 What's up YouTube? Today I am going to workshop a successful personal statement and this is from Dr. Rex. He was so gracious to share his personal statement and a few of his secondaries that were successful in admissions. He got into Dartmouth UNC a whole list and you can learn about all his stats and his journey in his YouTube channel which is great because you can kind of like live the experience with him. I will link that below but today we're going to go through the personal statement so that you can really get a sense as to why it was successful, what works, what things I think could be improved upon and that way as you sit down to write you can kind of start writing your most compelling personal statement yourself. Hi, I am Dr. Josie. This is Write Your Acceptance. I work with a ton of students who are medical school, indential school, residency. We work to really establish your voice but be as compelling as possible and if you want to learn more about how I work with students you can grab your free 15-minute consult with me. You can learn about my program, the personal statement Rx, the kind of one-hour free webinar that I am hosting these days and all that good stuff in the links below but for now let's get started on Rex's personal statement. I'm going to read the entire thing first and then we'll go kind of section by section so you can get a sense of the entire the essay in its entirety and then we can kind of break it down. All right, he will be taken off life support in the next couple days but he can still hear you. Read the all-to-brief description next to the patient's name on the weekly list of hospital visitation requests sent to St. Thomas More Church. I've read this short line while holding the day's religious census as I looked up the room numbers of patients on the visit request list. It completely caught me off guard. What does someone say to a total stranger who is so near the end of their life? I did not believe I was qualified to answer the question but I do believe that there is not one answer that applies to every person. While I was partially terrified at the responsibility of the upcoming conversation I was grateful to have the opportunity to simply be with another person and share human interaction at such a significant point in their life despite that fact that I did not know what this interaction with a man who could no longer speak or move would be like. Ultimately the opportunity to share in some of the most intimate moments of people's lives both high and low is why I visit patients in the hospital every weekend as a Catholic Communion minister for the chaplain's office and why I want to be a doctor one day. Emotion is what makes us human and to be human is truly an amazing experience. This basic truth is not something I always understood. During high school I had a significant struggle with depression. I spent a lot of time attempting to hide from my emotions and seeing no escape. I had isolated myself from relationships and felt my emotions were the greatest burden of being human. Now years later my experience confronting depression helps shape my actions every day of my life. I live each day embracing every opportunity to feel alive and cherish each opportunity to experience emotion especially through sharing in another's joy sorrow pain or love. I agree with legendary basketball coach Jimmy V who in the sb acceptance speech weeks before his death from cancer stated if you laugh you think and you cry that's a full day but for me even the opportunity to have my emotions stirred to care about another person enough to allow them to move me is plenty to make me thankful for that day. I want to spend my life caring for people that at times when disease and physical injury might otherwise make them feel alone or isolated sharing in people's experiences and emotion is what makes me feel most human and alive and that is what I seek to do in my future career. I visited the man on life support first that day inside the ICU tubes and wires protruded from him taking measurements and serving functions I hope to one day fully understand. His skin appeared almost plastic it was hard to see or hear signs of life in the room and the only sounds were robotic beeping and the mechanical war of air. He was all alone with the machines that were keeping him alive. I looked at his eyes I have found that no matter what people's eyes always remind me that they are human. I sat down in the chair and began talking to him. I do not remember all of what I said that day I introduced myself I told him that I was glad to be there with him and that he was not alone. I explained that I didn't know if he could hear me but hope that he could. Then I simply prayed with him for a few minutes in the way of our shared faith tradition. I thanked him for the visit and told him of my continued prayers for him. I do not know how many days later the man died but he was not on the religious census the next weekend. I still stay up some nights thinking about my conversation with him wondering what more I might have said and how I could have said things better. My hope is that if he could hear me my words and presence brought him comfort and peace for those moments when I shared life with him. The desire to be a doctor is manifest to me because I want to share in more of these moments with people. Specifically I want to work for the elderly so I can not only share in but also aid people through some of the medical trials and result from becoming elderly. Aging often brings a multifaceted need for healing in the physical emotional social and spiritual domains. Medical science can bring amazing physical healing to a person and I believe my intellect's innovative thinking and ability to synthesize diverse information will serve me well to improve a patient's quality of life. However the role of a doctor does not end with physical healing. Doctors serve their patients so much more when they seek to also bring person-centered healing that goes beyond presenting physical condition. For me a doctor is being both one connecting the tubes and wires to a patient and the person sitting at their bedside when medicine has reached its limits. Okay so first I mean holistically a beautiful personal statement. It is a privilege to workshop and share it with you guys. Let's deep dive into the different sections. There are places of kind of room for improvement in my humble opinion. There are moments where he kind of just hits it on the head and just strikes such a beautiful emotional cord and so I kind of want to celebrate and critique with your permission a little bit so that you can find your voice and find your space within kind of this storytelling type of personal statement. So intro. He will be taking off life support in the next couple days but he can still hear you. Read the all too brief description next to the patient's name on the weekly list of hospital visitation requests sent to St. Thomas More Church. I read the short line while holding the day's religious census as I looked at the room numbers of patients on the visitor request list. It completely caught me off guard. What does someone say to a total stranger who is so near the end of their life? So the line the introduction line the first line grips you right away right? He will be taken off life support in the next couple days but he can still hear you. Usually I am not a huge fan of kind of a quote from someone else right so from a celebrity a scholar not that the words are not thoughtful not adequate to the you know not pertaining to the situation just because I don't I'm selfish with the real estate of the essay and I don't like to give too much voice away from the writer. Having said that this line is excellent in the sense of like from a narrative perspective right? Like it grips you as a reader you want to read more you want to understand what is happening. So kudos great first line. I feel like the second half of line one kind of drives on a little bit right? So the patient's name on the weekly list of a hospital visitation request sent to the church. So I feel like that could have been a little bit more brief. Very quickly let's do paragraph two. The very quick detail is I don't love starting a sentence with but it's just not my favorite. So the first couple lines I did not believe that I was qualified to answer that question but I do believe that there is no one answer that applies to every person. So just a quick kind of like you know of writing detail for me that kind of bothers me. Really like the second half of paragraph two. Ultimately the opportunity to share in some of the most intimate moments of people's lives both high and low is why I visit patients in the hospital every weekend as a Catholic community minister for the chaplain's office and why I want to be a doctor one day. So really like this personal kind of moment of growth in the introduction section right? So yes this is paragraph two but it's still kind of talking about a formative moment the same kind of moment and they're teasing out how they value the experience. I like the kind of what I call the loose thesis statement in the personal statement. So it is that moment where they kind of connect that spark moment or the initial experience right to why medicine and so they do that very nicely in that last sentence. Then they go into emotion is what makes us human and to be human is truly an amazing experience. This basic truth is not something I always understood. During high school I had a significant struggle with depression. I spent a lot of time attempting to hide from my emotions and seeing no escape and I isolated myself so they continued with that with one more line. Typically I don't like any content that is from high school or before unless it is a spark moment and by spark moment I mean the passive medical experience that tuned you into medicine for the first time usually is a passive experience or something happens to you right? You get sick or grandma gets sick. In this moment he is sharing a very kind of delicate about with depression and it was in high school so it was pretty young because they started with the kind of introductory experience was something that is pretty contemporary pretty recent. They kind of go back to their spark moment in this high school experience. So I thought that in that sense it's good but you want to make sure that you are thinking about using as much relevant and recent content. Patient-centric is ideal as possible especially in the middle of the essay. Next up now years later my experience confronting depression helps shape my actions every day of my life. Love that topic sentence. It really connects what he just kind of wrapped up and then it goes into how that kind of still has significance in his life deployed differently now. I think this next section could be a little shorter because it's not about him. I live each day embracing every opportunity to feel alive and cherish each opportunity to experience emotion especially through sharing in others joy sorrow pain and love love that line but then it goes into Jimmy V's sb acceptance speech and we have a whole line. It's like three sentences I would try and make it like a sentence and a half so really shorten maybe that first sentence and then the the quote and then towards the end of that paragraph I want to spend my life caring for people at times when disease and physical injury might otherwise make them feel alone or isolated. Sharing in people's experiences and emotions is what makes me feel. I don't love quotes just because it takes away from the student voice it takes away from kind of the moment the immediacy of the experience but rats does a very great job at the end of this paragraph to bring it back to him his valuation and his connection of that quote and living a sense of full life and serving others in living their full life to why medicine so I thought that he did that very nicely. Do I love this paragraph? No I would have maybe voted for another patient-centric experience but does this paragraph work? Yes because they do come back to medicine and more importantly than that they show a different dimension or they share a different dimension of who they are right emotional maturity self-awareness it really does come back to advancing medicine and those aspects of their identity so then they continue. I visited the man on life support first that day inside the ICU tubes and why is protruded from him. I love how this comes back to the opening image right and it comes back to the opening image as if we were already we were just talking about it in a very interesting way Rex says that he sometimes thinks about this moment and the conversation what he could have said better how he could have kind of done something different so it feels like we are coming as readers we are kind of coming back to this moment over and over and so I love how there's no forced transitional topic sentence here it just goes into the details in a very image sensory driven way I hear the beeping of the machines I see the tubes protruding it's a beautiful moment I mean kudos to the decisions like rhetorically here and then probably my favorite line is from the bottom of this or the end of this paragraph I looked at his eyes I have found that no matter what people's eyes always remind me that they're human I sat down in a chair and began talking to him that's definitely something that's not going to be in Rex's CV right we're not going to see that in resume so those are the moments and reflections that you really want to capture in your personal statement especially if they're patient-centric which this is so it's like ding ding ding hits all the boxes I love it and then it kind of continued I do not know how many days later that man died but he was not in a religious census the next weekend if it were for me like you know I was ruling this world um this personal statement world I would have either swapped this paragraph or the Jimmy V paragraph out and put in one more patient experience patient-centric experience that offered a different lesson because I just wanted to see a little bit more of of his experiences more varied but that's just me because I'm being picky um it is a beautiful kind of reflection as to how this stuck with him and then it's a productive conclusion it's still about 4,800 characters so again I would have put in one more patient experience so that you can have gotten because you have the space you don't have to get to the 5,300 characters you don't have to be 5,296 right but um but you do have the space and because I would have swapped out one of the other two paragraphs you would have had ample space to kind of go into one more experience all in all though a privilege to workshop this essay I really love what it does I really love how it shares very vulnerable experiences very medically driven in the sense of it is advancing the why medicine in most if not all paragraphs I get a sense of who Rex is as a person what he values and who he is right so so I really like that I hope this video was helpful I have more on these videos I have a few essays that I workshop so check out the playlist below I can link that there and if you want to talk about how I work with students definitely book a call with me and and we can chat about personal statement rx my program or anything else that that you need if you're like in the secondary stage of your writing please give us a like and comment anything that I need to get back to you on thank you so much have a good one bye