Eye-Opening Conversation About the Med School Personal Statement

Session 107

This premed has a question about how to show resilience in your med school personal statement. Our conversation reveals a whole mindset shift he needs to make!

Listen to this podcast episode with the player above, or keep reading for the highlights and takeaway points.

By the way, the episodes in this podcast are recordings of our Facebook Live that we do at 3pm Eastern on most weekdays. Check out our Facebook page and like the page to be notified. Also, listen to our other podcasts on MedEd Media. If you have any questions, call me at 617-410-6747.

[00:30] Question of the Day

“I’m curious as to how we talk about resiliency in personal statements without giving admissions committees points to use against us. So for example, if we’re talking about things like maybe bad grades, how do we talk about bad grades without pinpointing and highlighting I might not be academically the strongest student?”

[00:53] The Infamous Acceptance Rate

Medical schools are going to see your grades in your transcripts in the first place so it’s not like they’re going to be surprised if you brought it up on your personal statements. They’re going to see that anyway. What you need to dig deeper into is to understand your fears.

This student was concerned about the acceptance rate of 35% of all applicants. Students always focus on the acceptance rate. But I want students to ignore that. Because for you, your acceptance rate is 100%.

Now, I got to review applications. Go check out Application Renovation Series on YouTube.

The number of students applying that have no business applying to medical school is just astronomical. And when you take out those people, the acceptance rate is probably closer to 70%.

“If you could extract all of those people from the stats, there are plenty of students applying to medical school that are nowhere near good enough yet.”Click To Tweet

When you look at all the data from across the services, that’s another big problem with the way everything is set up. There are three application services and all the data doesn’t talk to each other. And so you have students who, according to the AMCAS, don’t get into medical school, but they got in through AACOMAS to a DO medical school, or they got in through TMDSAS at a Texas Medical School.

Those numbers are scary so I understand why students go to them but just completely ignore them and only worry about yourself.

[05:05] The Goal of the Personal Statement

The goal of the personal statement is to give more insight into you as a person outside of academics and outside of what’s visible on paper. Go deeper into what makes you tick.

The goal of the personal statement is to answer why you want to be a doctor and not look at how you overcame an F in organic chemistry.

It takes a while for a lot of students for it to click, or maybe it never clicks. But they grind it out hard enough that they finally get that passing grade. And so bring that up in a personal statement but it’s not necessary.

“The goal of the personal statement is why do you want to be a doctor and not because you need to show resilience and dedication in your personal statement.”Click To Tweet

The moment you start to bring those types of agendas into your personal statement, it’s no longer a personal statement. But it’s a sales pitch to the admissions committee as to why you’re better than everyone else. That’s not the goal of the personal statement and that’s where students go wrong all of the time when it comes to their personal statement.

For more ideas on how to go about it, check out my book The Premed Playbook: Guide to the Medical School Personal Statement.

Medical schools want to understand who you are and why you want to be a physician. And when you come from this perspective, it should make writing your personal statement easier because now you’re worried less about how you’re going to stand out. And now you’re more worried about how to reflect on your personal journey, and really tell that story to the reader.

All of a sudden, you’re no longer competing against everyone else. You’re competing against you and your story. And you’re just writing it down. So there needs to be that mindset shift first off. Now, it’s not a competition to try to show how amazing you are compared to everyone else.

[08:42] Focus on Your Story

You don’t want to recall every trauma you’ve overcome. You just want to show who you are and why you are here. And that’s good enough.

There may be parts of the application process, especially in the secondary application process that really focuses on challenges you’ve had to overcome. But the goal of the personal statement is why do you want to be a physician.

Focus on you, not on why you think you’re going to be better than others and not on why you think you’re going to be an amazing physician.

There are tons of empathetic, compassionate science loving nerds out there who don’t want to be physicians. You don’t have to be a physician just because you like people and you want to help them and you like science. But what’s your story? What exposed you to medicine? What gave you that seed to start exploring it? What have you been doing to solidify in your mind that this is what you want?

“Focus on that journey, focus on that story. And that will be enough to set you apart because that's your story.”Click To Tweet

[09:27] It’s a Common Story, But It’s Still YOUR Story

There are also a lot of students who have the same story of having a loved one getting sick or having a personal injury. Sure, it’s common. But it’s still your story.

You’re still exploring everything through your own personal lens. You’re still reflecting on your journey and coming to your own conclusions on why it’s motivating you and why the things you’ve experienced are motivating you to become a physician.

There are lots of people in this world whose loved ones have gotten cancer and died or who have gotten hit by a bus and died. There are plenty of people out there who’ve gotten hurt playing sports, and we’re exposed to the orthopedic surgeon and physical therapists.

That’s your story but you were able to reflect on that through your own lens, your own upbringing, your own morals and ethics, and everything else to decide why those experiences made you want to be a physician. That being said, you don’t try to make it special, you just tell your story.

The goal of this process isn’t to show how amazing you are. There’s nothing you’ve done that hasn’t been done a million times before by applicants to medical school. You’re just not special. And that’s okay. As soon as you can remove that narrative of needing to show how special you are, the better your application will be because then it’ll just show who you are.

There are places to pitch yourself to sell yourself and there are specific questions that lend themselves to you going a little bit into that sales pitch mode. But the majority of your application is really just finding your voice and telling your story – period.