AMCAS - Personal Statement
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With so much riding on the personal statement, you should be very careful in writing and editing it. You should show it to your friends and teachers for review. You should try rewriting again and again until you have perfected it.
There are plenty of books available on amazon.com that will give you full details on writing a personal statement. Like the MCAT books, you are on your own to purchase one.5 Here are a few of my suggestions about outlining the essay:
- Begin with a brief story of how you got attracted to medicine
- Give a short overview of your view of the medical profession
- Tell the audience what you have done to prepare for medical school
- Tell what are you hoping to get out of becoming a doctor
- Close with a paragraph that relates all of your accomplishments to your first story
Some other things to keep in mind:
- Use verbs, not descriptions of feeling—e.g., “I love working with others,” versus, “I lived in a homeless shelter for a month to get a feel for the difficulties that the poor face every day in accessing life’s basic necessities such as healthcare, food, and clothing.”
- Your sentences with the most impact should be very short.
- Don’t say, “I want to help people.” The phrase is trite and overused. It’s immature—If you write it, admissions committees will assume that you have not fully thought out why you want to become a physician.
- Become a social worker if you only want to help people.
- Show some maturity about what doctors do. Don’t write, “I plan to run from one hospital room to another saving lives.”
- Be honest in why you like medicine. Now is not the time to bemoan the fact that many Americans are uninsured and that your only solution is to become a socialist and give free healthcare to everyone.
- Don’t apologize for low grades or lack of experience. The personal statement is for you to build yourself up. Believe me, you will have plenty of opportunities to explain your low grades later.
- Stay away from controversial topics such as religion or abortion. * First, you don’t want to say that you’re a fundamentalist Christian only to have your reader be a staunch atheist. You put him in a bad position by forcing him to make a decision on your personal religious beliefs, rather than your ability to become a doctor.
Example Personal Statement
The best way to learn how to write a personal statement is by example. Several of the books for sale online have real essays written by past medical students. Below is my own personal statement:
I was a junior in a Memphis, Tennessee, high school when I started developing chest pains. Thinking the cause to be heartburn, I went to a physician’s office in the nearby city of Bartlett. When I told the doctor I had severe heartburn, he immediately responded with a high-priced prescription to Prilosec.
Weeks went by and still the pain lingered. More doctors, more expensive drugs, still no results. Eventually I went to MIDTOWN Memphis, certainly not the poorest district of town, but not the nicest, either. When I told Dr. Michael I was suffering from chest pain, he did something no one else had tried—he started asking questions. He asked me about school and about my family life. After a while he informed me that my problems were not due to acid reflux disease, but anxiety. He stepped out for a few minutes only to return with a paper bag—not for breathing, but one filled with numerous sample packets of the drug Buspar. He said, “I don’t want you to pay for something unless we know it works.” After this meeting I realized I wanted to be just like him. I had always entertained the idea of becoming a doctor, but like most childhood attractions, my interest with medicine came and went as the years passed. However, I now want nothing more than to be a physician; and my short life and experiences prepared me for the challenges ahead.
I arrived at college wanting to major in physics because its equations describe an order to the world. Though the subject does a great job of answering “how?” it cannot give us “why?” Therefore, during my junior year I decided to take on a double major in religion to gain a deeper understanding of people and their faith as an important component of their lives. The two fields strikingly resemble modern health care: while pharmaceutical medicines can provide a mild push in the right direction, a patient’s positive attitude is a full leap towards recovery. My religious studies have made me realize that people need a personal touch as a component of the healing process.
To get a sense of that touch, I have volunteered at my county’s crisis center as a suicide counselor for the past year. During training I learned that the most important part of therapy is listening to my client, rather than supplying advice or giving orders. I now know that I simply need to confirm a patient’s fears and redirect the energy to more productive actions. I have received no greater feeling than when talking to a client who has called 1-800-SUICIDE and having him/her realize that his/her life is worth living one more day. In a way, I’ve been giving emotional CPR on a weekly basis.
While I have high hopes for a positive impact as a physician, I do not live in a fantasy world. I know of the potential disappointments and set backs which lie ahead and I’ve experienced a few of them already. Two of my patients died in the same day when I worked in the Intensive Care Unit at Shands Hospital; I had a frequent caller of the Crisis Center incarcerated under The Baker Act because I knew he was serious about killing himself when my words failed; and I have had my fair share of Alzheimer’s patients yell at me for no reason other than their irrational, yet very real fear. I also realize there are many changes that lie ahead in the way treatment is given. Socialized healthcare, HMO’s, and malpractice litigation have caused many doctors to leave the profession and even make potential physicians question ever joining. Despite these challenges transformations, I am still eager to practice medicine.
To see first hand how the system functions, I worked nearly a thousand hours as a certified nursing assistant over the course of two summers. I learned how to run an I.V., draw blood, and insert tubes into every opening of the body. Though I’ve worked in nearly every department in the hospital, my favorite place has been the Emergency Room. The teamwork and fast-paced action have convinced me to practice emergency medicine. Although I am convinced that I should work in the human side of health care, I have also enjoyed research.
Medicine is a unique profession in which the practitioner is both a scientist and humanitarian. In the same way, I have tried to lead a balanced life among both fields. My current research involves looking at glass and air composites called aerogels. By doping these highly porous solids with growth media, I’m hoping that others can better grow cell cultures. I work on a research team which combines my unique background in physics and biological sciences to examine the potentially dangerous effects of nanotechnology. Already my work with aerogels has earned some recognition: I won my school’s Engineering Fair by making a fluorescent aerogel fountain and was featured on the College of Engineering highlight video. My research will hopefully continue after graduation. This exciting field will produce results which can promote industrial advancement and enhance the quality of the environment.
Whether in the classroom, the lab, or the clinical setting, I have had many extraordinary experiences over the past five years. I hope that these skills will make me a better medical student and hopefully even better doctor. I think that Dr. Michael would be proud.
List of Commonly Misspelled Words
As much as I would like to think that the future doctors of America are great communicators, I’ve come to realize that people still make careless mistakes when spelling common words. Below is a list of the most frequently misspelled words that I often come across on personal statements, essays, and emails. Don’t think that your word processor’s spell checker is going to catch every mistake that you make. You still need to check your own work to make sure that you correctly used the words “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”
- accept To take ownership. Contrast with “except.”
- affect A verb: to cause or bring about. Contrast with “effect.”
- a lot Two words.
- definite There is no letter ‘a’ in definite.
- effect A noun that denotes a result. Contrast with “affect.”
- except An exclusion. Contrast with “accept.”
- fulfill Start with one ‘l,’ end with two.
- independent There is no ‘a’ in this word, either.
- its Ownership. Example: the dog is wagging its tail.
- it’s Contraction of “it is.”
- principal Foremost importance, such as principal investigator.
- principle Noun: a rule.
- relevant Now we have an ‘a.’
- their Plural possessive. Example: I visited my parents at their house.
- there Reference to an object or place. Also may lead a sentence.
- they’re Contraction of “they are.”
Last Notes on Typing the Personal Statement
Like most people, you will probably want to type your personal statement in a text processing program like Microsoft Word so that you can save, edit, and spell-check your response. Unfortunately, since AMCAS is a web form, many of Word’s auto formatted characters such as the quotation marks will be messed up when you put them in the web form. To correct the special symbols problem, use the Times New Roman font and then click on the “Tools” button at the top of the program page. Next, select “AutoCorrect . . . ” and then choose the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab. Go down to the section entitled “Replace as you type” and unselect everything. Click “Ok” and your formatting problem is gone. Now you can type your essay in Word and then copy and paste everything directly into AMCAS.
Keep in mind that AMCAS uses a character count, not a word count. I know that you were taught in school in always double space after every sentence, but for the sake of the personal statement, you should use only one space between sentences. In doing so, you’ll save enough room to add more words.
Finally, students applying for MD/PhD programs will have to write additional essays called research statements. These essays deal with your motivation of becoming a medical scientist. Writing such responses is beyond the scope of this book. You will have to check with your pre-med and research advisors on how to write these statements.
K-Set
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