What is a Med School Personal Statement?

If you are applying to US medical schools, having a solid personal statement is KEY. Plenty of applicants each year with fantastic stats and good activities get pushed aside each year because the writing aspects of their applications are not solid. Here is some background information about the personal statement to keep in mind.

• You are limited to 5300 characters for MD and DO applications
• The goal of your personal statement is to explain why you want to become a physician. That is, you need to answer the question "why medicine."
• You can write about ANY topic in your personal statement, but your topics need to be directly related to the question "why medicine."
• Common topics that students tend to include in their personal statements include patient care/clinical experiences or any exposure that they had with the medical system (eg being a patient, going to a family's medical appointments, etc).
• Someone needs to be able to read your essay and fully understand why you want to become a physician.

I have included examples throughout this course from both my own personal statement and from previous drafts to emphasize the changes that I made and why. If you want to see a ton of other personal statements, Dr. Ryan Gray has a great personal statement book called "The Premed Playbook: Guide to the Medical School Personal Statement" that I would highly recommend! Check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/Premed-Playbook-Personal-Statement-Interview/dp/168350853X