Personal Statements

Writing Your Personal Statement

Your personal statement is a very important piece of your application - it gives the reader an idea of who you are and the calue that you bring to your future health professional field.

A good piece of writing will take many versions with feedback from multiple readers. Several months before you plan to apply, you can schedule an appointment with an HPA 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.

Personal Statement Steps

Timeline

  • You can start your first draft as soon as you want, but serious work should be started several months before you plan to apply to allow yourself plenty of time to revise.
  • As soon as you can, start a journal of your healthcare and other experiences with stories and descriptions of shadowing, working with patients, research, tutoring, etc.
    • This will help to remember your impressions and what you learn along the way, to later add into your pre-health application.

Drafting Your Statement

Try brainstorming on the following topics:

  • Why this field?
  • Whom do you want to help, and how will you be able to best help them in this field?
  • What do you want to be able to do for them?
  • What kind of person will you be as a healthcare provider?
  • What value do you bring to the field?

Drafting Tips and Tricks:

  • Don’t worry about the character or word count, or even how your writing sounds - just get your ideas on the page.
  • Even if you don’t use all of this writing in your personal statement, you may use it for your experience descriptions or in the supplemental questions for the schools you’re applying to.
  • You don’t have to start writing with the introduction. You can start writing anywhere in the essay and then come back to the introduction or conclusion.

Content Guidelines

  • Start your essay with a story of how your interest in this field began or how you discovered your specific goals, and then move on to what you’ve done since then to develop and refine that interest.
  • Show the reader you understand the field you want to go into. For example, tell a story from a shadowing experience or working alongside a provider.
  • Tell stories from your experiences where you have an active role that show how you have already worked towards your goals in your future field.
  • Familiarize yourself with the core competencies for medical schools, which are relevant to any health-related field.
    • You don’t need to name them directly in your essay or touch on all of them, but use your stories to show how you embody the competencies that relate to you.
  • Focus on what you have done since you decided you wanted to go into your healthcare field, rather than just describing your journey to discovering your interest in the field.
    • Create a clear picture of who you will be as a healthcare provider through the experiences you’ve had in college and beyond.

Personal Statement Themes

  • Create a theme based on what you hope to do for people in your future field, like a goal statement. For example, “As a pharmacist, 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.”
    • Place this goal statement at the end of the first or second paragraph to quickly show the reader what you hope to accomplish in your field.
  • Having a theme can help the reader understand the main idea of your essay quickly.
  • A theme can help you decide which stories to tell from your experiences and how you want to tell them.
  • Looking back at your healthcare and other experiences, what common threads do you see?

Some ideas:

  • An emphasis on education?
  • An emphasis on access to care?
  • An emphasis on languages and communication?
  • Anything else?

Revisions

  • Plan to revise your essay multiple times
  • Get feedback early and often from people who will provide constructive feedback

HPA Tips

  • Your experiences page 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 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 your application?
  • The personal statement is your first chance to provide health profession school committees with subjective information 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.
  • When should I begin writing my personal statement?
  • The personal statement should be a reflective, well-polished document. You can create your first draft as soon as you want. The more time you give yourself to get feedback and revise the better. Health Professions Advising is happy to read your essay and give you feedback, but please make the appointment early in the process. Revisions take time.
  • Whom should I ask to read and help me revise my personal statement?
  • You can meet with an HPA advisor by scheduling an appointment or attending Zoom Drop-In advising. We also host HPA Personal Statement workshops to discuss statements in more detail. You can also meet with a writing specialist or tutor at the AATC.
  • What are some common personal statement themes?
  • Some common personal statement themes are based on caring for underserved communities, educating patients and creating better access to healthcare. 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.
  • 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 we 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 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 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.