Why have you selected the field of medicine?As intimidating as writing medical school admissions essays can be, they offer you an irreplaceable advantage: they give you a crucial additional application component that you can fully control. From the themes you choose to encompass your personal "profile" and the stories you pick to illustrate them, to the lessons you draw and the tone you adopt, medical schools give you, through the personal statement and secondary essays, the reins to shape how they perceive your candidacy. Helping you structure and manage the potentially frustrating and time-consuming challenge of essay writing is the subject of this chapter.
Before you begin writing your admissions essays, you should first develop a short self-marketing message or "profile" that integrates the key themes (strengths, experiences, interests) you want your application to communicate. Take your time. Cast your net widely, and ask friends, family, and mentors for their input. You want to isolate the handful of themes or experiences—from your childhood, passions, or travels to your education, research, career, or community life—that will best distinguish you from other applicants. This profile is the guiding message that should inform all your medical school essays and indeed your entire application, from recommendation letters to the interview. When your application pools' test scores, grades, and demographics have all been sorted and batched, this is the "label" you want the medical schools to remember your application by.
Once you have nailed down your themes, you need to identify the individual stories that you'll build your AMCAS and secondary essays around. "Data mining" your experiences through conversations with family and friends, résumé-based brainstorming, or "stream-of-consciousness" writing (aka the "brain dump") can help you flush out these stories.
If you've done it right, your data-mining process should leave you with a mass of raw material that could fill dozens of personal statements. Now you need to evaluate your raw stories critically. Continually ask yourself which of the possible essay stories have the most value or significance. A story's external significance could include its impact on your life (such as an academic honor, research breakthrough, or job promotion) or on others' lives (such as showing compassion to a patient or helping to mentor children). A story's internal significance would include how the experience changed you, enhanced your skills, deepened your perspective, strengthened your sense of your potential, and so on.
Look for stories that capture in microcosm what's essential about you so you don't submit a "kitchen-sink" essay that superficially skims many key moments. By understanding these stories, someone can know as much about who you really are as by hearing your full autobiography. Look for the stories that are most distinctive and that combine the greatest external impact and personal transformation. If a story rates highly in unusualness, objective results or impact, and personal significance, you've probably got a winner. Subject all the raw stories generated by your data-mining process to this same weighing or ranking process until you've arrived at a core story or set of stories that you want your AMCAS and secondary essays to cover.
The first and most important essay in your medical school application process is of course the AMCAS Personal Comments essay. As the Association of American Medical Colleges suggests in its application instructions, the likely focus of this 5,300–character essay are the following questions:
Why have you selected the field of medicine?
What motivates you to learn more about medicine?
What do you want medical schools to know about you that hasn't been disclosed in another section of the application?
Notwithstanding the personal focus of that last question, medicine and its relationship to your future are the core topic of the AMCAS Personal Comments essay. For that reason, Part II of this book presents perfect phrases for the most common medicine-related topics, including shadowing experiences, clinical interactions with patients, research experiences, thinking insightfully about medical issues, and so on. Though the AAMC suggests that acceptable topics include personal information about you—"what hasn't been disclosed" elsewhere—it also restricts you to roughly 900 words. Many applicants will find that once they've finished writing about their academic and medical-related experiences, they have precious little space left to focus on "hardships, challenges, or obstacles"—or any of the other non-medical-related experiences that make them who they are.
Fortunately, in addition to the AMCAS Personal Comments essay, the secondary essays required by medical schools offer you a much wider range of topics and thus more opportunities to express the full breadth of your uniqueness. Glance at the essay topics in the applications packets of the 129 AAMC-approved medical schools, and you'll see several general topic areas emerge:
Essays about personal material such as your upbringing, key experiences, and major life influences, including role models.
Essays about challenges and/or disadvantages you've had to overcome (the same "hardships, challenges, or obstacles" referred to in the AMCAS instructions).
Essays about personal characteristics or life experiences that might enhance a medical school's diversity.
Essays about experiences that show your compassion or desire to help others.
We have devoted Part III of this book to perfect phrases for all these major personal essay topics.
Now that you have an idea of the topics you'll need to write about, we can get started on the essays themselves.
The outline was invented to reduce the anxiety and time drain imposed by the writing process. By bringing structure to your personal statement before you start writing it, outlines maximize your efficiency and enable you to perform a crucial early test of the quality of your essay ideas. Do you have enough material to support your assertions or illustrate your experiences? Does the lesson or takeaway you're trying to draw from your story emerge organically from the story itself or does it seem imposed? Outlines can help you answer these questions before you've written a draft that you're emotionally invested in.
Let your creativity run as you write your medical school essays. At this stage, forget all the rules about transitions, "theme sentences" and "evidence sentences" that you learned in school. The real bottom line is this: essays will live or die by the degree of personal, vivid detail and insight you inject in them. Many applicants' essays never come alive on the page, and it's often because they lack specific human detail and personal anecdote. Always be as personal and concrete as you possibly can. You also want to achieve a balance between data—the facts that substantiate your themes—and analysis—regularly stepping back from an example or anecdote to tell the reader what it means.
Your focus when writing your essays' first drafts is really just to get something down on paper. Because many applicants believe they have to complete a polished, finished draft in the first sitting, they usually wind up with a starchy, formal-sounding treatise without life or detail. Don't be so hard on yourself. Again, forget about style, grammar, and word count when writing your first draft. Relax, run with your outline, and don't overanalyze what you're writing—just get it down.
It may help to think of your essays as stories about an interesting and sympathetic hero—you—who's in noble pursuit of a distant and holy grail (a medical degree). People are hardwired to respond to such human-interest stories. We like happy endings, and tales of sympathetic protagonists overcoming conflict or obstacles by changing their environments appeal to our basic hopes. Tell a good story.
Once you have written a rough draft based on your outline, step back and consider macro and organizational changes, such as contradictory themes or assertions, needlessly repeated points, gaps in context or logic, or weakly developed or poorly placed paragraphs. Continually ask yourself whether your main thesis and secondary points will be clear to the admissions readers, whether your words convey your personality and enthusiasm, whether you are telling your story as clearly, compellingly, and efficiently as you can. You may find that you need to switch around paragraphs, cut digressions, or add to, delete, or bolster your examples. Don't stress out. Remember, you already have your structure and rough draft; it's all downhill from here. Depending on how well conceived your outline was and how well you fleshed it out in your first draft, your essay may go through multiple macro-level revisions before it's ready for editing.
The next stage, editing, means cleaning up the essay's mechanics and grammar at the sentence and word level. The potential glitches that editing catches can be everything from pronoun and subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, run-on sentences, and faulty parallelism to punctuation and capitalization errors, word choice and misspelling, and active- versus passive-voice issues. One overriding rule that should guide your editing: always choose the simplest, shortest, and most direct expression over the more complex or "sophisticated" one. Read your essays aloud. Do they flow? Is the tone conversational? Does it sound like you?
Your essay is finished when you can't imagine how to make it say what you mean more candidly, vividly, or directly. When you've achieved that level of honesty, color, and tautness, let go.