Medical School Personal Statements

Admission officers have to go through hundreds of similar sounding, volubly ‘sincere’ statements every year, and have little patience for those looking for shortcuts. The medical profession is not like any other, and there are certain qualities and attributes of the applicant’s character that sets him apart from the rest of the students applying for other courses. Without going into further verbosity, a list has been made below of some such properties on the basis of a search through medical school, personal statements help, statistics and comments compiled on forum discussions, and practitioner’s opinions from the net.

Individuality: “I always knew that medicine was my calling”. Believe it or not, a forum has actually voted this to be the most boring line in the personal statement section. In their scramble to sound ‘correct’, medical students end up losing their personality entirely. While an admission officer is not scouting the papers in search of a very friendly and likeable person, who has written a short autobiography, the search is on for a real person, not a compilation of heavily worded sentences. Educational advisors have stressed the importance of the personal touch repeatedly, and with good reason. Illustrating with a personal anecdote or citing someone close who has touched your life in a way that has inspired you to become a doctor, are both more acceptable.

Maturity: A student of medicine, whether he means to become a practitioner or researcher, is about to assume a lot of responsibility for the lives of other people. A badly written statement with spelling and grammatical errors, no definite purpose and poor construction reveals an immature mind still not ready to grasp the importance of what is going to happen to him. Medicine is the area where the authorities lay maximum emphasis on having ‘young adults’ rather than undecided teenagers around. The statement should reflect a matured mind that recognises the value of a place in a med school.

Work Experience: Having volunteer experience is very helpful. If you have served at a hospital, please mention it with a precise account of your achievements. Medicine is based on results. So instead of laying importance to how important you were as a person, show how valuable your work was by talking of positive end results. It may be something as seemingly minor as getting the janitors to clean the hallway more regularly, but if it has benefited others, your purpose has been achieved. Lab experience also looks very good on a medical personal statement. It means that you already have an exposure to the kind of atmosphere you will be entering now, and have developed an interest in it. If your ‘work’ has been playing the Good Samaritan at a nonprofit organisation, or helping people who have been battered somehow, please mention it. The importance here will be on the conditioning of the mind, rather than the technical knowledge gained.

Analysis: The way we construct our sentences is a direct reflection of our minds. The overall structuring of the personal statement will reveal whether you are capable of analysis or not. A doctor arrives at a diagnosis only through a quick analysis of certain observations. A researcher reaches a conclusion after analysing the data gathered in hand. If you already have some credible experiments that have shown results, or have acted with alertness and responsibility after correctly deducing about a problem during your hospital volunteer experience – nothing can be better. You are really made for it.

Sincerity: Last but not least, please sound convincing, which can happen only if you are yourself convinced. An insincere physician is simply not wanted. How will the patient have confidence if the doctor sounds unsure? And God save us from the hands of an undecided experimenter who publishes his results based on something that is only a tentative notion! There is no space for insincerity and guesswork here.

Before you take the plunge, do some soul-searching. The sites won’t advise you to do that; it is up to you to face yourself. Go for a course in medicine only if you really want to. And if you do, it will show.