Personal Story and Critical Experiences

The most challenging part of making a coherent and refined medical school application is not your GPA, and it's not your MCAT. It's going to be making a personal statement on why you actually want to go to medical school. This is your final great challenge along the pathway to getting into medicine, secondary applications and the interview will be easier (albeit more time consuming) than writing the personal statement.

What makes this section so tricky is that it needs to encapsulate a very simple idea in 5300 characters. Why do you want to go to medical school? Why do you want to be a doctor? If the first answer was "to help people", that's great, so do the other 100,000 applicants applying in the cycle. Your personal statement needs to be catchy, it needs to be clever, it needs to be fundamentally true to who you are as a person. And if that can't be developed on paper, then you will probably not be able to get into a medical school. Now, medicine is a crapshoot, of course you can get accepted into a school for making a mediocre personal statement for whatever reasons. Even if you do craft an excellent statement, have a perfect track record of academics, research, service etc., you are not guaranteed a shot at medical school. But, the point of this project is to make it as close as possible for you my friend.

We are going to talk about methods of how to dig deep. What I want you to first do is with a pen and paper (or computer if that suits you) write yourself and in-depth autobiography. This should HOPEFULLY be more than a page. Write about everything you remember that is relevant to you, why you think its relevant to you, what you have and have not liked about your life. We are going to become our own patient, for that is the first person we must heal. This might be painful, you might not want to do it, however, you will get your most authentic feelings and ideas out on paper. Once you have a nice autobiography, write about why you want to go to medical school. If a good chunk of your initial writing was about medicine, all the better. Write about medicine, as why, and then ask why again.

"Why medicine?" "To help people" "Why do you want to help people?" "Because it's the right thing to do"

Many things are the right thing to do but why medicine? - Because I like biology - "But can't you help a person by being a biologist or psychologist?" - yes - so why medicine?" - because I was inspired by my own doctors through their kindness and compassion and I know that I can, want, and should do the same!

This is the type of dialogue you need to have with yourself. Yes, eventually you will reach a reason for why medicine specifically, don't just keep asking why ad nauseum, do it with intention. And if at the end of your trials you discover that you can't figure out why medicine, that's okay to. You don't have to. You just need to figure out what's best for yourself. There's no rush, the schools are not going anywhere.