Writing a Personal Statement is hard! In this article, we’re going to run through our 5 top tips when it comes to tackling your Personal Statement and getting that all-important medical school place.
Ali Abdaal's Tips On Writing a Personal Statement
1. Check The Medical School Selection Criteria
When constructing personal statements, it’s important you base everything you mention (whether from your work experience, volunteering or extra-curricular activities) around an almost universally adopted selection criteria. The GMC provides admissions guidelines for all medical schools in the UK and recommends universal traits and qualities to look for in applicants.
Medical School Qualities and Traits
Some of the qualities of a good doctor and traits medical schools look for are listed below (based upon Oxford and UCL admissions guidelines):
- Communication: an ability to make knowledge and ideas clear using language appropriate to the audience and listening skills
- Capacity for sustained and intense work
- Individual strengths: social, musical and sporting interests or activities, for example
- Problem-solving: critical thinking, analytical approach
- Empathy: an ability and willingness to imagine the feelings of others and understand the reasons for the views of others
- Understanding of a career in medicine: most importantly, the realities of being a doctor
- Attitudes: including honesty, integrity and humility
- Ethical Awareness
- Intellectual curiosity: awareness of current scientific and medical affairs, for example
- Teamwork: an ability to work with others
- Motivation: a reasonably well-informed and strong desire to practice medicine
- Leadership
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These cover most, if not all, of the characteristics medical schools are looking for in an applicant. Of course, you can’t fit all of it in, but you should cover as much of it as possible, which is why it’s important to try to be relatively succinct in your writing. Alongside this, you should have an alignment of values and behaviours with the values of the NHS constitution.
Your understanding and appreciation of these values must reflect in your personal statement (and at interview).
Remember, although you definitely should give a personal and individual account of your experiences, you should also aim to tell medical schools what they want to hear.
How should you go about conveying these characteristics?
- You should know what these qualities are and should find examples from your experiences to confirm you are aware of and have come to realize the importance of such traits in a doctor.
- You should also give examples of possessing these characteristics yourself, perhaps through your extra-curricular skills or a demonstration of competency when volunteering or during work experience.
Here’s a tip, you could actually write out content for different areas (such as for communication, teamwork, empathy, etc.), grouping them under specific subheadings on a separate document, and then mix and match them all, inserting them at different places in your statement: this allows you to try out more options when writing your personal statement to begin with and forces you to prioritise certain content over others.
2. Focus Your Personal Statement On Reflection
As repeated several times already, when writing a personal statement, don’t go on too long describing what you did during your work experience or time volunteering. Focus instead on reflection, which includes talking about the things you came to realize and discovered about medicine in general and the specific qualities in doctors.
3. Provide Evidence For Every Point
It’s easy to claim to have various qualities and an understanding of what it means to be a doctor, but quite a few students we’ve come across fail to substantiate many of their assertions in their personal statements.
For example, don’t say you have a strong interest in the sciences without actually providing some support that is this the case. Similarly, don’t spout out a list of qualities (teamwork, the importance of communication, etc.) without providing some real-world examples of why they’re important.
4. Strive for Clear Structure and Perfect Grammar
Although unfair for those who don’t consider themselves strong writers, the truth is, good writing makes a big difference. All too often, students send us personal statements littered with grammatical errors – for example, one of the big things many students seem to struggle with is the correct and effective use of commas.
Our recommendation is that if you’re not a particularly good writer, you get somebody who is good to look through your personal statement, sentence by sentence, getting them to help reword phrases.
Personal Statement Structure
When it comes to the structure of your personal statement, it’s simple – just be organised with your content. If two things aren’t strongly related, then start a new paragraph.
For example, if you’re writing a paragraph on work experience in a hospital environment and want to talk about the GP next, it’s probably best to start a new paragraph for the GP; however, if you’re on the theme of communication, and you found a nice story that illustrates its importance from both the hospital and GP, then it’s reasonable to talk about this using examples from both your GP and hospital experiences in the same paragraph.
In a nutshell, lump related things together to make the reader’s life easier. Along with this, try to have some kind of connecting sentence that links between different themes for better flow, but only if you have enough space.
There’s much more to learn about Personal Statement structuring. Why not check out our Personal Statement Crash Course and Masterclasses, all included within 6med’s Medicine Mastery Bundle!
Check out these Personal Statement examples for inspiration:
5. Redraft Your Personal Statement
Our final principle is this: keep drafting your personal statement, chipping away at it paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. Never be content with your statement until you’ve at least drafted it several times; many of us had drafted our statements at least 20 times before we handed them in.
You should play around with individual sections of your personal statements. Set apart a day just to work on your opening paragraph or work experience sections.
You can redraft based on your own thoughts (constantly reread your personal statement as if you were a super harsh critic), and you should send out your personal statement to willing doctors and medical students, as well as teachers – but make sure you send what you think is a strong draft (one you could pretty much submit) so as to not waste their time.
It may also help to get your draft reviewed regularly, so you can get another person’s opinion on what works and what doesn’t. This could be from a family member, friend, mentor or even an expert tutor. For example, you can submit up to 10 personal statement drafts to be reviewed by medical school experts when you sign up for the Medicine Mastery Bundles!
Need some extra guidance for your Personal Statement?
We have a bunch of Personal Statement resources available for free on our Personal Statement Resources page. Some of the top guides include:
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