The Personal Statement is your opportunity to introduce yourself to admission committees. Strong narratives are geared towards presenting evidence of your preparation to join a program that will prepare you for your future career in healthcare. Since your personal statement will need to speak to all schools you will be applying, grounding your narrative on how your values, skills, and competencies align with your understanding of the responsibility of the profession will help schools see more easily how you will fit in with their program. Understanding your field well makes it easy to make the connection between what the profession will ask of you and what you have to offer. Professional schools have a clear understanding of the role they want to play in healthcare. Do you?

The more time you give yourself to reflect on your writing, the more effective it will be. You will not be able to write about everything. Decide ahead of time the first impression you want schools to make about you, and the strengths you want them to “see” first. Accept that it will not be perfect. 

Begin by deciding on what part of your story you want to focus on. Here are some sample questions to get you started:

  • How has my decision to go into this profession changed over time?
  • Who has been a role model for me?
  • What experiences have I had in healthcare that influenced my decision to follow this path?
  • What life experiences have I had that influenced my decision to follow this path?
  • What challenges have I had in life, and how have I overcome them?
  • What are my strengths and weaknesses?

Topics that can serve as a backdrop for you to showcase your values, competencies, and knowledge:

  • Encounters with individuals in patient or service settings.
  • Observations from shadowing healthcare providers.
  • Times when your values guided important life/professional decisions.
  • Working through misunderstandings.
  • Positive impact of your leadership.
  • Delivering bad news or coping with grief alongside others.
  • Evidence of your ability to be coached, learn from mistakes, and persist through inevitable life challenges.

Write about any meaningful aspects of your identity, or life/professional experiences that demonstrate maturity and constructive situational judgment.

Other Practical Guiding Points

  • Have a timeline with a schedule and deadline to work on your writing.
  • Suggested structure: intro, 2–3 stories to support your theme, and conclusion.
  • Start by deciding the stories, followed by the conclusion you want the reader to make, then work on the introduction.
  • Write in first person.
  • Read your writing out loud.
  • Ask others to read your writing and provide feedback. Questions to ask them:
    • What was your takeaway from reading my essay?
    • What personal attributes stood out for you?
    • How did the tone of my writing come across?
  • Check spelling and grammar.

Schools want to know your story. How your story is written is up to you. If you ask 10 people “what’s the best approach to writing a personal statement?”, you will get 11 answers. Just write, listen to yourself reading what you wrote, share it with others and ask for feedback. It helps to get feedback from someone who knows you well, someone who doesn’t know you well, and someone with mad grammar skills. Now stop thinking about writing and just get started!

There are a wide variety of sample essays online (google: sample essay questions medical school). These might provide ideas, but remember that this is your personal statement. It needs to be written from the heart and be about you.

If you are applying to an MD-PhD program, you will write and include two other essays, one on why you are applying to these programs and one on your research experience. 

Essay Help

You can utilize the Personal Statement Resources that the TWP Writing Studio offers.