Introduction (back to contents)

Writing your personal statement on a medical school application is a big deal. But you’ve already figured that out; that’s why you’ve got this book. Why is it a big deal? Because your essay is a blank slate upon which you intend to differentiate yourself from approximately 35,000 other smart people with the same desire to become a doctor.

It’s true that the number of medical school applications has been declining recently. So your chance of landing one of the approximately 17,000 coveted positions in a med school class has improved to about 50 percent, assuming everyone is equal. But everyone isn’t equal, or med schools would save themselves a lot of trouble and draw names out of a hat. Though right now you’re probably thinking you’d be happy getting into any medical school, you’d rather have your pick of the best.

Once you get past the initial screening (often based solely on grades and MCAT scores), the personal statement is your opportunity to be noticed. Its relative importance does differ by school: More prominent schools tend to place more emphasis on the essay, if only because they receive more applications. The essay may not make much difference for an applicant who’s an Olympic athlete, or one who holds a patent for a lifesaving device, but it does matter for the rest. The truth is, premedical students all look alike after you’ve read a few hundred applications.

More so than in law or business school admissions, the admissions officer is looking for signs that you are a compassionate, dedicated person who relates well to other people (i.e., patients). If you can’t make this case for yourself on paper, they generally feel you won’t be able to do it in person.

Applicants want to say the right thing. Unfortunately, the cliche “I want to help people” will make the reader’s eyes glaze over and sometimes consign your application to the reject pile. And there’s the other extreme: You get invited for an interview, but one of the interviewers is a psychiatrist. So applicants generally err on the overly cautious side, for fear of crossing the ambiguous boundary between creative/intriguing and worrisome/weird.

That’s the primary value of this book: We hope it will show you how wide the boundaries are. We have assembled a variety of essays that helped their authors gain admission to some of the best medical schools in the country: Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and many more. The essays are not all literary masterpieces, by any means. In fact, after you read seven or eight in a row, you’ll gain sympathy for the admissions officers faced with a stack of 200 applications. But if you read them all, you should get an excellent sense of how you can craft your unique experiences into a coherent, interesting personal statement that reveals more about yourself than your grades and test scores ever could.

Be honest, be mature, be enthusiastic, and be sincere. Don’t be afraid to go out on a small limb. Communicate your passion for medicine. Get noticed.

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