 I constantly hear I'm bad at writing or I hate writing and while these feelings can be extremely disheartening, there are specific attributes that make a medical school personal statement stand out elevated as compelling as it can be. Stick around and let's kind of diagnose what is going on with your personal statement. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance. I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of students on their medical school personal statements, dental school, residency, even for college. I know what they're looking for. I have students now at Mayo Clinic at UF Shands. You name it, I know them. So let's talk about personal statements. Problem one, I have my why, but it is not interesting or it's cliche. So I want you to attack this on two fronts. First of all, I want you to kind of think about your intro and conclusion together as bookend experiences kind of move them to the side, at least for the first round of diagnoses of assessment for your personal statement. Think about them together because many times the introduction has the spark moment. And I cast this as a passive experience, something that happened to you. You got ill, grandma got sick, out of a way an experience that introduced you to medicine, but that you didn't necessarily intentionally seek out, right? Another way students begin their personal statement is something non-medical, love of music, a love of marathon running. So something that then they could kind of like draw lessons from and connect that to medicine, right? So it's kind of the middle part, the experiences in the body paragraphs that you've intentionally sought out. These are the volunteer experiences, the clinical patient-centric experiences that you've kind of gone out of your way to seek them to really learn as much as possible about the field, right? That's where I would start first. And every body paragraph should be building your why through evidence base. So you want to kind of start looking at any body paragraphs or any large chunks that are talking about your why. They're telling the why I am passionate about medicine because I care about others because I love to pursue research and kind of I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing you caring for others. I'm not seeing you pursuing research, right? So you want to make sure that each body paragraph, especially in that middle part that it is showing your experiences through evidence and then kind of bringing that evidence into reflection. That's when you kind of do the lesson learned. And if you do that in your middle section, then in the conclusion, you can kind of bring all those mini lessons to the bottom and kind of restate them in a different way connecting it to your intro. So then that's when I would bring in the intro and conclusion. This is just a sample format that I work with students through. Obviously many body paragraphs will have a ton of different types of ideas and kind of formats, right? But you can think about a topic sentence or that first sentence of a body paragraph. It mentioned where you are in what capacity. So what's your role and maybe gesturing to kind of like the lesson learned that you'll kind of talk about at the end of the body paragraph, right? Then there's three to four sentences of story, an anecdote, kind of you showing me the lesson that you are taking away from this experience. And then the one to two sentences at the bottom that kind of talk about your takeaways, what you learned, how that took you from one aspect of the field to another and how you built on that experience for the next experience in medicine. So think about kind of really setting yourself up with that anecdote with that story and then the takeaways. Problem two, my actual writing is not strong enough. So I get it. We are big critics and some of my STEM students for sure haven't taken a writing class since freshman year in college, right? So it's been a few years and you feel rusty. You want to think about kind of coming back to your draft and it's never a sum zero game. Whenever you are reading rough drafts or final drafts rather or listening to them on YouTube, on here, you want to think about all the drafts and all the ideas and all the brainstorming and all the work that came before that that you're not seeing, right? So if you have a draft and you think it's total crap, that's fine. That is a great building a block, right? If you are thinking about the actual writing, what you want to think about is once you have an, I break down paragraphs, right? I break down partial statements into paragraphs because if you're kind of thinking about the entire 5300 characters, it's overwhelming. So really kind of find a section that you want to improve. And if you're looking at the rhetorical strategies, right, like the writing of that section, think about sprinkling in kind of sensorial five senses type description whenever possible. This is less as more, but you want whenever possible to have kind of like a camera over your shoulder. We've talked about this, right? I have other videos on this. If you want, I have kind of 10 elements that I'll link above for the personal statement because we go way in depth into that. But here you want to kind of sprinkle in sensorial in the sense of like engage the five senses whenever appropriate. I want to taste your taste touch. I said, taste like that 17 times there. That's fine. But you get the, you get the gist, right? Here's an example. I saw her anguish in every wrinkle on her forehead. I know emotional register right there. And I see that the woman is older that she's wearing her anguish on her face, right? Versus that line came from she was in pain or the child's bare hug conveyed her newfound trust. That came from a line that said he was no longer scared. So we can kind of actually see the bare hug. We can feel the kind of trust building, right? So you want to kind of sprinkle in these types of sentences. It's not a lot. It's not dramatically changing your writing. It's just kind of you tapping into a different type of writing that brings in more sensory and makes it automatically more engaging. Do you have a draft and you're not sure about how to kind of elevate the language? Comment below. I'd love to help you out. Problem three. And this is a two-part problem. I see this a ton, a ton, a ton. And it is the student that feels helpless and the measuring a job well done through a patient's gratitude. So these are two that I really, I mean, I see crop up a lot and I understand why they come up in your personal statements. But you want to make sure that when you're, especially when you've figured out, okay, this is all the content that I want to say that you are kind of tuning into these, they're not red flags. They're just kind of moments that don't really advance your argument, don't really showcase you as the most compelling candidate. So the I feel helpless. This is the kind of, you know, a student is volunteering at a hospice and they hold a patient's hand and they feel helpless because they can't cure them, help them. Their grandmother's sick and they want to understand what's going on with her heart, but they feel helpless and they, they want to kind of do more but can't. For every rule that I have, I break it all the time. So like this, I feel helpless sentiment. I can see it work well when you are talking about your spark moment, when you're talking about that experience that introduced you to medicine that happened to you, if you have one of those, because it is a moment that sparked that kind of introduced you to the field, this wide world that is medicine. I get that. But what happens is that then that student that felt helpless, their grandmother's bedside goes into EMT training and then a ride along in their first time with a patient and they feel helpless. And then they go into their hospice volunteer and then they also feel, so then all of a sudden the essay has three or four times this kind of sentiment of I feel helpless. The outcomes don't expect you to be a physician. You're not a doctor yet, right? So the sentiment doesn't really kind of advance your why medicine. It just kind of shows, it just shares your emotional kind of turmoil at that moment. And you want to be careful with that because you can swap that out for a lesson, for a takeaway. Another problem is the patient that shows gratitude, right? So, you know, you do something nice or you go above and beyond for a patient and then you have that in story and that's great. And then instead of going into your lessons, instead of going into the takeaways, what you learned about the field about health inequity, about social determinants of health, about whatever that is relevant to the moment, the student goes into two sentences with a quote and everything from the patient thanking them for going above and beyond. Sometimes for me, and this is, you know, these aren't my humble beginnings, but sometimes these don't play well for me. Like it can sound like the student is measuring their efficacy, measuring their worth and thus the success of the moment by the level of gratitude that the patient has. And two, it doesn't share anything about you, about your takeaway, about your growing wisdom, your deepening wisdom within the field. So I feel like it is a missed opportunity and I am of the mind that, yes, it sounds at the beginning, 5,300 characters sounds like a ton of space to recover. But then once you have everything you want to say, you want to make sure that each sentence is doing its job. And by doing its job means it is advancing your Y medicine and the I feel helpless or a patient's gratitude. I think don't move the needle for you and don't advance your case in the way that you should be thinking about. So for that, you do with lessons, learn takeaways, etc. Thank you guys for watching. If you have any questions, make sure to comment below. I have my free 15 minute chat. I'm going to open it again with more slots, because I know it's been filled as of late. So if you want to chat about your personal statement, if you want to chat about how I work with students, definitely tell me the link below and we can chat together. Have a good one. I'll see you soon. Bye.