5 Medical School Personal Statement Writing Pitfalls

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5 Medical School Personal Statement Writing PitfallsProspective medical students should think critically about their personal statement before writing.

By US News Ali Lotfi, M.D., Contributor 

Feb. 14, 2017, at 9:30 a.m.

When gearing up to write a personal statement for your [size=1.12]medical school application, your first inclination may be to sit down and begin describing all the reasons you want to be a doctor, why you should be accepted to medical school or the strengths that set you apart from the vast pool of applicants.

While these are good approaches to working on a personal statement, you'll also want to make sure you avoid these five writing pitfalls.

• Writing before thinking: Applicants often fall into the trap of beginning the writing process before having a clear idea of what they are going to say or how they are going to structure their essay. It's easy to whip out your computer and begin writing – but if you take this approach, you may find yourself stuck in the writing process shortly after you begin.

Creating a personal statement is primarily a thinking exercise and secondarily a writing exercise. Before you begin writing,spend some quality time thinking about what you want to cover in your essay and how you plan to organize the different issues.

As you embark on this process, create a written outline as an extension of the thinking process; this will help you navigate the writing element.

Some topics to cover may include your upbringing and how it shaped your interest in medicine and science; a careful reflection on how your clinical experiences drew you to the medical profession; or a description of how your extracurricular activities or personal life challenges make you well-suited for the medical profession.

• Omitting the desire to be a physician: This is one of the most common mistakes that medical school applicants make. They often leave this important point out of their essay or tangentially talk about it without explicitly stating what specific elements of the medical profession draw them to becoming a doctor.

This is arguably the most important question any personal statement should answer. State this clearly early in your essay and back up your reasons with strong examples.

• Trying too hard not to sound generic: At the expense of not sounding generic, applicants often fail to answer key questions in their personal statements that are important to admissions committees. These may include why they are interested in medicine, how this interest developed and what they have acquired through their clinical experiences.

Remember your essay should not be a repeat of your resume, but it should be a thoughtful reflection of your resume that also incorporates elements about your personal life to add color to your story. If you reflect thoughtfully on your experiences, you won't sound generic.

• Listing positive attributes without examples: You may have heard "Don't tell, show" when it comes to medical school personal statements. It is critical to describe your positive characteristics in the context of the experiences in which you acquired them.

Just listing a series of positive attributes will not impress any one on anadmissions committee. Instead they want to know if you have strong interpersonal skills and that you can thoughtfully demonstrate how you acquired those interpersonal skills through interactions with patients or

Admissions committees are more impressed by positive characteristics that you have acquired over time than those you claim to have inherently been born with. Avoid sentences like, "Ever since I was a young boy, I had a penchant for understanding the human body." Your essay will sound stronger if instead you describe how your curiosity for understanding human biology developed over time through various experiences.

• Writing too poetically or philosophically: In an effort to set themselves apart, some applicants write a poetic or philosophical essay that can be overly emotional but lack the necessary substance to help admissions committees gauge the applicants' aptitude for medicine.

Remember, you are not applying for a graduate program in creative writing or philosophy. You are applying for medical school. Focus on what you need to say to convince medical schools of your commitment to this profession.

]It's also easy to miss the big picture by getting too emotional about a single patient encounter or excessively highlighting your desire to help others without also demonstrating a passion for medical science. After all, an important part of being a physician is a commitment to medical science.

Instead of keeping your essay narrow and emotional, make sure you cover the key topics to create a strong, balanced essay.