Your personal statement is a very important part of your application. It is an opportunity to give the health professional admissions team an idea of who you are in writing.
A strong personal statement will take many versions with feedback from multiple readers. Several months before you apply, you can schedule an appointment with a HPA Staff Advisor to discuss your essay drafts and ideas.
Your personal statement will take many shapes and forms over the years as you grow and experience new things. If you are in the early stages of deciding to pursue a health profession, try to answer the question "Why do you want to be a _____?" Keep your writing and revisit it from time to time on your educational journey.
Things to Keep In Mind
Timeline
Students can start their first draft of their personal statement as soon as they want. However, students should keep in mind their own application timelines and deadlines to allow themselves plenty of time to revise their writing. It is suggested that students start several months before they plan to apply for health professional schools to begin writing their personal statements.
As soon as students can, they are encouraged to start a journal of their healthcare and other experiences with stories and descriptions of shadowing, working with patients, research, tutoring, etc. This will help with remembering impressions and learning moments during experiences which will be useful during the writing process for the pre-health application.
Drafting Your Personal Statement
Starting the writing process can be challenging! Try brainstorming with the following topics:
- Why this health profession?
- Whom do you want to help, and how will you best help them in this field?
- What do you want to do for them?
- What kind of person will you be as a healthcare provider?
- What value do you bring to the field?
When drafting:
- Don’t worry about the character or word count, or even how your writing sounds. It’s important to get your ideas on the page
- Even if you don’t use all of your experiences in your personal statement, you may use it for experience descriptions or in the supplemental questions for the schools you’re applying to
- You don’t have to start with writing the introduction. You can start writing anywhere in the essay and then come back to the introduction or conclusion
Content Guidelines
Personal statements are an essay about you and your motivation and interest in a health profession. Topics you can discuss in your personal statement are:
- How you discovered your specific goals and what you’ve done since then to develop and refine that interest
- Your understanding of the field you want to go into
- Stories from your experiences where you have an active role that show you are working towards your goals in your future field
- Focus on what you have done since you decided you wanted to go into the healthcare field, rather than describing your journey to discovering your interest
- Create a picture of who you will be as a healthcare provider through your experiences
Students are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Premed Competencies. Although these competencies are directed towards pre-medical students, they are relevant to any health-related field. These attributes and skills do not need to be named directly in the personal statement but can be used to show how students embody the competencies that relate to them.
Themes
Themes are based on what you hope to do for people in your future field, like a goal statement. They provide a focus to your essay that the reader can easily follow and help you avoid creating an essay that is a list of experiences or life stories. Themes can help you think of experiences that build on one another to show the reader who you are, what you care about, and the value you bring to healthcare.
An example of a theme could be: “As a (health professional), I want to be a resource for medical information and education within underserved communities similar to the one I grew up in that may not have access to other healthcare providers.”
Other themes could include: an emphasis on education, access to care, languages & communication, and so much more. This is not an exhaustive list of themes, and they should be much more specific and personalized to you. It is important to reflect on your own life experiences to determine a central theme that connects them and is specific to you and your plans for your future healthcare career.
Revisions
Plan to revise your essay multiple times! Get feedback early and often from people who will provide constructive feedback.
HPA Tips
- Your experiences section or resume will tell the readers what you have done, so you do not need to list all of your experiences in your essay. Use your essay to tell them something they do not already know about you through carefully selected stories from your experiences
- If you have trouble identifying a theme, have other people read your writing to see what they might notice. HPA Staff Advisors can help you with this as well
- Create a balance between showing and telling
- Try not to just tell the reader that you are empathetic and a good listener, for example. Rather, show those attributes through a specific story of you interacting with someone else, like a patient or student, that shows how you will be with your patients in the future
- At the end of your story, reflect and tell the reader why this is important to your journey into your field
- Not all of your stories need to be directly related to healthcare, but they should be related to your overall theme
- For example, if you have a theme of wanting to educate your patients about their health, you can have a story of being a tutor or teacher in one of your paragraphs
- It's ok to address systemic problems with healthcare today in your essay, but do so through your stories. Acknowledge that you will be a part of the solution, but not the solution itself
- Be realistic about the changes you can make. You won’t be able to save or cure all of your patients, but you can provide them comfort, information, advice and guidance
Frequently Asked Personal Statement Questions
- Why is the personal statement important to my application?
- The personal statement is your first chance to provide health profession school committees with subjective information and context about your qualifications and your reasons for choosing a particular career. In other words, the personal statement is your initial opportunity to present yourself as an interesting and unique applicant who deserves a closer look.
- Who should I ask to read and help me review my personal statement?
- You can meet with an HPA Staff Advisor by scheduling an appointment or attending Drop-In Advising. HPA also hosts personal statement workshops to discuss your statements in more detail. You can also meet with a writing specialist or tutor at the Academic Assistance and Tutoring Centers (AATC).
- Do I submit my personal statement in my primary or secondary application?
- Your personal statement is submitted in the primary application. In the secondary or supplemental applications, each school may require additional essays, which HPA can also help you with.
- What if I do not have a lot of medical or clinical experiences to talk about in my personal statement?
- Not all of your stories need to be directly related to healthcare, but they should be related to your overall theme. Additionally, it is important to not think of your personal statement as a list of experiences but an essay that connects these experiences to express your values as a future health professional.
- What is the difference between a statement of purpose and a personal statement?
- Some healthcare fields require master’s degrees or PhDs. For these applications, you may need to write a statement of purpose and/or a personal statement. Statements of purpose generally focus on your motivation to go into your field and ways you have prepared yourself for advanced study, centering mainly on what you have done in college and after. Personal statements are often centered around what kind of diversity you bring to the field and program you’re applying to, as well as how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. HPA Staff Advisors can help you to figure out which information to put in each type of statement.
- Can I also get help from HPA to write the experience descriptions and supplemental or secondary essays for my application?
- Yes! HPA Staff Advisors can guide you on what to include and how to describe what you did in each of your experiences, as well as how to write your secondaries/supplementals.