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“I want this to be perfect.”
15 Tips for Your Medical School Personal Statement
Don’t underestimate the power of the medical school personal statement to make a strong, positive impression on an admissions committee. Combined with your interview performance, your personal statement can account for 60% (or more) of your total admissions score!
Medical schools want to enroll bright, empathetic, communicative people. Here’s how to write a compelling med school personal statement that shows schools who you are and what you’re capable of.
Personal Statement Topics
Your medical school personal statement is a component of your primary application submitted via, TMDSAS (for Texas applications), or AACOMAS (NB: If you are applying to medical school in Canada, confirm the application process with your school, as not all application components may be submitted through AMCAS).
These applications offer broad topics to consider, and many essay approaches are acceptable. For example, you could write about:
- an experience that challenged or changed your perspective about medicine
- a relationship with a mentor or another inspiring individual
- a challenging personal experience
- unique hardships, challenges, or obstacles that may have influenced your educational pursuits
- your motivation to seek a career in medicine
You’ll write an additional essay (or two) when you submit secondary applications to individual schools. These essays require you to respond to a specific question. Admissions committees will review your entire application, so choose subject matter that complements your original essay .
How to Write a Personal Statement for Medical School
Follow these personal statement tips to help the admissions committee better understand you as a candidate.
1. Write, re-write, let it sit, and write again!
Allow yourself 6 months of writing and revision to get your essay in submission-ready shape. This gives you the time to take your first pass, set your draft aside (for a minimum of 24 hours), review what you’ve written, and re-work your draft.
2. Stay focused.
Your personal statement should highlight interesting aspects of your journey—not tell your entire life story. Choose a theme, stick to it, and support it with specific examples.
3. Back off the cliches.
Loving science and wanting to help people might be your sincere passions, but they are also what everyone else is writing about. Instead, be personal and specific.
4. Find your unique angle.
What can you say about yourself that no one else can? Remember, everyone has trials, successes and failures. What’s important and unique is how you reacted to those incidents. Bring your own voice and perspective to your personal statement to give it a truly memorable flavor.
5. Be interesting.
Start with a “catch” that will create intrigue before launching into the story of who you are. Make the admissions committee want to read on!
6. Show don’t tell.
Instead of telling the admissions committee about your unique qualities (like compassion, empathy, and organization), show them through the stories you tell about yourself. Don’t just say it—actually prove it.
7. Embrace the 5-point essay format.
Here’s a trusty format that you can make your own:
- 1st paragraph: These four or five sentences should “catch” the reader’s attention.
- 3-4 body paragraphs: Use these paragraphs to reveal who you are. Ideally, one of these paragraphs will reflect clinical understanding and one will reflect service.
- Concluding paragraph: The strongest conclusion reflects the beginning of your essay, gives a brief summary of you are, and ends with a challenge for the future.
8. Good writing is simple writing.
Good medical students—and good doctors—use clear, direct language. Your essays should not be a struggle to comprehend.
9. Be thoughtful about transitions.
Be sure to vary your sentence structure. You don’t want your essay to be boring! Pay attention to how your paragraphs connect to each other.
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Good medical students—and good doctors—use clear, direct language.
10. Stick to the rules.
Watch your word count. That’s 5,300 characters (including spaces) for AMCAS applications, 5,000 characters for TMDSAS, and 4,500 characters for AACOMAS.
11. Stay on topic.
Rambling not only uses up your precious character limit, but it also causes confusion! Think about the three to five “sound bytes” you want admissions committee to know and remember you by.
12. Don’t overdo it.
Beware of being too self-congratulatory or too self-deprecating.
13. Seek multiple opinions.
Before you hit “submit,” ask several people you trust for feedback on your personal statement. The more time you have spent writing your statement, the less likely you are to spot any errors. A professor or friend whose judgment and writing skills you trust is invaluable.
14. Double-check the details.
Always check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. This goes for the rest of your application (like your activities list), too. A common oversight is referencing the wrong school in your statement! Give yourself (and your proofreaders) the time this task truly requires.
15. Consult the experts about your personal statement strategy.
Our med school admissions counselors can diagnose the “health” of your overall application, including your personal statement. Get expert help and guidance to write an effective personal statement that showcases not only your accomplishments, but your passion and your journey.
Want to get an edge over the crowd?
Our admissions experts know what it takes it get into med school. Get the customized strategy and guidance you need to help achieve your goals.
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Blog
You Won’t Believe the Amount of Pages You’ll Need to Write for Medical School
By: Ryan Kelly
“I want this to be perfect.”
Every year, we hear pre-med students say this about their medical school personal statements. And we don’t blame them. The personal statement is the largest essay of the primary application, and it certainly carries a lot of weight.
But consider this: did you know that medical schools will read your work and activities section first? Yep. That means three 1325-character most meaningful essays, along with up to 15 activity descriptions (700 characters each), all before they even glance at your personal statement. Let’s do some quick calculations, shall we?
PERSONAL STATEMENT
5300
characters with spaces500
words1.5
pages single spaced
MOST MEANINGFUL ESSAYS
3975
characters with spaces
(1325 x 3)375
words1.13
pages single spaced
ACTIVITY DESCRIPTIONS
10500
characters with spaces
(700 x 15)991
words2.97
pages single spaced
TOTAL WORK AND ACTIVITIES
14475
characters with spaces1364
words4.1
pages single spaced
Even if you only have, let’s say, eight 700-character descriptions (as opposed to the full 15), the work and activities section is still nearly twice as long as the personal statement.
So, your perfectionism and anxiety surrounding the personal statement can be detrimental if it stifles your progress on other essays. In a way, your personal statement is like the headliner at a music festival. Sure, it’s a big deal, but it also works in harmony with the many other musicians and performances throughout the festival. Don’t put all your effort into the grand finale if it means losing sight of the bigger picture.
Speaking of big picture, the primary application pales in comparison to the pages and pages of secondary essays you’ll need to write. Many students play the numbers game and apply to upwards of 40 schools, but let’s just say you only choose 25.
Every school’s secondary is created differently. A school like UC Riverside will ask about 10 250-word questions:
26500
characters with spaces2500
words
(250 x 10)7.5
pages single spaced
On the shorter end of the spectrum, a school like Rosalind Franklin will only ask two 100-word questions:
2120
characters with spaces200
words
(100 x 2)0.6
pages single spaced
So, roughly, we could average these two extremes and arrive at a typical amount of secondary writing:
14310
characters with spaces1350
words4.1
pages single spaced
If you multiply that by your 25 schools, you’ll have over 100 pages of secondary essays!
According to our data, the average medical school asks 3.56 essay questions, so for 25 applications, you’re looking at 89 essays. No wonder it takes 100 pages.
Yes, 100+ pages, which dwarfs the measly 5.5 of the primary application. It’s important to note that you can reuse material for different schools’ secondary prompts. This is helpful, no doubt, but it still often requires tweaking, cutting, repurposing, or adding to an existing essay, which can be cumbersome tasks in of themselves. This doesn’t include the pages of notes you’ll take while researching each school and compiling information that matches your background or interests.
So, what’s the point? Are we just trying to scare you into not applying? Of course not. There are two major lessons to be drawn from these statistics.
One is that the personal statement is not the end-all-be-all of the application process. You cannot afford to settle for junk, but you also cannot afford to dawdle on one part of the application in hopes of achieving perfection. More often than not, this quest for perfection results in a hyper-dissection of the essay, and before you know it, a once-solid draft is totally dismantled.
Rather than trying to cram everything into a “perfect” personal statement, shoot for quality writing throughout the whole application. Remember the harmony of the music festival! Yes, you want Coldplay as your headliner, but not if it means surrounding them with the Insane Clown Posse.
The second lesson is to never underestimate the secondary writing process. It’s long and grueling, and it will make the primary application seem like a cakewalk. It’s critical to work ahead on the primary, so that you can get a big head start on prewriting your secondaries. A good strategy is locate the secondary prompts from the previous year, since they usually don’t change that much from year to year.
This allows you to slowly fine-tune your drafts and strategize about how to use them across your schools. It also gives you more time to research schools, which can sometimes be a cryptic and overwhelming endeavor. And if schools do happen to change their prompts, you’ll be organized and calm enough to find or create appropriate material.
The numbers don’t lie. There is A LOT of writing for medical school applications, which extends far beyond that perfect personal statement of your dreams. Don’t be lax and shortsighted, or you’ll find yourself drowning in pages of unfinished drafts.
Tough love, kid. You’ve been warned.
