 not sure what to say in your personal statement. You have so many experiences you don't know which ones to pick or how to make it flow. Stick around and let's get out of the rut. This is right, your acceptance. I'm Dr. Josie. Hello. Hello. Make sure to subscribe and hit that bell so you don't miss a video. And we're going to get started now. I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of students on personal statements. I work with students in medical, dental, residency, and I know what they're looking for and I know how to help you stay relevant and be as compelling as possible. Let's get started. Step one, let's start with your resume. So if you don't have an updated resume, that's okay, but let's start with kind of a comprehensive professional list that you have. If you have it in your resume, great. If not, you can start your own list and you want to start kind of four buckets. Clinical experience is volunteering, shadowing, and I would say the kind of outlier would be the identity and non-medical experiences that are formative from the last four or five years. So nothing from high school if you're applying directly from undergrad. So stick with undergrad or if you have any graduate work from these most relevant years. Think about this list as like your fact-finding mission. You're looking for the W's. What happened? Where were you? Who you were with? And what did you learn? Right? So you're kind of trying to think about the experience through a journalistic lens first so that we can see and assess what kind of information you have. Think ER, evidence, then reflection. Anything that makes it into the personal statement, anything that you are going to use in your secondaries or in the activities section, you want to have evidence and reflection. So anytime you tell a story, you want to kind of reflect on lessons learned. And so that's kind of the ER acronym that we fun to use for writing. So for example, you had a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. You want to maybe start with the resume language, right? Like start with kind of thinking about those W's. What did you do? Who were you with? Where were you exactly? The patients that you were working with or serving, assisting doctors and medical students. What were you doing? What were the logistics? And then kind of go into for evidence, especially when you zoom into patient-centric experiences for evidence, reflect on that. Was that an easy experience? How was it difficult? How was it challenging? What did you learn? How did you kind of adapt to the circumstances? So kind of start thinking about those reflections. It's the ER format that you find kind of most relevant for your body paragraphs in your personal statement down the road. Step two, do this process through the ER process and the W's for all of the buckets, right? So the clinical, shadowing, non-medical experiences that you would potentially bring in. Remember that if you kind of consider brainstorming as something that you continue to come back to, you could in or kind of I suggest that you guys brainstorm way more than what you need in the personal statement because you'll need that for your activities, your secondaries. So make sure that you take the time to kind of really think about what the potential lessons could be, what the potential experiences that have advanced your why medicine. And ideally when you sit down to pick your different experiences for that one personal statement, so all the different experiences you're going to bring together in one narrative, you are offering different lessons. So the, you know, evidence from a specific story will yield a specific reflection and lesson learned. And then another story will kind of give another lesson or another sense of reflection to kind of show advancement and growth within your journey to medicine. Step three, but I kind of already jumped the gun is to honor your process. I always tell students, I'm going to give you kind of feedback as to what works for me, what I'm doing with students, kind of what is working best for my students at the moment. But you want to kind of honor your process. I kind of tell students, don't jump into writing a full draft right away. Don't jump into writing full paragraphs. When you write something, writing is hard, even for, you know, someone who loves it like moi. But if you kind of commit to writing paragraphs and paragraphs, then you feel more attached to that versus like you want to be nimble and you want to be kind of really critical as to what is going to make it into the personal statement versus what's going to be demoted a little bit, you know, slightly for your activities section, let's say. So you want to kind of, you know, don't commit too early for an experience and then feel like, Oh, I can't touch that. I have, you know, 2000 characters. No, no, no, you want to basically canvas all of you experiences first or my suggestion. And then kind of, you know, whether that's lists and bullet points or mini paragraphs here and there, kind of a couple sentences here and there for the story and then bullet points, the different lessons that you can kind of talk about. But first and foremost, honor your process. Also 3.5 step 3.5 is to kind of think about not just the splashy big experiences in your journey, but also the more quiet moments. Did you take a patient down to get a prescription refill at the hospital? Were you standing in line and heard that the patient in front of you pharmacy was having a hard time and you helped translate for them? So these are kind of, you know, small moments that will definitely not make it into your resume, but could be very moving and compelling and could really yield some very interesting lessons for you in your personal statement. These are kind of from sample students. Step 4. Once you have a few of these stories or a few of these potential stories that you can pick four or five that are the strongest. And by strongest, I mean, for me, there's a hierarchy for experiences to kind of select from for your personal statement. So patient-centric experiences, the ones that you are connecting directly with patients are from me, rain as king queen. And so most important in your personal statement, kind of moments where you are, you know, engaging with community, engaging in scientific kind of curiosity. And so there is a sense of intellectual and community engagement in your personal statement. That's also important. I don't love shadowing experiences for medical personal statements dental is something different with regards to shadowing. So you want to kind of think about where you are most active in moments. And those are for me most important. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have the more kind of passive shadowing experiences. Every time I say a rule, someone will break it for me and a student will write something incredible. And so then that's why I always kind of say, you know, caution, this is an idea, but it's definitely not kind of a hard fast rule. But once you kind of have all of your experiences canvassed out, I would pick about four or five, probably not going to make all five into the personal statement, but pick four or five, and then kind of start writing out that story, right? And sprinkle in some images, some five senses, I want to see here, taste, touch, whatever possible, whatever is available, right? I want to kind of, as if you have a camera over your shoulder, I want to see what's going on. I want it kind of to be a movie a little bit as brief as possible. You just want to get into what is going on, how you kind of acted and how you connected with the patient, just enough evidence for then that reflection, that lesson. So instead of she smiled at me, you can get a little bit more kind of image driven and say something like, after I warmed my hands to help her stand up, she responded with a tired smile. And I knew that although we did not speak the same language, kindness is universal. So right there, we have a sense of touch. We have kind of the visual aspect of the smile. We have that there is a kind of diverse patient population or kind of a diversity or a difference in cultural backgrounds or linguistic backgrounds between the caregiver and the patient. And we are bridging that, right? We're kind of connecting on a different level. So we have a lot of different things besides the she smiled at me. I don't love when students write about how a patient is thankful or you know, are showing their gratitude for what they did for a kindness that they did. What I would rather do is kind of see what that taught you. So I would skip the thank you from the patient or you know, they smiles and said, thank you so much. I would skip that. And I would go into what the moment meant to you and your journey to medicine. So then once you have these four or five, you have the evidence, you have what you would write as reflection or lesson, you want to start picking which ones are the strongest for me, the barometer for strength to make it into the personal statement is the kind of let's say three anecdotes. Maybe you use four stories, but three for the most part that they are offering you varying lessons. So you don't want three examples of the same lesson. For example, three examples where you translated one in a clinical setting, one, you know, in line at the pharmacy and one in a homeless shelter. If you have these three and you do want to kind of bring this in, then maybe you bring all three examples into one body paragraph yielding the same or similar lessons, right? But you want the different kind of sections. So like the different main sections of the body paragraphs to be yielding different lessons, varying lessons. So you can show a multi-dimensional understanding of your journey to medicine. And so you want kind of different kind of lessons and reflections. What are your brainstorming hacks? If you have stuff that you know you're working on and you did an exercise that really worked well, definitely comment below. Please help our community out. And if you have any questions for me, I'd love to answer them down below. So here are a few moments that seem subtle, but have played very well in personal statements. So a student volunteer at a hospice center notices that a new patient loves tango ballads and brings a few downloaded on their phone. And next time, you know, that they visit with the patient, they kind of bring in the music and it becomes like a small ritual for them. And she connects with this patient in that way. A student brings sock puppets or a student brings socks to a patient who loves plays and they start kind of a sock puppet impromptu activity in the center. A student teaches an elderly nutrition class to Cuban Americans who want to eat healthier. And so she is adapting Cuban recipes to kind of swap out the less healthy ways of cooking with kind of more healthier options and still keep true to the cultural background of the group's palate. So a few of these were kind of introductions and a couple of those examples that I just listed out were body paragraphs that kind of were expanded. If you want to hear more about how you should expand your personal statements, especially those body paragraphs, I have a video coming up soon about that specifically. I also have many playlists. I'll put them in the description if you want to chat with me, free 15 minute call and how I work with students and learn more to work together. Definitely book your call in the calendar link below and I will also put my program down there so that you can see the website. The program that I work with students through is PSRX and I have just a couple slots right now actually to be honest, students are starting early this cycle. So any questions about that, any comments about kind of your brainstorming, definitely comment that below. I hope this was helpful and I'll see you soon. Take care.