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Personalizing Your Applications The essay section of your application ("Personal Comments" in AMCAS) is an important item and must be utilized to sell yourself. You must gain entry to an interview and the essay is the only truly personal statement you will have prior to the interview and the only one that each member of the admissions committee will see. It is the one item most likely to distinguish you from a vast sea of applicants with credentials similar to yours. It should address points uniquely important about you. Keep it concrete, avoid generalizations.
The readers will be interested in what you say as long as you stick to the topic. The topic is you, your interests, your experience and history. DO fill this section with a well-organized and grammatical essay. DO draw attention to anything in your application which is at variance with the usual and which might have a negative effect on an admissions committee, e. g. , a poor semester.
Explain it as best you can. DO comment on any course you failed or on multiple withdrawals or pass / fail courses. IF you are a transfer, DO give the reason for your transfer. YOU MAY comment on extracurricular activities and employment especially if they demand much of your time and energies during the school year or if they gave important experiences leading toward a profession in medicine (dentistry). DO comment on any weaknesses in your MCAT (DAT).
Ask the pre-med advisor what constitutes a "weakness. " DO comment on time out of school or lack of continuity in your education. IF married, especially with children, DO comment on how you plan to cope with the demands on your time and finances. DO explain any medical or psychiatric illnesses. YOU MAY present the origin of your interest in medicine or dentistry, what you have done to assure yourself that you have a realistic grasp of the profession and what you envision your role in it will be. Be specific and concrete.
DON'T criticize your school, department, or teachers or assume a generally negative attitude. DON'T espouse controversial social or political causes. (There isn't enough space to do justice to your viewpoint. ) DO type neatly. Fill the space comfortably. Make it easy to read. Do not pad it with useless words. Do not use strange vocabulary.
Avoid "awesome, "incredible, " current cliches and "valley speak. " DO remember who your readers are and that they are hurried and must read many of these. If you are applying to the pre-med committee for a June evaluation you may regard the essay for the Pre-Med Committee as practice for your application essay. The committee or its chair may take the opportunity to criticize what you write. In any case, you ought to get some objective critic to go over your essay once, preferably someone who reads admissions essays. Tips on style Admittedly it is hard to write about yourself. You must "sell yourself" without being boastful or defensive.
If you want to list all the many achievements of your life, look upon them as opportunities for which you are grateful, rather then conquests you have racked up. Do not try to cover too many of the points above. You have only one page. Two or three good points are usually all you can adequately cover in one short page. One page cannot do justice to a full biography nor to a definitive treatise on your philosophy of medicine. Most applicants would do better keeping the page biographical.
A narrative containing honest, concrete information about yourself is more interesting (believe it or not) than a labored abstract, discursive essay. The readers are interested in learning about you, not about medicine, life or Walden Pond. At least they aren't interested in learning about those things from you at this point in their acquaintance with you. The most frequent dilemma for students writing these essays is how to end them.
My suggestions are two. First, there is usually no need to summarize a one page essay with some abstract conclusion, so keep it concrete. Second, it may be useful to finish by saying what project (s) of interest you will engage you in the immediate future, i. e. , the months when you can expect an interview. The advantage to including these is that the interviewer may ask you about something that you are currently doing. Apply these major principles to your essay: 1.
Concreteness. Reread each paragraph and ask yourself the question, "Could this be said by any of the other 30 applicants to medical school?" If the answer is yes, then drop it. 2. Subjectivity / objectivity . Do not evaluate yourself; that is the job of the readers. You can give them the facts but let them draw the conclusions.
If you tell them what conclusions they are supposed to draw, you are usurping their function and they will find you silly or presumptuous. One the other hand, you can evaluate your experiences subjectively in the sense that you can say why or how important an event was to you. That is a legitimately subjective evaluation that only you can make. For example, a major medical experience in your life may have made an enormous impression on you and motivated you to consider medicine but it would be presumptuous for you to say that it have made you a more sympathetic person or will make you a better doctor.
More Advice on the Writing of Personal Essays: Two Examples In general the best use of the essay is to make it informative. In the context of how the essay will be read by a busy member of an admissions committee, the essay will be useful if it is about the applicant (as opposed to being about medicine in general), if it is concrete (as opposed to being general, abstract or philosophical), if it is simple (as opposed to flowery or convoluted) and if it is straightforward (as opposed to self-evaluative or egotistical). Because it is hard to write about yourself, there are several pitfalls that are common among applicants as they face the discomfort of having to present themselves on one page of an important application. One tendency is to avoid writing about yourself at all. The result is to write abstractly about the medical profession or about the qualities that you believe a good doctor should have, hoping of course, that the reader will believe that you have acquired or are striving to acquire these qualities simply because you allege to hold them in high esteem. A second pitfall is to believe that you can share with your readers some philosophical insight that you have gained about medicine, yourself or life in general.
My observation is that even though it is very important that you have gained such insights, the format and context of the admissions essay is such that hardly any reader will do justice to even the best expressed philosophical statement. Besides wasting the space where you may have written something concrete and informative you may lose your readers attention and cause them to miss the valuable and memorable items you did put into your essay. Frequently abstract discussions sound like so many cliches. Often they sound pedantic and therefore inappropriate; an applicant need not instruct a group of doctors on the nature of medicine or about the qualities that make a good physician. Literary quotations are almost always inappropriate. In the context of this essay, simple vocabulary is better than trying to impress readers with unusual words (appropriately used scientific terms excepted).
I recommend avoiding words that are current colloquialisms such as "awesome" or "unbelievable" or "interface. " Don't use "pursue" more than once and be sure to spell it correctly. Be economical. You do not need to tell readers what you are going to tell them before you tell them and then summarize your message again at the end. The essay is only one page so omit the structural statements.
Above all do not tell the readers what conclusions they are supposed to draw from your arguments about how well prepared you are for medical school and how you will be an outstanding physician. That is the job of the reader and you should let them do their job, namely evaluating you. Give them the evidence, they will draw the conclusions. So much for hints on style; now some points about content: Students often have trouble deciding what topics to include in an essay.
Information about your own life is old hat and may not seem interesting to you but it will be of interest to someone who does not know anything about you other than the bare facts that appear elsewhere on your application form: MCAT scores, grades where you are from and where you have gone to school. Below is a list of suggestions, by no means comprehensive but any two or three or four may fill a page. Remember that this is the only place where you can guarantee some particular information about yourself will be presented. References may relay some information but they too may be filled largely with generalities. Also readers will be interested in knowing which topics you consider important enough to spend your precious little essay space upon. Some topics may best be covered in an interview.
However if you want some topic to come up in an interview it is a good idea to put it in your essay. Your family background, especially as it relates to medicine or your education or if you are an immigrant, will be of interest. Your own experiences in medicine, research, volunteer work or major extracurricular activities around campus, are of interest. Hobbies that have been genuinely important to you are fair game.
Whatever has been a major preoccupation with you over your college years is probably important. You may want to explain as best you can any obvious weaknesses in your record. Make such explanations brief and do not use your entire essay on apologies. It is usually appropriate to address any discontinuities in your education such as a leave of absence or a transfer of schools.
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