 When thinking about what you should write in your medical school personal statement, think about the word acronym CRAFT. These five essential elements should be in all personal statements, no matter the topic. Stay tuned. For the best medical school personal statement coaching, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss out on any videos. Your personal statement for medical school should be a non-stop, tirelessly working for your cheerleader, rooting you on through the journey of accepted. So you want to make sure you have these essential elements to make sure that happens. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance. As a university writing faculty and a personal statement coach, I've helped hundreds and hundreds of students perfect their story and now it's your turn. Let's get started. If you're looking for more expert tips and strategy and work, you should definitely book a one-on-one call with me and we can get started on next steps. So the acronym is CRAFT, character, relatability, action, future, truth. Okay, here we go. The first one is character. So keep in mind that you are essentially asking to be part of an elite institution, an elite group of honorable professionals at the peak of their kind of public service and intelligence, right? And so you want to make sure that you pick stories that show growth, but that are also showcasing your best self, that you are showcasing moments that show humility, reveal growth, and that you show conviction to kind of core values, but also flexibility in and adaptability in learning, that you're not stubborn and kind of tunnel-visioned in your values either, so that you are kind of confident about who you are and what you bring and your decision-making skills, but also open to growth and change and bending towards a better, stronger, more robust intellect and public servant. Number two, relatability. So hard work and intelligence is sometimes not enough to get into medical school. If they can't stand you, if you have this air of arrogance on the page and it's kind of dripping from your personal statement, it's hard to kind of root for you and so a terrible personal statement can keep really, really high-performing students on the outs and an incredible personal statement can take a mediocre student statistically mediocre and really make them competitive. So you want to make sure that you are able to relate humility and growth and kindness and that you're someone that they want to be around and spend time with. Number three is action. So you want to make sure that you have a couple of moments that actually tell a story, that you have an anecdote and that you are showing yourself in action. So are you the person that takes initiative at a volunteer gig? Are you the person teaching CPR at a pool party? Will you help the elderly woman with her grocery bags? So you want to make sure that you show people you in action at a couple moments in the essay. It's not a creative piece by any means. However, you should have creative elements to really showcase action and initiative throughout. Sometimes students will say, but miss nothing's crazy, has ever happened to me and what am I going to say? I don't have a story. And I'm like, nope, that's wrong. You want to make sure that it's not all flash. You have those quiet moments. You have experiences you've been gearing up for years, even before you started undergrad for this moment to tell your story. So you have 20 plus years of experiences that you can kind of weave together. And so you want to be kind of edit happy and you don't want to narrate everything because then you can't go in depth in a few things. So you have way more content than you think. You just want to take the time to really kind of run through your resume or brainstorm. And I have a couple of videos on brainstorming and how to do a unifying theme if you want to check those out and really spend time thinking about not only the medically driven kind of, you know, clinical experiences and shadowing, but also the quieter moments, the kind of personal or identitarian moments, kind of moments in your identity that have fueled you to be in this moment today. F is for a future. So you want to make sure that you discuss and reflect upon how you see yourself beyond medical school. So I know you can't see beyond it right now, but you want to make sure that maybe you kind of shadowed an OBGYN or a neuro specialist and you want to make sure that you kind of talk about how you see yourself specializing in this field, in urban settings or starting a nonprofit one day in your home country of where. So you want to make sure you get as concrete as possible and detailed as possible. They're not going to hold you to it, but they want to see kind of a moment of reflection that you have really concretely thought about this that because in many ways medical school is just the beginning, right? Is it's not an endpoint. It is an endpoint, but it's kind of one of those goal posts that we continue to move. And so you'll have another goal as soon as you get in, right? So you want to make sure that you have kind of a moment where you've talked about the future in some way. And the last one to you for truth. So honor your truth, memorialize your story. Don't feel compelled to exaggerate a moment or, you know, kind of take too many liberties because your story is going to be the most authentic. It's going to be the most powerful because you're the one telling it. So if you want, if you kind of honor the details, if you spend the time to really think about the sensory driven descriptions and really reflect on how then those two, three kind of narratives or experience experiences that you narrate come back to that big why a nuanced detailed why I want to be in medicine. And it goes beyond the cliche I want to help people and I love science, right? That you have these very detailed truths in your essay, you're going to be amazing. So a quick kind of semantics game, right? So you want to make sure that you when you tell a story that you tell it, you know, very succinctly because it's not a creative piece, but that you tell the story in a narrative way. So in real time, as if you had a camera over your shoulders. And then after you that, don't be afraid to shift to voices and to kind of go into a reflective lessons learned moment so that you kind of zoom out and then talk about why this experience is as memorable or as emblematic of your journey into medicine. And so kind of really break it down for them. Do you have a story or an experience in your journey that you want to tell, but you're not sure how comment below, I'd love to help you out. Okay, so bonus, let's kind of run through a quick activity exercise on how you would switch voices in an anecdote in experience. So it would start with something like this. Are you a magician? With my black garment bag and toe, I walked into my cousin's birthday pool party and a swarm of expectant 10 year olds approached thinking I was the next act they anticipated flowers or even a rabbit to swiftly appear from my bag, but rather I brought out my CPR dummy. I had just finished co teaching a certification class and didn't think I would put my knowledge to the test so soon again. But there I was coaching children how to count compressions. So notice this example is happening in real time. It says if we're there with the student at the pool party, right? And so we kind of see the lens a little bit. We see the kids swarming. So we have different word choices. You don't spend sentences and sentences on the description, but you have different kind of word choices to help count compression. So you have some alliteration. And then you zoom out and you kind of talk about lessons learned or the reflection. So this would then kind of go into why medicine or what aspects of medicine and education you value. So you can say something like on a sunny afternoon amidst birthday cakes and pool activities I felt in my element, whether I'm in a classroom at a party or in a clinical setting, I strive to always empower others, especially the next generation to learn necessary health and safety measures so they are activists in their own well being. Now you kind of zoom out and do more broad why medicine and why you and medicine kind of your takeaways, let's say. So that voice is kind of less personal, right? It's kind of after the fact you've taken stock of the experience and then you kind of go into why that was a memorable moment. If you're looking for more expert tips and strategy and work, you should definitely book a one on one call with me and we can get started on next steps. Also, if you found this video helpful, please hit that like button, subscribe and make sure you share this video and others with your pre-med friends. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.