 What's up, YouTube? If you are writing your personal statement for dental school and all you have is about your braces, let's talk. This video will kind of go over all the different elements that you need to make sure that you have a successful personal statement for dental school. Hi, I am Dr. Josie. This is Write Your Acceptance. I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of students applying to medical school, dental school, residency, even college. I know what the admissions committees are looking for and now it's your turn. Let's get started. So step one, let's talk your beginning. I do see the I got my braces experience as that spark moment into dentistry a lot. If that is your truth and you know, you want to start with that, that's fine. But make sure that you are really thinking about how to particularize your moment. Whenever possible, you want to make sure that the personal statement is really setting you apart, right? In a good way and know that the braces story is a very popular story. And so to avoid kind of the more generic experience, I was embarrassed with my smile and then I got braces and it changed my world. Figure out if there were any kind of other outlier experiences that particularize your experience, what I mean? You started braces and then for financial reasons you had to stop. For you immigrated in between and you had to stop and start, you kind of had to navigate something that really shows your awareness of a cultural landscape of a different of a healthcare landscape. So think about how you want to kind of really individualize your moment if that is the start you want. There are other ways to start. You can start with an experience that brings you more kind of into the present moment, maybe taking care of a patient, adapting to their needs, helping them with emotional support. You can save this for later in the essay for sure in the dental experience section, but I do see some students start with a formative dental experience that they've had recently and then kind of go back chronologically to when they were a child and build back up into their dental experiences. Another moment you can tap into for the beginning is a formative leadership experience. If it's within a dental capacity, even better, but really kind of showcasing you in action and helping and connecting to the community. I've had students who have taught through a mobile dental clinic for teaching kids how to brush. I've had students who have started nonprofit organizations and they talk about kind of that commitment and connection to the community and then how they were introduced to dentistry and kind of inequality within oral healthcare through that non-dental experience. And so then they started that way. Step two is to consider your background for your wide dentistry. This second section, you can kind of piggyback off of the first paragraph. So let's say you helped a patient manage their fears and you really adapted to their emotional well-being. At the beginning of the second paragraph, you can offer those takeaways. You can offer how like a little self placement, how you had similar fears or your father had similar fears while you were growing up and you played that support role for a couple decades growing up with a scared parent and kind of avoiding the dentist at all costs. So kind of connecting the story to something particular to you and personal to you. Another experience, if you did anything with regards to translating maybe and you speak multiple languages at home, you're bicultural in any way, you can then kind of go into a personal story and you can go into how you grew up translating for your grandmother, going to medical appointments and dental visits. So really kind of you can use paragraph two of section two as a self placement and kind of connect that spark moment or that opening paragraph experience to something personal to you. Step three is to narrate your dental experiences, right? So you may have started with a spark moment when you were a kid or you started with something that has a dental experience like a current dental experience. You would come back to that so you can say returning to the same practice that offered me my time with Erin. You know, if that's if this story is with Erin at the beginning, then you can kind of go into more experiences and how you've kind of offered support and helped patients offered help streamline any practice procedures, how you've, you know, learned how to sterilize equipment. So you can kind of go into your and build on other if you have other ideally you have multiple dental experiences or, you know, a couple of places unlike medical school, I feel like dental school shadowing appointments allow for more active engagement. So they are more important in my book than they are for capturing shadowing experiences in medical school personal statements, but I digress here. Yes, it works. So these dental related experiences, you want to make sure that if you do a couple of experiences with patients that they offer up slightly different lessons. You don't want to just kind of reconfirm the same lesson over and over, right? So make sure that it is offering moments opportunities to showcase that your takeaways are deepening your commitment to the field, that you've learned different lessons about kind of connecting to community, connecting to patients about helping patients not only really find their place within oral wellness, but then also kind of inspire them to return for preventative measures, not wait until acute pain or acute issues arise. Step four, something else you want to consider are any kind of academic and leadership experiences that you want to share. So do you have a particular, I don't know, biology professor or biology class where you learned about the tooth enamel or where you had like a lab that you saw something under a microscope and it really kind of connected to something you did at your shadowing appointment? Or do you have a leadership position in one of the pre-dental experience that one of the pre-dental student organizations and you started a Relay for Life fundraising project or you started connecting with another student organization, another school and really kind of bringing a mobile dental clinic to the local community or the five elementary schools between your school and their school. These are all experiences from former students. So really think about those academic and community service experiences that have allowed you to kind of figure out what kind of dentists you want to be, right? And so if you want to be that kind of community oriented, dental professional that works with disadvantaged populations, then maybe you showcase the kind of efforts that you've been doing to kind of advance that awareness and what you need to do. Are you having trouble organizing your personal statement? Comment below if you want some help. Step five, conclusion and big takeaways. So for me, each section that comes before the conclusion should have its own takeaway, its own lesson, and they should be varied. Like they should be, it can't, well it can, I guess, but it shouldn't be in my opinion the same lesson over and over, right? You want to show your awareness of the multifaceted profession that you aspire to join. So if you are doing kind of examples in story form sometimes, and then kind of takeaways, and you have these lessons throughout, you've already built your wide dentistry in your conclusion, you can kind of restate them, you can shorten them and kind of offer them more kind of concise, you can return to the opening image and kind of use that as a bookend experience. So there's a couple ways to come full circle and to finish the essay. But you want to make sure that you have, for the most part, all of these elements at least addressed or that you've considered each element as potential topics for your personal statement. Thank you for watching. I hope you found this helpful. Please give us a like, subscribe, and more videos will come your way. Also, if you want to talk about how I work with students on personal statements, make sure to grab your free a 15 minute personal statement chat with me. It's the candle and the link in the notes below. I'll see you guys soon. Thank you so much. Bye