Premed Tip #8- Preparing for Your Personal Statement

There is a lot of work you can do leading up to writing your personal statement. One of my biggest mistakes was starting in April on my personal statement. Along those same lines, I also started with the experiences I wanted to mention and worked backwards to construct my statement. I wouldn't suggest this either.

Here are some steps you should do before constructing your first draft of your personal statement.

1.  Look up about 10-12 interview question pertaining to why you want to be a doctor and your goals. Here are some examples from Princeton review. These will help you narrow down your topic and exactly what motivates you to apply. The more detailed the better.
2.  Go through all of your answers and write what made you come to these conclusions. 
3. Pick the main reason you want to go into medicine and flesh out every opinion, thought, and story that lead you to this reason. This also includes points that made you continue to be premed as well after you discovered this reason.
4.  Narrow down what is most important from that list to your interest in being a physician. Find stories from your life that demonstrate these points.
5. Now that you have an idea of what you want to get across, decide the style you would like to write your personal statement in. Is it best to do it in chronological order? Do you have a central theme to your list of important experiences that needs to be in a certain order?
6. Make an outline of exactly what you want your first draft to look like.
7. Now go through steps 3 through 6 again with another reason from your answers in 2 until you have several outlines you can work with.
8. Leave your work for awhile to give yourself time to think and add to what you have done.