Seven tips for writing the AMCAS personal statement

1) Answer the question “Why medicine?”

 This is the most important goal of your essay – providing a clear and compelling reason for pursuing a career in medicine. You can think of the answer to this question as your thesis – a one (maybe two) sentence summary of your motivations and perspective that you will support throughout the rest of your essay by highlighting your experiences and what you’ve learned along the way. The experiences and lessons you choose to highlight should clearly connect to your thesis.

2) Think about what makes you unique 

Many students feel like they don’t have anything particularly unique to write about, usually for questions about how they will contribute to program diversity. When thinking about the diversity essay, think beyond the standard diversity themes. Diversity can mean almost anything, even experiences or attributes that might seem relatively insignificant at first. Ask family and friends what they think makes you unique, think about particularly impactful experiences from your past, or consider you interests and hobbies and how they might give you a unique perspective on medicine. You almost always have more ideas and themes to work with than you think initially, so don’t get discouraged! 

3)    Go deep! 

This might be the most important piece of advice – by deep, I mean that admissions committees want to understand how you think, adapt, and grow. Rather than simply explaining what you’ve done in preparation for applying to med school – shadowing, patient care jobs, undergrad research – talk about what you learned, about medicine and yourself, and how you grew from your experiences. Many students will apply with broadly similar extracurriculars and work experience, so your best bet to stand out is to talk more about how these experiences challenged, changed, or inspired you. You want to demonstrate that you possess the qualities (not just the skills) most important for practicing medicine – introspective, adaptable, open-minded, resilient, etc. 

4)    Write about yourself, not others 

Sometimes prompts ask about role models, mentors, or your answer might involve dynamics with friends and family -- when writing these essays, it's easy to write more about another person than yourself. Admissions committees are interested in learning about your values and perspective, so don’t waste valuable space focusing too much on others! Make sure you always return to what YOU learned in a situation or from another person, and how you will apply that lesson in the future.

5)    Use your own voice 

This means a couple different things. First and foremost, your essay should be written by you. Friends and family (and writing coaches) can offer valuable feedback and proofreading, but the final product should be your own work. Secondly, make sure you are true to your own writing voice. Avoid using big words to “sound smarter” – you are smart, or you wouldn’t have made it this far! Admissions committees want to get a sense of who you are, and using vocabulary or grammar that is overly formal or complicated will very quickly signal that your writing is not authentic.  

6)    Workshop several different outlines

You may not be sure right off the bat what the best narrative is for your essay, or the best way to tie several different themes together. You want to avoid spending hours writing a full draft only to realize it’s not very effective, and then starting over. Writing a few detailed outlines lets you compare all your different ideas and decide which framing works best. It also allows you to combine different themes or elements from several outlines into your final outline. This may seem like more work in the beginning, but it will help you narrow down the most important points and save you from rewriting whole drafts. 

7)    Take time between drafts 

Related to the previous point – even after writing multiple outlines and deciding or combining the best, you will inevitably write multiple drafts of your essay. There is no way around it! Good writing is iterative writing. Spend a few days writing a draft, share it with others, then take a day or two off. Come back to the essay with fresh eyes and armed with constructive feedback from peers. Read what you wrote, decide what works and what doesn’t, make edits, and send it out. Spending too much time bogged down with a single draft will make it hard to assess your writing objectively.