anonymous asked 7 months ago
I’ve heard that in one of the ULWR classes (I believe English 325), people are able to work on writing their personal statements. Can anyone confirm this? Does it depend on the professor? And in general, for people who have written their personal statement, how did you start the process? (what specific resources you used, how you approached it, etc.)
Jasmine Bhatti answered 7 months ago
Hi!
Thank you for your question!
I unfortunately have not seen anything about working on personal statements during an ULWR. However, I’m sure you will learn valuable skills about writing essays that will be helpful when writing your personal statement. If you come across any specific details about this class, feel free to post a follow up question
Writing personal statements can be tough, but it is important to focus on one step at a time; you likely won’t write the whole essay in one sitting. The most helpful step for me has been to just spend some time brainstorming about why you would make a good doctor, why you are passionate about medicine and how this can be seen in your college experiences. This can be by making a flowchart or writing down what you learned from each of your college experiences or what you hope is shown by your college activities. The main idea of your personal statement is to illustrate a story of why you are choosing medicine as your career path. So essentially this can involve talking about any personal experiences you’ve had with the medical field and why this guided your passion for medicine and also talking about why you chose to do the things you did during your college career.
The biggest piece of advice I can give you for personal statement drafting is just to start writing any ideas that come to your mind, whether it’s bullet points or paragraphs. This will at least help get some ideas flowing and get your brain thinking more about your personal experiences and motivation to pursue medicine.
It can also be helpful to take some inspiration and tips from other personal statements such as from this website or this other one. I would like to emphasize though that your personal statement will not be like any other person’s, so I would encourage you to not spend too much time comparing your ideas to other personal statements; those are there mostly to guide the overall flow of your essay and give ideas for types of experiences you might want to talk about.
I hope this helps, but feel free to ask any other questions if you have any!
-Jasmine, PMH advisor