Week 4 Personal Statements

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Week 4Personal Statements
Kent L. BarrusPre-professional Advisor
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
The difference between the right word and the
almost right word is the difference between
lightning and the lightning bug. -Mark Twain
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Objectives

• Discuss the elements of an effective personal
  statement.
• Discuss what not to do with a personal statement.
• Critique and analyze sample personal statements.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Preparing for the essay

• Preparatory Questionnaire.

• Personal Marketing Inventory.

• Log of ideas and experiences.

• Read others essays.

• Learn about medicine through experience.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Topics - Selection and Development

• Description of irregularities in your record.

• The five common topic areas
• Your motivation for a career as a physician.
• The influence of your family / early experiences
  in life.
• The influence of extracurricular, work/volunteer
  activities on your life.
• Your long-term goals.
• Your personal philosophy.

• Description of irregularities in you record.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Attributes Committee Look For
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
The Most Common Essay Mistakes

• Underestimating the Importance of the Essay.

• Using Excessive Detail

• Failing to Make the Essay Personal.

• Embellishing the Essay.

• Failing to Proofread the Essay.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• Manifest Destiny
• Any essay that claims, I was born to be a
  dentist, or Friends always tell me I should be
  a doctor, or At age ten I knew I wanted to be a
  pharmacist.
• Spotlight your specific personality, not a
  destiny that seems larger than you.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• My Contribution to the World
• It is naïve to say that you have your whole life
  mapped out already.
• The When I grow up, I want to be a and save
  the rainforest tells your reader nothing
  significant about you other then youre a dreamer.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• The Interpretive Guide
• Common essay type when one has blemishes on their
  academic record.
• Refrain from telling an admissions officer to
  count as significant a particular item or that
  something shouldnt count.
• State a problem briefly and then move on.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• The Traveling Resume
• A rehash of your various activities. This is
  already found in the application.
• Its better to focus most of the essay around a
  single activity that offers sincere and deep
  insight into you.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• The Cute Essay
• Videotapes may have been cool for college
  applications, but professional schools are a lot
  more serious.
• No pictures, art, photos, or interpretive dance
  are necessary, or appreciated.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• Name Dropping
• If youve worked with an important person in your
  field, ask him or her to write a recommendation
  for you.
• Crafting an essay around who you know doesnt
  leave enough room to discuss who you are..

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• Im Special
• An essay that claims, You probably dont get
  people like me very often is almost inevitably
  wrong.
• Dont tell your readers that you are unique, show
  them through examples of where you spent your
  time and what you did.
• Let the readers draw their own conclusions about
  your uniqueness.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Essay Types To Avoid

• My father, my role model
• While it may be useful to discuss the influence
  upon your life that someone has had, dont devote
  your whole essay to the achievements of someone
  else.
• The personal statement should be about you.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Available Resources

• Books in P.P.A.C.

• Internet. Internet2.

• Writing Center.

• NAAHP

• Essay Edge.

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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Sample Essay 1
Robert F. Kennedy, during a campaign speech for
the Presidency of the United States, said that
"Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom,
not a guide by which to live." It was a Friday
night, on August 28th, 1992, when I was compelled
to live that quotation. On the way home from
Sabbath services with my parents, two sisters,
and brother, our car was struck by a drunk
driver, killing my sister Sarah and severely
injuring my family. As I lay in the hospital bed,
tubes and machines surrounding me, I could only
foresee a life of despondency. Now, five years
later, I understand Kennedy's words my
despondency has changed into a strong commitment
to help others. Less than a year after the
accident, I took a course to become a certified
emergency medical technician (EMT), having
learned from first-hand experience the importance
of basic life-saving skills, I was determined to
gain that knowledge. Once in college, I became
actively involved with the Brandeis Emergency
Medical Corps (BEMCo), an organization of
volunteer EMTs who respond to all emergency
medical calls on campus. The summer between my
freshman and sophomore year, I worked for a
private ambulance service in Los Angeles. I found
this experience very valuable because it brought
me into the inner-city for the first time. I was
exposed to individuals who lived on a daily basis
with fear and uncertainty about their health when
some of the finest medical technology was just
moments away. Intrigued by these issues, I later
enrolled in a specialized health, law and
medicine program at Brandeis to study possible
solutions to the problems I saw
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Sample Essay 1
By the end of my sophomore year, I knew that I
wanted to see for myself and learn more about the
effects of diseases on the body. As a result, I
took an internship at the UCLA Department of
Pathology, where I began assisting in autopsies.
I was able to apply the textbook description and
organ functions that I had previously learned
into their clinical aspects. From this
experience, I not only acquired a greater
appreciation of how the human body functions, but
I also learned that bodies are more than just
organs and series of chemical reactions. I have
come to realize that there is no deeper way of
understanding the human face of medicine than to
be a patient or clinician oneself. When I was
growing up in France, my family and I had built a
deep-rooted relationship with our family
physician. Dr. Celan knew each of our personal
and medical history, and with love, attention,
confidence, and trust cared for us and his other
patients. I know from the accident that being
alone in an emergency room can be very
frightening. I also know that regardless of how
may shots of anesthetics I received that night
nothing helped me more and gave me more strength
than holding my doctor's hand. A simple human
approach can bring significant results. While no
activity I take part in will ever bring my sister
back, I can and will forever strive for the
strength to take what I have learned from the
accident and help others in her memory. I am now
starting my fourth year in BEMCo. I have the
primary responsibility for our three-person team,
and I am one of two supervisors for the Corps.
Every time that I respond to an emergency, I look
at the patient and see Sarah's beautiful face. I
am reminded each time that even if I do not know
these patients, they are still as important to
someone as Sarah was and is to my family.
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Sample Essay 2
Last Sunday as I came back from the church buses
for the children's ministry, one man asked how it
went and I said good. He then commented, "Well,
it's different every week. I've been here seven
years and it's different every week," which
caused me to smile. How fortunate that it is
different every week. There will never be a loss
of finding something to do, or someone new to
meet and listen to. When volunteering at Cancer
Treatment Center on Mondays, I expect the patient
visits will be good, but I never really know. I
do not know if the patient that spoke to me for
thirty minutes last week about her daughter will
even be conscious enough to recognize my face
that day. I do not know if I will encounter hope,
hostility, or sadness. I remember one morning I
walked into a dim room where a bearded man sat
looking into the distance, though looking at a
wall. His eyes were somber and completely lost in
the knowledge of his condition. He began to
ramble about the news his doctor had given him
that he should go home and set his life in order
before the cancer totally took him over. He
muttered about this place being his last hope and
now he would have to fly home that day. As I left
the center, I informed my supervisor of the
situation and suggested that a chaplain be sent
to this man's room. That morning I was brought to
face the limitations of medicine, and was glad to
discern it from a handicap. Medicine is not a
perfect field with the solutions to save the
world, but a piece of service to mankind. It
addresses those who have hope for physical
well-being as well as those who do not.
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Sample Essay 2
I find I cannot go back to my high school days
when my dreams of being a doctor simulated
visions of a clean, tidy office full of cute
babies waiting to be examined. Several years ago
I spent a summer shadowing my father during his
ENT surgeries. It was my pride that kept me
concentrating on standing up straight and
breathing deep as the sterile surgical smell
filled my nostrils and tempted me to collapse at
the sight of tonsils scooped out like ice cream.
It has been these types of experiences that have
injected a shot of realism into my dreams and
thus changed my perceptions of how it will be in
the lush fields of medicine and how I fit in. I
will work with people who have problems entirely
real and more threatening than my trivial worries
have ever been. These people will be of all ages,
professions, and levels of society. They will
also need someone in whom to entrust their
health, their security. I meet these people every
day, and they have no clue that I notice or would
like to help. I see the redheaded man who
develops my film at the one hour photo has a
limp, and wonder if it is a recurring injury or
from a recent accident. My hairdresser says she
will give birth in just a month and I sit
secretly wishing to be there and assist in the
miracle. My father begins recovery free from a
long month of radiation treatment, and I can only
pray and hope to love him enough. I have asked
myself again and again if being a physician is
really who I am, or if there is something else.
After wrestling with this question, I realized
that being a physician is not who I am, though it
is an integral part of me. Growing up under the
shadow of my father, his example has shaped my
ideology to believe that being an instrument in
restoring others to health actually changes lives
and this is what I have grown to be a part of and
is irrevocably a part of me. It is through this
connection with medicine that I see my paradigms
of the world shift, and wake up to find that each
day is different, new, and challenging.
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Sample Essay 3
The most vivid image I have from this past year
is that of a twelve year old child running up and
throwing her arms around her pediatrician and
giving him a hug hello. Clinically, Violet was
wasted immunologicaly depressed, and had the
height of an eight year-old and the weight of a
six year-old. The sores in her mouth prevented
her from eating normally she fed herself through
a valve known as a "PEG tube" that poked out just
northeast of her bellybutton. But now, in the
presence of her doctor, she was glowing. She
didn't get along terribly well with her
classmates when she was well enough to go to
school. Word got out that she was HIV and the
kids around her taunted her about it until she
cried. Her mother wasn't any better. She ignored
Violet on her good days beat her on the bad
ones. She told me that she would feed her
daughter dog food when she didn't feel like
cooking. It seemed as if a dark cloud enveloped
Violet when her mother would enter the room. But
as soon as Dr. K walked in, that cloud lifted
away and was replaced by a sparkling smile that
widened her emaciated face. He was her
friend. During the course of my studies at the
Tulane University School of Public Health and
Tropical Medicine I saw a lot of patients like
Violet. Some sicker, some healthier. Some older,
some younger. Some richer, some poorer. I studied
their charts and, more importantly, I studied
them. Whether I was at their bedside in the
hospital, at the busy clinic just a
stones-throwaway from the housing projects, or in
a consultation office somewhere in the rural
bayous of Louisiana, I learned to listen to
patients and absorb what I saw and what they
felt.
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Bio 311 - Professional School Preparation
Sample Essay 3
The volumes of charts I examined for my research
filled out the blanks in my spreadsheets. My
coursework in biostatistics and epidemiology
enabled me to analyze the data and look for
trends. The numbers told me that, yes, pediatric
AIDS patients' nutritional status does improve
with aggressive nutritional sup- port and drug
therapy despite the fact that there is no
uniformly successful treatment for
cryptosporidiosis. This research will likely be
published. But while my charts and graphs deftly
illustrate quantity of life, talking to a patient
face to face provoked thoughts about quality of
life. I started to think about which was more
important a patient's serum albumin level or his
desire to get out of the darn hospital so he can
get home and play ball with the neighborhood
kids. I didn't come up with any answers, just
more questions. After our visit with Violet, Dr.
K told me that a smile like hers made him forget
all of the bad things that he'd seen that day, if
only for a moment. I believe that the reverse is
also true For a moment, Violet forgot that she
was dying. She found comfort in the presence of
her doctor. The high quality of care she received
came not only from the years of training that her
physician completed, but also from the person who
dedicated his life to making his patients feel
well in every sense of the word.