 If I asked you to write a personal statement right now, would you be stressed out? Most of you would probably say yes, because you probably don't think you're a good writer. You don't know what to write about. You don't know how to make a great personal statement. But today, I'm going to give you tips on how to get the admission board, your interviewers, anyone that reads your personal statement to say, that was amazing. That sounds interesting to you. Then stay tuned. We're going to get to those tips after this intro. All right, guys. What is going on? I'm the journey helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. In this video, we're going to talk about the personal statements because I know as the making of this video, you are probably applying to medical school, residency, or whatever schooling that you want to do in the future. And I want to make the personal statement process a little bit easier. So in this video, I'm going to break it down step by step on how I write my personal statements quickly, efficiently, and stress-free and have a final product where people are raving about how amazing it was. Are you guys excited? Let's get into it. We're going to get started. Some of these methods are going to be a little bit unconventional, but that is kind of what makes it so effective. So step number one is after you read the prompt, I want you to take five to 10 minutes on answering the question out loud. So it seems a little bit weird, but let's say you're applying for medical school and the question is, why do you want to become a doctor? That's usually a typical prompt that you may have to answer. Spend five to 10 minutes of saying all of your reasons, you know, regardless of how incohesive you may feel, go ahead and speak it out. The reason I say five to 10 minutes is because if I told you just 30 seconds, you're going to do superficial answers. You're going to say, I want to help people. My family was affected by some type of help ailments and I want to provide care. All of those are good reasons, guys, but the way you get into a really good personal statement is you have to get really deep. And to get deep, you have to understand your own thoughts and give yourself some time to process. So five to 10 minutes, I find to be really effective. Just go ahead and speak them out loud. Now step number two is after you're going ahead and speaking out your answers, I want you to use what I like to call my sticky note method. So basically I have a bunch of sticky notes and post-it notes around my desk at all times. And as you're talking, you're going to have some ideas where you're going to be like, ah, that wasn't that great, but there's going to be some like, well, that sounded amazing. Whatever I said out loud, like that needs to go in the essay. And so I would literally just use a sticky note and I would write the experience or the thought and then my big takeaway. So I'll give you an example. When I'm applying to residency, they may ask me why I'm going into the field that I chose, which is internal medicine. So often what students do is that they pick different experiences from medical school, maybe a patient experience or something of the sort. And they say, this is a patient experience. This is my big takeaway. So if you're talking about why you want to go to med school or whatever, use your thought and then write your big takeaway in one sticky note. Now, every time you feel like you have an epiphany or like gold mind of a thought, keep creating another sticky note. I'll tell you kind of how we're going to use this in a second, but I love using these sticky notes just because it's easier than just typing out like an outline on a word doc and not really knowing how to organize it later. So we'll get to that. I promise, but use these sticky notes just to keep track of your thoughts, but keep, you know, talking out for the five to 10 minutes. So step number three is coming up with a final conclusion. So for this step, act like you're asked the same question for the prompt, but in an interview. Now, obviously you're not going to have five to 10 minutes to answer why you want to go into medical school or why you want to go into a residency, you're going to have to come up with like a one to four or five sentence answer. And so after you've kind of had this five to 10 second or a 10 minute discussion, go ahead and figure out what your one to two liner would be. So, you know, if your reason like mine was, is because you had family members who were affected by health crises and you learned the power of medicine, that could be your final conclusion. You just want to know what conclusion you're going to get to take your reader to because then we can move on to step number four. So now we're going to come back to the sticky note that it's remember, we had different epiphanies, different experiences with each respective takeaways that we had. And we can add to these. That's the beauty of these sticky notes. So what I want you to do now is create a sticky note just for your final conclusion, the one we just did in the previous step. And then look at your sticky notes and saying, huh, could this sell my final conclusion? Could this one do a better job? Maybe this one doesn't really like talk about it. Maybe I talked about community service, but it doesn't really touch on my like my family element kind of conclusion. So I'm going to take that one out. But these two right here seem to do a pretty good job. So then what you can do is you can just lay them on the table, have your final conclusion at the very end and see a nice cohesive kind of flow from your essay, from experience to experience, and each of them will have a takeaway, ultimately leading you to your final conclusion, your final statement. So you can see how this process, your letter or your essay is already being created without a lot of stress, you're just spending maybe five to 10 minutes talking it out. And now it's starting to look and have a structure. So now that we've done step number four, which is picking the experiences that are going to sell the final conclusion, I want you to go to step number five and you're going to take more sticky notes. I know we're using a lot. I promise they're going to be effective on creating a perfect personal statement. If you're going to use more sticky notes to create what I like to call flow statements or flow or transitions, basically what these are is the essays that are good are the ones that have good experiences and a good conclusion. They seem to balance each other out. The essay has a direction, but the essays that are amazing are the ones that can clearly take you from the first experience to the second one to the third one to the final point. The reader can really follow your argument. They can follow your journey and they understand and feel like they understand who you are. That's what makes a great essay because that's one when the reader, your interviewers will say, you wrote an amazing essay. So to get to that point, I like to call these the flow or the transition notes. And so between each of my experiences, so now I have my sticky notes that I'm going to be talking about the different experiences, I'm just going to be saying how can I get from first experience to the second one. And if I can't do a good job, maybe I have to like kind of jumble around my experiences. But maybe my first experience was something I did in college and then my second experience was something that I discovered in med school and then I kept going on and on. It's kind of like a timeline phase, but you can use experiences that taught you one lesson and then another experience that kind of built upon that lesson. There's many different ways of using these transitions, but using these flows will help you go from, you know, point to point. So hopefully that part makes sense. This will really make you from going to an average above average essay to one that's truly amazing. All right guys, so the personal statement is now starting to have a structure. We have our experiences, we have the final conclusion. And now we also know how we're going to transition between experiences. So really the last part that we need to do is creating a hook. And this hook is obviously how we're going to start our essay, but you want to do it in a very intriguing way. So if you are applying to medical school, you know, what's the common answer you think most people will say on their essays they want to go to med school. They'll say, oh, I want to help people. And there's going to be some type of variation in the introduction. Readers read about this kind of prompt all the time. So for them, it's so boring and you don't want to be boring. You want to be memorable. You want to be great. So to do that, there's a couple of things that you could do. Think about your final conclusion and then think about a story. You know, I love stories because you can really put the reader in your shoes and if you can make them feel like they're going through the experience that you went through then the rest of the essay, they feel like they understand. So pick an experience that you can tell a story about that's going to sell your ultimate conclusion. So I'll give you an example. I, as I mentioned, went into medicine because I had family members who dealt with health issues themselves. And I remember as a kid, kind of observing that. And so I thought about different memories and different stories and the one really stuck. Or I could think about, you know, one of my family members being severely sick and my thoughts, you know, as they were getting sick and then as they were getting better. So I put the reader in my own, you know, shoes and I wanted them to see what I was seeing as what this family member was going through. And I put that as my introduction and then I had a final conclusion and I had that conclusion go to the first experience and then I had the flow, you know, notes that we've already talked about go to the second experience and it went all the way to my final conclusion. So use that hook guys, tell a story. And as a bonus tip guys, try to tell your hook from a very interesting time perspective. So don't try to tell the story from the very beginning because that's very cliche. Instead maybe start from the middle or start with the conclusion and then like rewind and have a flashback as your hook. Think of very interesting ways you could attract your reader. Again, the goal is to put them in your shoes so that way they can feel like they're in your shoes the rest of the essay. And that is going to make it feel from good to great. All right guys, so now we're wrapping up the creation of this personal statement. And right now I would say it's, you know, close to great, but it's not quite there. You know, we want to add this little oomph that is really going to attract the reader. And so what I want you to do is go through your different experiences that, you know, you have maybe one takeaway on and spend two to four minutes talking out loud what your takeaways for that experience were. You know, I've had met students or college students who are applying to medical school who talked about their desires to go into medicine because they like volunteered at a camp and they saw really cool things or maybe they had a health illness themselves and they talked about those experiences. So I want you to kind of be able to elaborate those. So talk those out. And as you're talking them out, add your takeaways. You know, what are your big epiphany moments? Because then you can use those in those paragraphs that talk about that experience and that portion of your essay becomes more filled and not superficial. So continue to do that. Now, after you've spent some time developing your experiences, now it's time to get started on the writing. We've spent a good amount of time creating the structure of our personal statement that looks amazing. And now we just have to get words to paper or digital paper in this regard. And just a bonus tips is wrap up this video when you're writing and after you kind of have your first draft, what I want you to do is look at every single sentence and say, is this pertinent? Is this going to sell my final conclusion? Or is this just fluff? Can any other student say this? And if the answer is yes, more often than not, you're probably writing a superficial essay. You're writing about helping people but so is that other classmate of yours. There's nothing personal in your personal statement. So if the sentence doesn't pertain to your final conclusion, then it could be anyone's essay. So look at each sentence and say, is this and does this belong? And the answer is no, take it out. And you can obviously make your essay shorter. You know, we're not trying to fill space just for the heck of it. You want to have each sentence kind of mean something. And so that's the whole practice of like speaking it out loud because you can have more and more epiphanies, which will sell your final conclusion. Now that you've kind of have your first draft, I want you to use some tools to obviously make sure it looks polished in terms of a grammar standpoint. So use tools and I'll link this down below called Grammarly, which is a free plugin that you can add to Chrome or whatnot. You can also install it from Microsoft Word and it'll give you spelling as well as punctuation, just suggestions, all of this for free. And you can download it so that all your emails and all your essays will look amazing in the future. So go ahead and download Grammarly down below. And then finally send it to several peers and mentors that you trust and value their opinions. So your significant other, your friends, your families, send it to everyone and saying, what are your thoughts? Where could I improve? Obviously, people are gonna focus on the grammars and things of that sort, but you want to ask them, did I sell you? And if they said yes, your mom's always gonna say yes, so don't trust your mom. But look at your friends and your mentors that did I sell you on why I wanted to go to medicine? And if they're hesitating, you probably are more superficial than you thought. So keep working on it. You can add creating more epiphanies, more kind of details to each of your experience. And I promise you guys, if you create this structure, try out the sticky note method, let me know what you guys think you're gonna have an amazing personal statement that's not gonna require a lot of stress. But hopefully this video was helpful. And if it was, if you can just take one second to drop a comment on one thing that you learned in this video, it's gonna help me make sure that I'm actually giving content of value to you guys. So that's my whole goal. So one thing, maybe one method that you plan on using in your future personal statements. But with that being said, if you did enjoy this video, first of all, do give it a like. It helps the channel out a lot. For all of you that have subscribed, thank you. But if you're not part of the channel and you enjoyed this video and you somehow made it to the end, make sure you subscribe to the channel for more tips and videos just like this on a weekly basis. But I will see you guys on the next video.