How to write memorable med school essays

Stressed about writing your personal statement? Afraid you won’t be able to come up with answers to secondary prompts?

The writing for med school applications can be daunting for many reasons. One major reason I hear from clients is that they’ve done similar things to every other applicant – clinical shadowing, patient care jobs, undergrad research projects, etc. The key to distinguishing yourself is not by writing about what you did during your experiences, but what you learned. 

 Admissions committees want to know about you as a person, beyond your test scores or experiences listed on your resume. They want to know how you think -- how you respond to stress, receive feedback or criticism, adapt to difficult or new situations, and communicate with others. The tasks you performed as a patient intake coordinator, for example, are of course important, but they really want to know how you interacted with a special needs patient, or a difficult patient who made a scene. How did it challenge you, how did you respond, and what lessons did you take from the experience? 

 You could talk about how you navigated working with a difficult boss, who didn’t set clear expectations, for example. But it doesn’t have to necessarily be a negative or challenging situation – maybe you worked as a research assistant on a project early in undergrad that was so interesting it inspired your thesis topic – talk about what you learned from the project and how it informed your own research. Maybe you had a boss, or shadowed a surgeon who became a role model – what traits or behaviors did they model and what did you learn from watching and working with them? 

 Regardless of the specific topic, the point is to go beyond objective things you learned or did, and instead talk about how you were challenged or changed by a situation or experience. You can start to generate ideas by listing your experiences, then filling in the following prompts for each one:

How I was challenged…

How I reacted…

What I learned…

Use these prompts as templates — you can adapt them to your specific experiences (i.e. maybe you were inspired rather than challenged by something). The point is to ensure you’re digging below the surface of your experiences.

Your jobs, shadowing, and patient experiences may be similar to other applicants’, but your personal interactions, challenges, and realizations were surely very different. Your ability to identify these moments and lessons, and to articulate how you learned from them, is what will set you apart from other applicants – and the good news is everyone has them! Identifying these experiences requires careful reflection and brainstorming. Once you’ve generated ideas, it’s onto the personal statement. I lay out seven key tips for nailing the PS in the next post. Have a look!