 With 4,500 characters, dental school applicants need to share who they are, reveal their aspirations, and their journey to dentistry quick. Stick around and I will share how to kind of stand out from a pack. For the best personal statement coaching, subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss a video. There are four elements that every dental school applicant should hit in their personal statement. From storytelling to reflection, you want to make sure that you kind of stand out by really, really developing your ID, your identity within dentistry. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance as a university writing faculty and personal statement coach. I know what they're looking for and I know how to help you tell your best story. Stick around. Tip one, decide on your emblematic story. So you want to make sure that your journey to dentistry maybe perhaps starts with that spark moment. So that one experience that you can narrate that reveals to the reader why, how you kind of set off into this journey within dentistry. So that's super important, but you want to make sure that you don't kind of tell this grand narrative that occupies so much real estate. You want to kind of break it up into chunks and bring in kind of very specific strategic experiences, then show kind of in sensor driven, imagistic language kind of continued commitment throughout so that you have this spark moment, this kind of foundational experience that helped you kind of get on this path. But then you also have these moments that you kind of splice throughout that are in narrative form that show that continued commitment and you want that camera over your shoulder feel as if you were telling showing a movie and really kind of get the reader invested in your story. Tip two, convey passion and commitment. And so students will ask me all the time, how do I convey passion, commitment without sounding too cliche and unoriginal. And so basically what you're going to do it is through showing through those imagistic type sentences. A lot of students will start with telling phrases. So sentences, for example, I'm committed to a career in dentistry because it is what I have been passionate about ever since shadowing Dr. Perlman or my passion for the practice of dentistry shined right when I interned at Dr. Cavity's practice. I realized then that I wanted to dedicate my time and efforts to such a noble practice. So these are not bad sentences, but they should come on the heels or after the kind of narrative that shows this commitment and shows this passion when you shadowed this person or when you were kind of volunteering and turning at that practice. So you really want the kind of story to come first and then have these telling phrases. If you like, you want to follow story plus reflection equals a compelling narrative or a compelling paragraph. So you definitely want to add those kind of narrative style as, you know, as if I'm watching a movie of your life and then kind of reflect with those telling phrases. If you like the less number of telling phrases, the better. Tip three to tell effective stories, we bring in descriptors, image and sensory driven. So the five senses whenever possible, I want to see here, taste, touch, all that good stuff, whatever appropriate. You want to do this by kind of as efficient as possible and strategic as possible, meaning that you want to make sure that you're not kind of taking too much time to get to the heart or the climax of a story. So you want to play with what I call macro and micro. You want to get to write the heart of the story right away, kind of a quick description, a quick exchange, a dialogue between you and a patient. And then you kind of want to map out or like zoom out rather and then give the ambient noises or any other kind of, you know, chatter around or responses to the exchange that you just had. So you're kind of zooming in and zooming out very efficiently to tell a story. And then you kind of reflect on it. So here's an example, a 63 year old patient with a salt and pepper bob clutched the chair until her knuckles were ghost white, shredding her mouth. She refused to let anyone near her much less begin her much needed root canal. After the hygienists left the room exasperated, I sat in the corner far enough for comfort and asked her open ended questions in Spanish, stumbling upon our shared love of Chinese food. She began loosening her demeanor and then whispered that she was no longer scared. So notice how we zoomed right in to the patient, right? So we kind of had a quick physical description so that we can imagine it in our mind's eye, her kind of knuckles turning ghost white because she was so tense and the student kind of dropping a pin and letting us know where they are in this scene. So very quick in a couple of sentences, we get how tense the patient was. We get how kind of friendly and personable the student is and how they can kind of connect with people. So they're socially aware, they're reading the social cues, which is very important when you practice and when you work with the public. So we get a number of traits here, compassion, empathy, and then you can kind of reflect on the takeaways and lesson learned. But if you don't have this anecdote beforehand and you just say, I am compassionate or I am empathetic when elderly patients or older patients, you don't hate the dentist, we don't get that kind of emotional connection that we do from the story first and then the takeaway. So after this as well, then the student can say that, you know, interning at Dr. Cavity's practice, let's say the invented last name, was more than just sterilizing equipment and organizing files. It was a chance to kind of interact with patients and learn how to kind of dial in on the emotional register that is needed to be an effective practitioner. Are you starting to brainstorm your personal statement and aren't sure you're headed in the right direction? Comment below, I'd love to give you my two cents. Tip four, how will you give back to the community of dentistry? So your personal statement should not be just what you're going to gain from dentistry or what you've already done. It's really kind of a starting point as to the type of dentist you will become and how you will connect and offer, you know, pay it forward in some way. So really think about how you're going to kind of establish that ID, right, that identity within dentistry. Are you interested in kind of dental mission trips? Are you interested in opening a practice and kind of merging, combining the business aspects, you know, many dentists have their own practice, right? Are you interested in connecting with lower socioeconomic pockets of society and offering free or low income oral health care? So how do you see yourself giving back to this community? And how will your community improve because of your involvement? I think that's a super important kind of question to consider as you are, especially wrapping up the ending I like for this kind of why me and dentistry. So these are examples that I've seen in previous personal statements to kind of give you some inspiration. So if you come from a disadvantaged community yourself, you can give back to your own community or the community where you were raised in, right? If you volunteered with a local group teaching oral hygiene to children, you can kind of relay it to an experience that you already had and then talk about how you aspire to expand that project in a way. Maybe you did some research on dentists without borders or something kind of, you know, medical mission trip type. And that may be interesting. One more underutilized kind of option is to connect dentistry to something else. There's a local orthodontics who now with the kind of pandemic has shifted some of their efforts to making a PPE to supplying hospitals with protective equipment because of the shortages. So how do you kind of see yourself offering a kind of community-oriented gesture of commitment is necessary and is needed and that you would thrive with? If you want more expert feedback on your personal statement, definitely book your one-on-one call with me. The link is in the description. If you like this video, you found it helpful. 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