Pre-Health Prep Series: Writing Personal Essays

It's the time of year when students are sending in their personal essays for professional programs. They've been writing and revising and revising and writing some more. At the Pre-Health Pathways office, we have lots of great resources to help students begin and move through the process of preparing a personal statement for their applications. During the regular semesters, we host a Personal Essays Workshop to help students get started with reflecting on their experiences and drafting their first essays. There are lots of great tips, resources, and collections of advice for helping students in this area, but today we are going to talk about the four major areas that every good personal essay should address.

The first area is MOTIVATION. This is a major component of the essay as it answers the big "why?" question for admissions committees. You want the committee to understand, specifically, why you want a career in health care. And don't you dare leave it at "I want to help people". There are lots of jobs where you can "help people", so don't be generic! Give some context about what got you interested in health care. Did a person inspire you? Was there an event in your life that made you want to be a doctor/PT/dentist/etc.? Tell the committee about what drives you to continue pursing that career when things get hard. You can showcase your resilience, reliability, dependability, and service orientation by discussing your motivation. While you can talk about motivation throughout your essay, it is a great place to start and a nice thing to use for "closing the loop" on your narrative, so we recommend writing about motivation in your first paragraph and then bringing it back up in the final paragraph of your essay.

The second area to address is FIT. When we talk about fit, we are talking about how your experiences relate to the profession (i.e. how the program is a good fit for you) and about how you are going to contribute uniquely to a student cohort and eventually as a professional (i.e. how you are a good fit for the program). You want to talk about why you would make a good professional and how you would enrich a program as a student with a unique perspective due to your background, pre-health training, culture, or other life experiences. This is a good place to showcase your diversity as a member of an underrepresented group, as a person with a non-traditional education pathway, as someone who has experienced a long struggle with a health condition, as a person from a small town, as someone who has traveled to be part of humanitarian efforts, etc. Diversity can be defined in a lot of different ways, so think about how you will bring a unique perspective to class discussions and talk about it. The idea here is to persuade the committee that you would be a great person to interview for their program because the profession is a good fit for your goals and you are a good fit for any program. You can also talk about fit to address how you've changed for the better over time. How you've grown. The professional distance that you've traveled to bring you to this moment. By talking about fit, you can demonstrate things like your service orientation, your cultural competence, your social and teamwork skills, your ethical responsibility, your resilience and adaptability, and/or your capacity for improvement. Talking about fit works well as a second paragraph as transitioning from motivation to fit often flows nicely. It is also something that you can reiterate in a conclusive paragraph with just a couple of summary sentences.


You should also address CAPACITY. Capacity refers to how well your training, skills, attributes, and other competencies align with the expectations of the profession. A good place to start thinking about your capacity is to review the kinds of competencies that your profession expects of pre-health applicants and then to self-assess how capable you are in each of those areas. You want to talk about the qualifications that you have right now and how those have prepared you to thrive in a professional program. Talk about the skills that you have developed from your time as a student and from your health care experiences so far. Talk about how you have developed things that will help you to succeed in a program, such as better study habits, ways of balancing school, work, and personal obligations, or good bedside manner. Discuss your professional distance traveled, like you did with fit, but this time focus on the skills that helped you to grow and how you are continuing to grow. This section can help you to show the committee that you are reliable, that you are responsible, that you have the ability to adapt and improve, and that you have a good foundation from which to build your career in the profession. Moving from a discussion of fit to a discussion of capacity can be done naturally in writing, so we suggest talking about capacity in a third or fourth paragraph in your essay. That being said, sometimes you can talk about both fit and capacity simultaneously within your narrative, so if that works for you, feel free to intermingle the two within the body of your essay. Do remember to refer back to capacity in the conclusive paragraph with a sentence or two summarizing what makes you qualified to be applying.

Finally, the last thing you should talk about is your VISION. Think about what impact you want to have on your profession. Where do you see yourself when you finish your program and are out in the workforce? How do you envision working with your patients, colleagues, or maybe even students someday? What kinds of things do you wan tot achieve in your career? You don't want to spend a ton of character-space addressing things you haven't done yet, but you do want to talk a little bit about these things to show the committee that you've thought about it. This can also reinforce your motivation and fit as you've previously described them. While you could make this a full paragraph, you could also just sprinkle some of this into the body or just use it in the conclusive paragraph to help you with wrapping up your narrative.

If you are having trouble getting started with writing your personal essay, you could try reflecting on these four areas and writing down a few things under each. You want to address those four areas within a narrative that is interesting to read, so you can also think about structuring your essay by first providing context (talking about motivation works well here), then presenting an action, change, or insight (here's where you can talk about fit and capacity), and then discussing the outcome and how it relates to the context from the beginning (close the loop with vision and motivation). You can use this suggested order to help you lay out the structure of your narrative, but don't feel like you are tied to that format. You want your writing to feel authentic just as much as you want it to feel professional.

After you've written a draft of your essay, you'll want to do some serious editing. Put it away for 24 hours, then come back to it with fresh eyes and see what mistakes you made, what doesn't make sense, and what you could do to make it more precise. Sometimes, reading the essay out loud to yourself can help you identify what you actually wrote as compared to what you intended to say. (Our brains are notorious for autocorrecting when we read things silently, so this is a great way to catch silly little mistakes!) Then revise and send your essay out to others to help you check for grammatical errors, flow, and content. Then revise some more...and then even more revising. Make sure that your essay is going to make the best first impression possible with those on the admissions committees who will be reading it.

Remember that the Pre-Health Pathways office is open all summer and we are happy to help you get started on your essay and work on edits before you submit. Your personal essay, combined with your interview, can account for as much as 60% of your applicant score for some programs, so be sure that you are submitting your very best work! For those of you planning to apply next year, it's never too early to start working on your essay. ;)