5 Tips For Writing A Personal Statement For Medical School

By this point, you’ve spent hours, months, and even years preparing for medical school. Between stacking your resume with clinical experiences and earning high grades, you likely feel prepared to enter medical school. However, you still have to pass one of the final hurdles before you can start your medical education: writing your personal statement.

In 2022, there were more than 55,000 applicants to allopathic medical schools, with 22,700 students matriculating into an MD program. That means just 41% of applicants were successful. Unfortunately, every year, qualified candidates with high GPAs, competitive MCAT scores and strong resumes are rejected from every medical school they apply to. Despite doing almost everything right, they failed to stand out from the crowded field of applicants with their personal statements.

The AMCAS (American Medical College Application Service) personal statement prompt is: “Use the space provided to explain why you want to go to medical school.” Applicants have 5,300 characters to answer this broad question. Because this prompt is intentionally vague, it allows students to reflect on their qualities and demonstrate why they are interested in joining the field of medicine.

The medical school personal statement is not something that should be written in one draft. You should brainstorm, outline, draft, and rewrite your thoughts to address the qualities and experiences that make you suitable for the school and the profession.

Here are five tips to help you leverage the personal statement to your advantage.

5 Tips For Crafting Your Personal Statement

Tell A Story

In the medical school application, you will have the opportunity to list and describe your top activities. Therefore, instead of listing out your entire resume, you should focus on telling your most significant story and how it impacted you. Stories are a great tool to help admissions see how you work in different scenarios and can help them picture what type of doctor you will be. Be careful not to try to cram too many stories into your personal statement. It’s better to expand on three or four stories and add details that help bring you alive off the page.

2. Show Your Passions And Motivation

As you were building your resume, you should have filled it with activities you truly enjoyed. It is apparent to admission officers if you were doing activities just to check a box. In your personal statement, it is your chance to showcase the purpose behind each activity that you do.

3. Demonstrate Your Growth

There can always be a lesson found in each of your experiences. Medical schools don’t want a student who hasn’t struggled before in their lives—the journey to medicine will not be easy, so they aren’t expecting students to have a perfect GPA, MCAT score or resume. As you write your personal statement, think about your growth and how it may apply to your experiences in the future. By demonstrating your growth and resilience, you can prove that you will be a strong medical school student.

4. Talk About Your Life Experiences

The natural tendency is to focus solely on medically-related experiences. However, medical schools want to know about your interests and experiences outside of medicine. Because medical training is long and rigorous, they want to select candidates who demonstrate maturity and balance.

5. Focus On Intrapersonal And Interpersonal Qualities

Showcase your personal qualities and your communication and teamwork skills that make you a strong candidate. These skills are often overlooked when crafting a personal statement, but they are essential in helping admission offices understand what kind of doctor you will be.