statement (w/ Examples)
A strong medical school personal statement can take many forms, but the most impressive ones share several features. A winning statement obviously needs to be well written with perfect grammar and an engaging style.
Also, a standout personal statement needs to be personal. The AMCAS application used by nearly all United States medical schools provides a simple prompt: "Use the space provided to explain why you want to go to medical school. How did you become interested in medicine? What experiences have affirmed that interest? How does medical school fit into your career goals? The structure and precise content of the statement, however, can vary greatly.
Below are two sample statements to illustrate some possibilities. Each is followed by an analysis of the statement's strengths and weaknesses. The walk across campus was excruciating. During my first year of college, I had gotten strep throat for the second time in a month. Worst of all, I had developed hiccups. Yes, hiccups. Every time my diaphragm spasmed, I had such a stab of severe pain in my shoulder that I nearly blacked out.
Needless to say, this was strange. The fatigue and sore throat made sense, but torturous knife-in-the-shoulder hiccups? The walk seemed like miles, and every hiccup brought a stifled scream and a stop to my progress. I grew up in rural New York, so I had never been to a teaching hospital before. All of my childhood doctors, best med school personal statements, in fact, had moved to my area to get their medical school loans repaid by agreeing to practice in an underserved community.
What mattered to me, best med school personal statements, of course, was my doctor and how she would fix my demonic death hiccups. At the time, I was thinking an epidural followed by a shoulder amputation would be a good solution. When Dr. Bennett arrived in my examining room, she immediately sent me to x-ray and told me to bring the films back to her.
I thought it was odd that the patient would do this ferrying, and I found it even more strange when she put the images up on the illuminator and viewed them for the first time with me by her side. This was the moment when I realized that Dr. Bennett was much more than a physician. She was a teacher, and at that moment, she was not teaching her medical students, but me.
She showed me the outlines of the organs in my abdomen, and pointed to my spleen that was enlarged from mono, best med school personal statements. The spleen, she explained, was pushing on a nerve to my shoulder. Each hiccup dramatically increased that pressure, thus causing the shoulder pain. As my interest in medicine grew and I added biology and chemistry minors to my communication studies major, I started looking for shadowing opportunities.
Over winter break of my junior year, a dermatologist from a nearby town agreed to let me shadow him full time for a week. He was a family acquaintance who, unlike my childhood doctors, had been working out of the same office for over 30 years. Until that January, however, I really had no idea what his job was actually like. My first impression was one of disbelief. He began seeing patients at 6 a. for 5-minute consultations during which he would best med school personal statements at a single area of concern for the patient—a rash, a suspicious mole, an open sore.
Around a. His workday was over by midafternoon in time to get in some skiing golf in warmer monthsbut he would still see upwards of 50 patients in a day. One would think with best med school personal statements kind of volume, the patient experience would be impersonal and rushed. But Dr. Lowry knew his patients. He greeted them by name, asked about their kids and grandkids, and laughed at his own bad jokes.
He was deceptively quick and efficient, best med school personal statements he made patients comfortable. Whether a patient had a benign seborrheic keratosis or melanoma that had gone untreated for far too long, he compassionately and clearly explained the situation.
He was, in short, an excellent teacher. I love biology and medicine. I also love writing and teaching, best med school personal statements I plan to use all of these skills in my future medical career. My experiences with Dr. Bennett and Dr. Lowry have made clear to me that the best doctors are also excellent teachers and best med school personal statements. Lowry taught me not just about dermatology, but the realities of rural medicine.
He is the only dermatologist in a mile radius. He is such a valuable and integral part of the community, yet he will be retiring soon. With its focus on rural medicine and the importance of good communication in health professions, the statement's topic is promising. Here's a discussion of what works well and what could use a little improvement. There is much in this personal statement that the admissions committee will find appealing.
Most obviously, the applicant has an interesting background as a communication studies major, and the statement successfully shows how important good communication is to being a good physician. Medical school applicants certainly don't need to major in the sciencesand they need not be apologetic or defensive when they have a major in the humanities or social sciences.
This applicant clearly has taken the required biology and chemistry classesbest med school personal statements, and the additional skills in writing, speaking, and teaching will be an added bonus. Indeed, the statement's emphasis on doctors as teachers is compelling and speaks well to the applicant's understanding of effective patient treatment. The readers of this statement are also likely to admire the applicant's understanding of the challenges rural communities face when it comes to health care, and the end of the statement makes clear that the applicant is interested in helping address this challenge by working in a rural area.
Finally, the author comes across as a thoughtful and at times humorous person. The "demonic death hiccups" are likely to draw a smile, and the understanding of Dr. Lowry's contributions to the community reveals the author's ability to analyze and understand some of the challenges of rural medical practices. On the whole, this is a strong personal statement. As with any piece of writing, however, it is not without some shortcomings. By telling two stories—the experiences with Dr. Lowry—there is little room left to explain the applicant's motivation for studying medicine.
The statement never gets very specific about what the applicant best med school personal statements to study in medical school. The final paragraph suggests it could be dermatology, but that certainly doesn't seem definitive and there's no indication of a passion for dermatology.
Many MD students, of course, don't know what their specialty will be when they begin medical school, but a good statement should address why the applicant is driven to study medicine. This statement tells a couple of good stories, but the discussion of motivation is a little thin.
My paternal grandfather died of rectal cancer when I was 10 and my grandmother died of colon cancer two years later. My father gets frequent colonoscopies in an effort to avoid the same fate, and I will soon be doing the same.
Doctors gave him, at best, a few months to live. He was an avid reader and researcher who learned everything he could about his disease. Walking with a cane because of tumors in his leg, he attended a medical conference, inserted himself into a conversation with a top cancer researcher, and managed to get enrolled in a clinical trial for CAR T-cell therapy. Because of his inquisitiveness and assertiveness, he is still alive today with no signs of cancer. This type of happy outcome, however, is more the exception than the rule, and in an ideal world, a cancer patient should not have to reject his doctor's diagnosis to seek his own cure.
My interest in oncology certainly stems from my family history and the ticking time bomb within my own genes, as well as my general fascination with understanding how living things work. The field also appeals to my love of challenges and puzzles. My early childhood was one big blur of giant jigsaw puzzles, best med school personal statements, scouring the countryside with a magnifying glass, and bringing home every newt, salamander, and snake I could find.
Today, those interests manifest themselves in my fondness for mathematics, cellular biology, and anatomy. In contemporary medicine, there is perhaps no greater living puzzle than cancer. That said, best med school personal statements, some cancers remain remarkably elusive, and so much more progress is needed.
Some of my fellow lab assistants find the work tedious and repetitive, but I view each piece of data as part of the bigger puzzle. Progress may be slow and even halting at times, but it is still progress, and I find it exciting. With its laser-sharp focus on oncology, this statement stands in sharp contrast to the first example. Here's what works well and what doesn't. Unlike the first writer, best med school personal statements, this applicant does an excellent job revealing the motivation behind attending medical school.
The opening paragraphs bring to life the damage cancer has done to the applicant's family, and the statement as a whole convincingly shows that oncology is an area of interest best med school personal statements both personal and intellectual reasons.
The applicant's volunteer work and research experiences all center on cancer, and the reader has no doubt about the applicant's passion for the field. The applicant also has remarkably clear and specific career goals. On the whole, the reader gets the sense that this applicant will be an ambitious, focused, motivated, and passionate medical student. Like the first example, this personal statement is generally quite strong.
If it has one significant weakness, it is on the patient care side of medicine. In best med school personal statements first example, the applicant's admiration for and understanding of good patient care stands at the forefront.
Medicine personal statement - FULL BREAKDOWN
, time: 19:50Medical School Personal Statement Examples
Medical School Personal Statement 1 - Feedback The author masterfully weaves together multiple elements of his unique experiences in medicine to tell a compelling story. This an excellent example of “show, don’t tell”, whereby the author tells stories and takes the reader on a journey rather than simply listing what he did in the past · Dr. Viveta Lobo, an emergency medicine physician with the Stanford University School of Medicine in California who often mentors premeds, says the key thing to know about a personal statement Author: Ilana Kowarski · To help you craft it, we're going to go over 20 fantastic medical school personal statement examples and teach you how to create your own from scratch. 2 Medical school personal statement examples Example #1. I made my way to Hillary’s house after hearing about her alcoholic father’s incarceration
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