 Are you applying to the University of Michigan's medical school? If you are or already applied this cycle, here is some intel on how to approach your secondaries. Thank you for joining me on my channel for the best personal statement coaching and secondaries. Make sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss a video. For the 2021 cycle, the University of Michigan secondaries are pretty kind of representative of a lot of schools, which is great. I do tell students though to pre-write their secondaries because they come at you fast and in waves. And if you're interested in templates and guides on how to do that, check out the link in the description below. Thank you for joining me. I am Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance. I'm a university writing faculty and I help coach students through the kind of writing process of their medical school and dental school admissions experience. So let's get started. Essay one. So here we go. Comment on how you hope to impact medicine in the future. If examples are needed, feel free to refer to our eight paths of excellence. Do not exceed 1500 characters with spaces. So here the feel free to consult our eight paths. For me is not a suggestion. You definitely want to consult them and kind of think through the language and framework that each path suggests. Inevitably your service work, volunteer work, clinical experience research is going to hit one of those eight for sure. But you definitely want to frame your story and anecdote and background and reflection within one of the pillars that they discuss. And so once you pick that you want to address a story and anecdote kind of show your kind of brief emblematic experience and then go into how this path is something that is kind of like a guiding compass for you medical career. So for example, if you choose global health, let's say you have two main kind of options I think through students can if you have a personal story. So you or your parents or immigrants, you have firsthand experience of kind of global health care and health care inequities, let's say internationally. So that may be interesting to start with and then kind of go into the work that you've been doing in your kind of preparation for medical school. Another one is no need to have a personal kind of stake in the immigrant story, but you've done a medical mission trip abroad in some way or even and I've seen this very successfully for a student, they were working at a local clinic and that local clinic had a partnership with a clinic in Ghana. And so helping them kind of raise money helping them source materials and resources and that's how they kind of talk about global health. So think about kind of your entry point to the pillar, the path that they talk about, SA2. At the University of Michigan Medical School, we are committed to building a superb educational community with students of diverse talents, experiences, opinions and backgrounds. What would you as an individual bring to our medical school community? Do not exceed 1500 characters, including spaces. This including spaces thing is very serious, right? Because some schools will then say not including spaces. So it's a big kind of flag to make sure that you are mindful of that's a tangent. Okay, so this is your typical diversity essay. And so don't only think through the lens of diversity of identity, right? It could be diversity of thought, inclusive attitudes, representational of kind of inviting diverse voices to the table, so to speak. I would offer here examples of you practicing within kind of a diverse setting in the sense of you don't have to be French to kind of be using a little bit of functional French, right? Or you don't have to be Hispanic to borrow kind of a translator and use some college kind of rusty Spanish and connect with a patient on their kind of cultural level of comfort. So that's interesting to kind of think about like you in a situation that is a kind of diverse experience or that you are actively participating in diverse space and connecting with someone at their kind of level of comfort. You can also approach this essay in a very different way and students have kind of written about hobbies or cultural traditions or just regular kind of secular traditions. And it's really about kind of highlighting the sense of collaboration and inclusion and so what you learned, how kind of it impacted you, what you kind of brought to the table and really kind of think about this sense of collaboration, camaraderie and comfort indifference. Essay three. If you previously applied to the University of Michigan, briefly summarize what is new or different from the last time you applied. Do not exceed 1500 characters including spaces. So this essay is pretty straightforward. They want to know if you are a re-applicant, what have you been doing for the last year, right? To kind of better prepare yourself for the rigors of medical school. What volunteer shadowing clinical hours have you continue to kind of gain, right? So you want to not hit kind of a number of shadowing hours or volunteer hours and then stop all of a sudden, right? Like you want to maintain continuity there. Also, did you do a post back? Have you been doing research? What have you been doing to really kind of strengthen your, I wouldn't say weak spots, but strengthen kind of the holistic candidacy of your application. So maybe you've published, maybe you have a, you did a poster presentation, you've attended conferences. So how have you been engaging with the field and continuing to strengthen your application? Are you working on a few secondaries and are a little stuck? Comment below. I'd love to help you out. Essay four. Describe your experience in the leadership position, the challenges that you present, that presented themselves in that position and what you did to contribute to the success of the team or project. Do not exceed 1500 characters. I've seen from nonprofits to grant proposals to student organizations and a lot of the kind of more successful secondaries, in my opinion, start with like a mini kind of story again and really show kind of you in a leadership position or you kind of showing the need or potential impact that you can make. If you start with that, you want to deliver on that impact by the end of the secondary, right? So you want to think about less important kind of where you're doing this kind of leadership, more important how you filled a need or how you kind of improved something, how you understand the nuances of leadership. So it's not just about kind of commanding people to do things and delegating it is knowing when to lead and knowing when to kind of inspire others to take charge, right? So those nuances of leadership I think sometimes reflecting on that especially towards the end is successful and then make sure that you kind of reflect on what you learned but also kind of how you improve that team or project. It's definitely part of the prompt and some students kind of shy away from tooting their own horn. Essay five. Last one. Tell us something you are passionate about and why do not exceed 1500 characters. So here you can use your kind of beyond academics essay. Sometimes this one tends to be recycled with if you haven't shared something about your candidacy or if there's something else you want to kind of tell the admissions committee, what would that be? I would definitely not put NA there. That would be for secondaries for another school but just to kind of give you an idea, this is the type of essay that I would recycle there. So you can go beyond the classroom, you can do a hobby, you know, they want to know you're a human being. You're not like this medical robot, right? But I also tell students to kind of before they commit to a topic for this essay, take a step back and think about their application to Michigan holistically. So have they represented research, service, community engagement, representative of the different pillars, right? The different paths. Have they hit those eight? And if there's one that seems lighter than another and they have an experience restored to tell, this is where you would put that. And so explain why something is a passion. I've also seen kind of personal hobbies, yoga, CrossFit, marathon running and how kind of that informs and shapes their discipline, their ambitions and their purpose. So really think about kind of how you want to use this essay but I would take a pause for a second and see what is kind of underrepresented in my application and can I use this moment to kind of balance that out. Thank you guys for joining me. If you liked this video, please give us a like and if you want more kind of content, strategic planning, guide and templates on some of the main kind of high yield secondaries, diversity, obstacle, why us, definitely look at the kind of link in the description below and that'll help you out. Any questions, leave those in the comments and I'll see you soon. Thank you.