Does anyone here feel like I do, like they would never want to read their own AMCAS personal statement again? I am rewriting mine for my Canadian applications, and I just want to junk the thing. I worked really hard on it and I still can’t believe this is what I sent out to schools. Then again I think maybe it is just the nature of personal statements that they are never quite right and never will be. I really had to cram a lot of info into mine.
I don’t really feel like starting from scratch right now. My friends who read over the original said they thought it was fine. Does anyone (especially anyone who’s read through a variety of PS’s) know what the general standard should be for these? Is it enough to get the ideas across, as long as the grammar’s good and the writing’s not dull? Or should these things really stand out as good essays? Cause I’m not sure I can achieve that here. Good essays are generally not vehicles for obvious information, and it’s the obvious info I think needs to come through in this.
Ok, thanks.
I have only read PSs published on how-to books, but I gather the idea is to satisfy both of those criteria you mentioned. In addition you have to vary sentence structure, be desciptive, avoid BS…etc.
I think that how you read your own PS is much different that how a total stranger will who is laying eyes on it for the first time. I know that when I didnt look at it for a week, and then picked it up again, I had a much better opinion of it.
Not sure what you mean by “obvious info,” but the stuff you need to get across in your PS is the stuff that a reader would NOT glean from reading the rest of your application. So your PS shouldn’t be a travelogue of what you’ve done with your life; instead it should bring out the highlights of your journey, the things that don’t come through in transcripts and locations or descriptions of jobs you’ve had.
And yes, by the time I got my PS into submittable form I vowed I would not read it ever again. I think I eventually unearthed it to share with someone else and kinda snuck a peek at it in the process of shipping it off as a file, but even then I just cringed. I can tell you honestly that I don’t know if I found a typo. I have blanked the whole experience from my head. I swear that one of my first thoughts on finding out that I’d been accepted off the waitlist (in late May) was, "Oh thank God I do not have to write another @#$!! PS!"
Mary
Oh, by obvious info I meant that I should be sure to explain why I want to go into medicine and what experience I have to show that I’ve thought this through. I think it is actually hard to state those kinds of things and still follow the rule of “engaging the reader.” I tried that the first time around and my conclusion is, well, personal statements can only go so far in the area of being interesting. I’ve found writing the secondary essays to be a lot more straightforward, since there’s no expectation that they’ll be fun reading for anyone. They ask specific questions so the task is more focused. Now when I look back at my PS, well, I cannot even read it. Still, I’ve gotten some interview invites on the basis of it so it can’t be that horrible. I’m just looking to find out if others generally consider their PS to be something they’d want to frame and put on the wall, or whether it’s just another irritating rite of passage. If it’s the latter then mine’s just like everyone else’s and I’ll keep using it.