 I love dental school personal statements. They're like those, my daughter gets them all the time, those kind of plastic, hard, straight bracelets that you kind of slap on your wrist and then they kind of curl. They are hard to crack and they could be kind of cheesy a little bit, but if you do it the right way, if you hit the right angle, they are, you know, you can elevate your message in such a way that it could be compelling and versatile. Now I'm talking about the personal statements, not the bracelets. So let's talk about how you do that for your personal statement. Hi, I am Dr. Josie. This is Write Your Acceptance. I work with students pre-medical, pre-dental and MSFORs on all of their messaging on really crafting the type of application that shares your values, your commitment, your purpose. So you stand out in a substantive way, not flash in the pan kind of, this is me, right? You want to do it with substance. You want to do it with kind of eloquence and you want to focus on what you're saying but how you're saying it as well. I've had students who get scholarships, low DAT scores and get multiple acceptances. So I really focus on the entire messaging so holistically you are as competitive as possible. Stick around, let's talk personal statements. Tip one, everyone will tell you you need a catchy beginning, right? Pension grabber and yes, but how do you do that? You can do it a couple of ways in a meaningful way, right? You can zoom into a story and get right in there in the beginning and just kind of show us what's going on and then kind of zoom out and explain. You can start with a series of descriptors. You can zoom way out and show context and start with statistics or a philosophical angle. And so I want to show you a couple of examples. Example one, I never liked his gummy smile. Staring at his mouth, I assumed the tooth fairy stole my grandfather's teeth while he slept. However, I will never forget when at 13 he told me that I was old enough to know that it was poverty and negligence who were the real thieves. Example two, band-aids, Q-tips, feminine hygiene products, and even sparkling blue toothpaste all spread across my dining room table, ready to get squeezed into every available corner of the medium-sized UPS box. We would ship to Cuba three days later. Example three, the Florida Keys is known for sun, fun and leisure, but did you ever know that my hometown is rampant with pulp necrosis, untimely root canals and discarded dentures with and then they started with statistics? I chose these three examples because they can't be more different, right? We have a kind of zoomed out assessment of the keys. We have separate, seemingly disconnected items across kind of a table, right? That then will come together with a socioeconomic commentary about kind of sending of reminces to Cuba and to family abroad. And then we have kind of a multi-generational story between grandson and grandfather, right? That opens up other aspects of social determinants of health, immigration, and it goes kind of broader and broader. They are different tonally, right? So the tone is different. They're kind of maybe more casual some, more kind of serious others, right? The tooth fairy, gummy smile, fun, sun, leisure, right? There are a couple of details here and there that the tone shifts, right? A lot of times students will ask me, what tone do I, should I be super serious? Should I be very academic? And the truth is that the material for me at least dictates the tone. So if you have a lighthearted example, if you have kind of a funny moment with a child or you're doing kind of a mobile dental clinic and you're doing chloride treatments and someone sneezes all over you, I've seen that, then the tone can be a little bit lighter, right? If you are talking about much serious, much more serious content, then you want to match the tone to that kind of level of experience and anecdote. So really kind of tone is less important for me than the actual substance that you're testing and then you can kind of match that to the way that you're talking about it. But the beginning, think about a story zooming in, think about different items that you can kind of like, as if a camera over your shoulder kind of identify and describe it, then you would bring together or statistics or zoom out and kind of talk about something broadly that then you can kind of piece apart in your intro and then potentially even in your conclusion. Tip two, you want, yes, a catchy intro, but you also want to select stories throughout the body of your personal statement that allow you to show kind of a deepened commitment to the field. So you want to think about kind of sometimes the intro and not all personal statements will go chronologically. A lot of them do, but I see a lot of students who will do kind of their, their absolutely most meaningful, memorable experience, dental related as their intro and then kind of go back chronologically after. So you definitely, if you want to start with something, you can make it happen. It doesn't have to be that you start at the beginning, but most of the time or sometimes I have students that will start the introduction with their kind of spark moment, with that moment that brought them to dentistry or that kind of snatched them out of a funk, a fear of dentist or they took their parent or grandparent to the dentist, even though they were deathly afraid after not going for five years, the grandfather losing teeth. So like this kind of origin story with you and dentistry and then they go into maybe a couple of stories of them in action with patients, adapting to their needs and really learning about the field in a very kind of direct manner. This is an unpopular opinion. I sometimes get a little bit of a pushback with my students. And like I say, the tips I give you are one, my opinion, but also two are not hard and fast in the sense of like every time I say, don't do this, someone will kind of do it and do it really well. I typically don't love students who use their braces as their origin story. It feels cliche, it feels like most students have, like the messaging is very, very similar among students. Doesn't matter where you're from, what your lived experience is, it tends to be I was shy about my kind of crooked teeth and after the braces I felt more confident and I can smile again. And so if you have a different perspective about your experience with braces, comment below, convince me otherwise. Typically that narrative arc tends to be cliche so I try to avoid it. So the after you decide what that origin story is, what that intro is, the middle part of your personal statement for me is how you have deepened your commitment to dentistry. So what are those patient stories? Always sharing you in the best light. Sometimes students will bring in research or leadership positions to really show how they are not only committed to dentistry that happens chair side, but also taking care out into their community and kind of how that fits into their brand of dentistry and their philosophy of care. When sharing patient experiences, don't just share what happened, right? Talk about how you made an impact, talk about how it impacted you, show you in action your takeaway, your lessons learned. So for example, this was a student whose experience we kind of tweaked and edited a couple times. So for example, the student wanted to kind of recall their time shadowing at a local dental practice and how they were about to close for the day and a patient came in whose wheelchair bound and had a terrible toothache and needed kind of emergency help. So the first version of that example was like the student asked the dentist, do you have more time to attend to this one patient? Then the student went back. So it was like a play by play. We can skip the kind of ping pong of being so faithful to the narrative and go straight to sitting chair side with the patient and narrating what the dentist is doing because the patient was so nervous about coming in the first place. That's why they waited so long. And so it would focus on what the patient felt like, how the student responded and adapted to the patient. And then it went into kind of takeaways about really learning about each and every patient and how they talked about accessible care and the importance of really kind of inclusion as this very broad and flexible, but also concrete experience. And so the paragraph, yes, shows the student in action, but it also shows their takeaways and how they connected with the patient and how then at the end, they offered a sentence about how this experience confirmed their wide dentistry. If you are having trouble with your writing messaging, you don't really know where to get started or you have a rough draft of your personal statement and you're not really sure it's all that great, definitely consider scheduling a free call with me to learn about how I work with students and we can kind of chat about what I offer and see if we're a good fit. Tip three, love your transitions. Show love to your transitions. Make sure that you focus on how you're going to go from one experience to the next. Too often students will kind of, you know, pick, okay, these are the three best experiences I have. Two are with patients. One is my leadership position in this student organization and how I did ex-research or volunteering opportunity through that organization. Okay, great. So now they've selected the strongest stories and then they will write the story that anecdote that has a takeaway and then it just goes to the next story and then it goes to the next story and then all of a sudden the personal statement feels patchworky. It feels like it is a collection of a series of mini paragraphs but not one cohesive narrative. So you wanna make sure that you're using transitional topic sentences before the next real kind of top of the next body paragraph. You're wanting to use these topic sentences to build your experience or you're scaffolding your experiences one on top of the other and one is informing the next and so it feels like one journey to dentistry. It feels like one experience and one holistic story. So one of my kind of pet peeves tell a beautiful patient story. You have a lesson at the end and then the topic sentence of the next paragraph is another experience that informs my dentistry. Calling is and then they go into another experience and it just feels like, you know, I'm not hating on it. I know it's super hard in my opinion. The topic sentences are kind of the last thing or near the last thing for the personal statement because you really wanna figure out what the content is gonna look like and then you can kind of like weave in these topic sentences. So a few tips on how to write those topic sentences. You wanna think about what that last sentence is of let's say, you know, paragraph two and then you're gonna write the transitional topic sentence for the beginning of paragraph three, maybe lift a couple of words or a phrase from that last sentence and then bring that in to that topic sentence in the bottom. So for example, dentistry for me is about integrity and hard work. Okay, so then you take the words hard work and you say something like, I found hard work particularly challenging when faced with and then that would be your topic sentence for the next section. It's not super complicated. It's just a small detail that makes a ton of difference when you are reading this holistically. You can also do a complex sentence with like a dependent clause where it's like, while I learned about hard work in XYZ, which would be the previous example, then you kind of go into, I really relished in the joy of XYZ when volunteering at Care Dental and then Care Dental is the story of the next one. So you can kind of do while or although or unlike and then just kind of like, you know, say goodbye to the first example and then kind of go into the next. The last and most lazy, but that's okay, no judgment, is put a timestamp on it, right? Three months later, I learned the true value of XYZ and so then you're just kind of chronologically at least giving us some builds. If you wanna learn about how I work with students, definitely grab your spot in my calendar and we can chat about how I work with students if you're a good fit, if we're a good fit and go from there. It was a pleasure. I hope this was helpful and I will see you soon. Bye.