 Feel like you don't know where to begin with your personal statement. Brain storming is the worst, but let's play a game of relationship charades so you know what to keep in your personal statement and what to toss into your activity section or keep in your resume. For the best medical school personal statement coaching, subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss out on the next video. Writing the personal statement starts way before you actually sit down to type. So you want to make sure that you save time and tears with very, very productive brainstorming strategies. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance. As a university writing faculty, I teach writing and as a personal statement coach, I have helped hundreds of students perfect their story and now it's your turn. Step one, start with your resume. So your resume is your friend. You can't start there because you're not going to end there. So basically make sure that you think about your resume as the what, when, where aspect. So end products. I organized this. I achieved that. And so you want to run down your resume, especially if it's an up-to-date doc and you want to kind of look at moments or experiences that may be interesting that you may want to include for your personal statement, but now you want to start writing in five or four different buckets for volunteering, shadowing, clinical experiences, hobbies, non-medical experiences that are memorable or identity-driven experiences or data. So within those buckets, you want to make sure that you start now thinking about experiences that answer the why and how. So more detail-driven, more sensory-driven. And so these will dominate the anecdotes and experiences in your personal statement. And you want to answer a few questions. So here they go. What kind of experiences. So take note of who you met and talked to, who did you offer a kind gesture to, who did you learn from. So and then in those relationships, you want to answer who was it, what was their role at the place, patient, peer, doctor, child, what was your interaction, so exactly what happened, what was said, what do you see, hear, taste, so kind of bring in sensory so that if that is a potential story and you kind of narrate it later that you have, that the exchange doesn't happen in the vacuum, that you hear kind of the overall activity around you. And then how did you react? So as if acting in your own movie played out through kind of those five senses. So what happened and how did you react? Make sure that you also kind of narrate memorable but quiet moments. Did you take a patient down to help them with their pharmacy kind of refill? Or did you help your grandmother with her iPhone? And so any of these kinds of like smaller moments that don't even feel that aren't medically related, let's say, or they don't feel kind of huge and loud, they may be memorable and they may be able to connect to your overall frame. So consider them, write them down with regards to relationship kind of language and connection. So for example, think about getting it very sensorial. Instead of she smiled at me, you could get a few more senses in play and say something like, I vigorously rubbed my cold hands before placing it on Nelly's shoulder. With a weathered smile, I knew that although we did not speak the same language, kindness and connection are universal. Here we have both touch, a sign of goodwill, and so you have kind of auditory hearing just because of the language that we don't speak the same language. So even if you don't hear it, you kind of allude to it. And so you have a couple more senses there in that kind of example of a sentence versus just she smiled at me. And the last kind of question, which is the harder one for each of the anecdotes that you kind of flesh out is kind of testing these moments is what did you learn? So what was your lesson learned? So medicine, being an active participant in the medical field doesn't only happen in an OR or in serving a diagnosis. And I know you know this. You want to make sure that you also kind of take stock of your relationship and your effect on people. So sometimes kind of you walk in with an idea and then the patient or experience kind of goes somewhere else and you are adaptable to going that way. Whether you're shadowing and you see a doctor do this or whether you're volunteering and you kind of help, you know, you went in to take a blood pressure and you settled in for a conversation on their family or their kind of lack of technology savvy experiences or something. So that you kind of are showing a human side to your kind of pursuit of medicine. Step two, to maximize this kind of sensory relationship activity, you want to make sure that you do quite a few and test them out if they're kind of PS worthy, if they're a personal statement worthy. But if they're not, that's okay because they may serve for your activities and memorable experiences section in your application. So it won't go to waste, but you've already done the work in a low stakes way of kind of fleshing out the sensory and seeing if they are anecdotes and experiences and lessons learned valuable enough for that one story. If not, you can put them somewhere else in your application and still doing good work for you. What are your brainstorming hacks to get you started? Comment below. So here are a few small moments that seem kind of subtle and not that kind of bombastic but have done a ton to open up the kind of humanity of a personal statement, which I've loved. So here are some. Buying a role of mince for an elderly woman who cast you off into kind of a history lesson on pre-communist Cuba, that was the beginning of a personal statement. Or a student's quick thinking saved a patient from an awkward experience at a pharmacy. They were not volunteering, they were just standing in line behind them. So the caption worthy experiences kind of sometimes highlight your accomplishments, those like big moments and you should have accomplishments in your personal statement, but you can also have kind of subtle quiet moments when kind of authority isn't looking to really show your initiative and your humanity and empathetic kind of qualities. So sometimes when we do something, when we don't expect anything in return, that plays really nicely within kind of this balance of telling your story and why medicine specifically. So no matter the kind of number of experiences that you have in accomplishments, you want to make sure that they tie back into an overall theme. So is it a theme of empathy within medicine? Is it a theme of holistic caring for the individual? And so then the whole buying a role of mince or helping the patient in the pharmacy was tied to like an overall idea of kind of isolation in older generations and how you kind of want to combat that through Alzheimer's research and work in your medical career. So you want to make sure that you tie back to a unifying theme. If you want more information on kind of how to develop a unifying theme, definitely check out this video linked above. And if you want more expert guidance on your personal statement, make sure you book a one on one call with me. The link is in the description. If you found this video helpful, please give us a like, subscribe and share with your pre-med friends. Thanks for watching. I'll see you soon.