During each application cycle — for college, a premed postbac, med school, residency, fellowship — you have to be good at writing personal statements. While the specifics will change a bit depending on where you are on your journey, there are certain tips you can use to improve the quality of your personal statements. In our experience working with pre-meds, pre-med post-bacs, and med students there are a lot of mistakes that students make regularly. You can easily avoid these and vastly improve your chances of getting an interview. Below are seven of the biggest personal statement mistakes we see applicants make and tips for how to improve your premed postbac or medical school personal statement.

1. Forgetting who your target audience is. 

If you’re a pre-med post-bac applicant, your target audience is an admissions officer/program director. These people see a ton of personal statements. And, yes, a lot of them are pretty similar. Your goal is to stand out, but you do not want to stand out too much. Nine times out of ten, attempts at originality will lose you points. Your goal is to tell a story that an admissions officer/program director has heard a hundred times before with your unique personal spin on it. What will get you points is knowing exactly what the program director wants to see and what they don’t want to see.

Here’s what they want: they want to see you are a normal, caring human being with normal human interests and a coherent story that explains why medicine is right for you. They do not want to learn things about you that would dissuade them from thinking you would be a good doctor. For instance, if you have hobbies that include binge drinking or playing video games 24/7, please don’t mention these in your personal statement. This sounds silly, but we have seen personal statements that include similar hobbies. Remember: if you don’t come off well in it, don’t mention it in your essay! If you have questions about whether something will sound good, consult people who have gone through the application process in the past for their advice.

2. Telling someone else’s story.

Many applicants use a large portion of their personal statement on anecdotes that focus on a patient, a parent, or grandparent. Often, this is a bout with illness. This is perfectly acceptable. The problem is when your essay becomes an essay about a parent/grandparent’s experience with illness, rather than about how their illness affected you. While it is okay to mention someone else’s story, remember to fit that story into your story. This is your personal statement. The way to focus on your story is to shorten anecdotes not directly related to you as much as possible. Then frame the story around what you saw and its impact on your decision to go into medicine.

3. Starting at the beginning.

Your childhood is likely not relevant to why you became a doctor. If your 7-year-old self’s love for dressing up with a stethoscope is why you are trying to become a doctor, you should seriously reconsider going to medical school. The truth is—particularly for post-bacc career changers—you did something else, and were not interested in medicine initially. Then, something changed and now you are interested in medicine. That is what admission’s officers want to hear about.

You studied German or Russian, worked for two years at a non-profit, eh? That’s interesting. Write down why you were interested in studying what you studied, what you did after that, what you learned from that experience, and then what happened to make you now interested in a different path. Explaining that transition is key. Bonus points for relating some aspect of your interest in previous stuff (say, teaching middle school) to the skills you will bring to medicine (say, being a leader, multitasking, promoting equity, etc). 

4. Oversharing.

You don’t need to explain ALL of the factors that led you to your med school decision. In fact, including 6 different threads that made you conclude that you should become a physician will likely confuse an admissions reader. In a cogent essay, it’s better to focus on one or two of the reasons you decided on medicine and then to tie those to your previous experiences. Coherent storytelling often requires this distillation process so that the reader (program director) can understand your decision-making clearly. 

5. Ignoring community service.

One of the most common mistakes applicants make is not focusing on community service in their personal statements. Community service is essential to being a physician. Or better put: the sort of person who cares enough to volunteer is the sort of person an admissions director wants to accept into a premed postbac program. For better or worse, this is why many premeds volunteer to begin with.

If you have done any recent community service, it’s important to link this to your why medicine story. You could say something like: at my position as a non-profit worker, I saw elderly individuals struggle with their activities of daily living. Afterwards, I decided to start volunteering at a nursing home/ hospice/whatever to try to support people in the same position. This linking of your consideration of medicine with a specific community service act is great for persuading admissions officers that you’re a good person and a reasonable medical school/ premed postbac candidate.

6. Being too abstract.

Your personal statement isn’t an essay about the etymology of the word doctor (yes, many applicants talk about this). Nor is it appropriate to get into the weeds about historical events. Try to stay personal! Remember this is a personal essay, which is about you and your experiences. This is not your thoughts on what doctors as an abstraction do. This is about specific doctors you worked with, what you admired about those specific doctors, and why you want to become one. A helpful way to be more specific is to frame sentences in this manner: “While shadowing, I observed Dr. so-and-so helping a patient which such-and-such. Through this experience, I learned XYZ about being a physician.” Then link what you learned to previous experiences you have had, or later experiences, such as deciding to do community service, where you developed these skills further. 

7. Being negative.

Program directors want to hear why you want to be a physician. They are not interested in how much you dislike working as a laboratory tech. The intricacies of what you hate about your current position are not only beside the point, but may be counterproductive. In fact, I would urge you to avoid saying anything you didn’t like about your previous experiences. It is much better to rephrase an experience you didn’t like as a learning opportunity where you found out what you want in a job.

For instance, “my experience working as an administrative assistant taught me that I wanted more direct personal connections with patients. I felt I could contribute more to patients directly rather than through administrative work.” This is better than saying “my job as an administrative assistant was emotionally deadening and I can’t imagine doing this for the next 20 years”. Try to imagine the program director’s spouse is [insert your previous career here] and proceed that way. That is, focus on what you learned about yourself. And be positive!

We hope you enjoyed these tips to improve your premed or med school personal statement. If you have any questions, feel free to email us at [email protected].