Ok, this post is not about me not wanting to continue on my current path, I do. Totally but I have been told that I need to be more explicit in my reason in my essay and I am having some trouble articulating my reasons, any of you face the same challenge? Any ideas?
Give me something to work with–tell me what reasons you’ve got so far.
Do you mean “Why you want to study medicine?”
This is THE million dollar question! Essentially, the PS is an essay about yourself where you cannot excessively use the terms: I, me or my & you must extol upon your virtues while appearing arrogant AND succintly elaborate why you should be a physician. A chipshot!
In summation, it ain’t really possible to address all of that in an under 1 page essay. So, do the next best thing - cover everything you can, the best you can. Tell a story about you that not only underscores your strengths & curiosities; but will also make the reader want to meet you. You, Alyson Chadwick - friend of politicians & President(s) - have had a very intriguing life and should include a synopsis of this in you PS. If there is some way that you can intermingle your current profession as underpinning your desire to be a physician, there’s a way to spin it all together.
Just adjust your perspective & it becomes more managable - not easy, just more managable.
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This is THE million dollar question! Essentially, the PS is an essay about yourself where you cannot excessively use the terms: I, me or my & you must extol upon your virtues while appearing arrogant AND succintly elaborate why you should be a physician. …
I think OMD really means “while NOT appearing arrogant…”
Cheers,
Judy
My old pre med advisor told me that no matter what the essays theme is, it should answer (whether implicityly or explicitly the same questions): how you have prepared for medical school, what events in your life have made you into someone who will be a good/successful doctor, what are you doing now that relates to medicine, and what your professional goals are.
If you try to answer these questions with honest personal detail, then you can usually come up with an essay that is more individual in nature and will address the “why” issue.
I once thought adcoms/interviewers did not bother to read ps, but 4 out of six interviewers complimented me on mine, and I used the same structure above.
There are other structures you can use, but if you are stuck this is a place to start.
It’s interesting, the Personal Statement and interview phases of the process really do reward white, middle-class position-jockeying and self-presentation skills (which is what this whole “I’m so great but I’m so modest” balancing act really is). I wonder what would happen if admissions were based on nothing but MCAT score-- no essays, no grades, not even the person’s name to trigger AdComs own internal biases. You would gain no benefit from sucking up to professors for LORs, attending an undergraduate institution with easy grading scales, and other factors that put a “finger” on the scales of absolute fairness.
Not advocating it, but you see what I mean-- the “subjective” parts of your med school portfolio will always reward people with a certain set of culturally biased careerist skills.
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It’s interesting, the Personal Statement and interview phases of the process really do reward white, middle-class position-jockeying and self-presentation skills (which is what this whole “I’m so great but I’m so modest” balancing act really is).
Your comment seems rather biased in itself. I could just as easily say that basing admissions on the MCAT alone would lead to med schools full of egghead nerds with no social skills, an equally unfair statement. The reason for such a complex set of “hoops” is to make the process more fair, to try to give the most comprehensive picture of someone. It is not a perfect process, but there is no perfect process. Sometimes an undeserving student will get a spot that could have been better filled by someone else, but that’s not the norm. The adcoms are not evil wardens of a beautiful treasure (though it might seem that way at times). They are looking for the right students for their schools. Yes, there are probably good ol’ boys out there who think that white males straight out of college make the best physicians, but if that was the predominant thought process none of us would be here. Many more are looking for a group of bright individuals who will bring diversity of race, nationality, sex, age, economic background, etc. Give them a little more credit.
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It’s interesting, the Personal Statement and interview phases of the process really do reward white, middle-class position-jockeying and self-presentation skills (which is what this whole “I’m so great but I’m so modest” balancing act really is).
…
Not advocating it, but you see what I mean-- the “subjective” parts of your med school portfolio will always reward people with a certain set of culturally biased careerist skills.
I don’t know about that. When I went to my first interview, I took the Greyhound bus home, halfway across the country. That was a huge mistake, granted, but the reason I’m mentioning it is because before the interview, a friend of mine and I were discussing it (ok my friend was laughing at me)–and we decided that I should under no circumstances let anyone at the interview know about my planned method of return transportation. I was expecting this school to be pretty posh and elitist, and the last thing I wanted was for them to see me as some hippie type criss-crossing the USA on a Greyhound, like Janis Joplin or something. The whole bus thing just didn’t convey the right kind of socioeconomic aspirations for an occasion like this, as my friend put it!
Well, then right before I was about to leave at the end of my interview, my student interviewer offered me a ride to the airport! I guess I am a bad liar, and also I really liked her–anyway I ended up spilling the whole story about the bus. So then she was even nicer! She offered to let me stay at her house all afternoon while I waited, and she showed nothing but sympathy and concern over the length of bus ride I was soon to embark on. I never got the slightest sense that I was being judged or that anyone cared what socioeconomic “strata” I appeared to be part of. People were just nice and wanted to help out.
Another thing I noticed while interviewing was that people I talked with seemed to appreciate the weird quirks of my application more than the standard careerist parts of it. I swear, no one asked me about my current research job, but everyone wanted to know about what it was like being from small town Minnesota, which I can tell you right out has zero value as far as middle-class jockeying. Far far from it.
If anything the interviews and essay are used to weed out “careerists,” I’d say.
The personal statement and interview rewards people who fit in but do so in an individual way; in other words, people who are enough conformist to be a part of a conservative profession but not so conformist as to be utterly boring and unpleasant. There are many ways to approach that fine balance; but I think it is true that it is easier to figure out the balance if you are pretty confident from the get-go that you will basically fit in. So, if you live in a world of people with advanced degrees, you’ve already cracked a big part of the code and you can more confidently show your uniqueness while being assured of your own ultimate conformity. People who don’t live in a world of people with advanced degrees often face this process with more anxiety about how to do what these mysterious advanced-degreed people want them to do… and therefore often end up concealing their own appealing and unique qualities. So, in a roundabout way, and perhaps not for the same reasons, I kind of agree with Matt about how the process works.
But if the system were based on scores alone I’d be somewhere very different than I am right now.
joe
Which does nothing to answer CalvinIABBTR’s question, of course–and putting my rather cynical answer above aside, the right answer is to be passionately but soberly yourself, and then edit. But first, be passionately yourself. But come on, you of all people know how to do this: think of yourself as John Edwards applying to medical school, or something like that.
good luck
joe
Well, I agree with the jaded view of the admissions process in many ways too, and I certainly think there is a self-propogating upper-middle-classness about the medical profession in general. However, I only wanted to emphasize that for people who are just getting close to applying, it can be helpful to put the scepticism and conspiracy theories aside temporarily, so as not to get overly depressed or paranoid about the situation.
Sorry Calvin, I’m not being any help either!
That is an excellent story!
You know, everytime I take the bus to visit my parents (not across country by any stretch! It’s a five-hour ride to Washington, DC) I hate it so much that I swear I’ll never do it again. But then a few months later, I am again seduced by the rock-bottom price (it’s down to $20 or $25 round tip NYC-DC) and I wind up in a hot crowded bus again.
I never learn!
I can totally relate to the bus story, and thanks for sharing such an awesome story. In 1998 I was working for a terrible person – a lobbyist and I HATED my job. I landed an interview at record company in NYC doing PR and because I had zero money, I took the bus up and back in a day. As I totally didn’t think I had a chance in hell of getting the job (w/no music industry experience) I wasn’t nervous at all and got the job, which I also hated but that’s not the point. 
Back to my question. I wrote my ps about a year ago and have most of it down. I have just been told to add a little, elaborate a little on the why medicine question. I have a better sense and just need to flush it out a bit. I was more wondering if any of you have had trouble putting how you feel about this into words. Normally, finding the right words isn’t my problem but there are days when I can’t remember why I want to do this (the great thing is even on those days, there is something inside me that gets me up early and makes me study even when the reason eludes me) so I know I have picked the right path.
On a personal note, and tere is no reason for this to be here but I am rambling already, I have a transfusion last week (my crit hsa been hovering around 26, which isn’t all that low but my GI doc thought it would make me feel better). The good news is it worked and I have SO MUCH more energy, the bad news is I partially dislocated my shoulder while I was in the hospital (how dumb is that?) and now all I want to do is go play tennis but it’s my right arm. 
Truly, this is not a complaint. That the rest of me feels good enough to have my shoulder bother me is a blessing in its own way.
And I can say for sure I DO NOT WANT TO DO GI.
PS. I am still looking for anyone who is interested to review my ps. More for overall content and style – ie would this make you want to get to know me better? Email me, please, if you are willing to look at it.
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Back to my question. I wrote my ps about a year ago and have most of it down. I have just been told to add a little, elaborate a little on the why medicine question. I have a better sense and just need to flush it out a bit. I was more wondering if any of you have had trouble putting how you feel about this into words. Normally, finding the right words isn’t my problem but there are days when I can’t remember why I want to do this (the great thing is even on those days, there is something inside me that gets me up early and makes me study even when the reason eludes me) so I know I have picked the right path.
I totally had a hard time coming up with concrete “reasons” why I wanted to go into medicine. Yeah, I have lots of them but they were never the kind that could be summarized in short, uplifting anecdotes, I felt. Maybe for people who tend to gush about their feelings and interests the essay is a little easier to approach, but for me it was really hard. In retrospect I wish I’d gone with a more literal, concrete approach, even if that meant selling off every single one of my ER volunteering stories–stories I mostly woudn’t even tell my friends, because I KNOW they’re not THAT interested.
You have lots of time, so maybe you could try to think of one or two concrete reasons each week for the next few weeks, and then work them into subsequent drafts?
By the way I’d love to read it, so just PM me if you want.