Is this personal experience significant enough to help admission chances?

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asw95

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I'm very glad things worked out for you, but applicants having severe illnesses are not uncommon. I've had several students who were cancer survivors, including several transplant recipients.

It does make for excellent material for your PS.

Your app so far looks solid, and with a decent MCAT score, your chances are excellent. Good luck!
 
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You aren't the first one to use personal medical conditions as a leverage in the admissions process. There are two things you need to be aware of:

1) Do NOT use this as an excuse of poor grades or MCAT score. The unfiltered reality is that a doctor MUST have competency in diagnosis and know what he or she is doing. If you got poor grades because of your medical condition, it does NOT prove that you would have had a decent grade otherwise. The same thing goes for college ranking. Just because you got a 3.2 at Princeton and were under a harsh curve, it doesn't mean you would've gotten a 3.8 at another school. It's unfair to other applicants to make that kind of assumption. So if you got any low grades during this period, don't use that as an excuse. But your overall GPA is strong so this shouldn't be too much of a concern to you.

2) Make sure that you express how this has helped you understand medicine better, rather than why this makes you more competitive. If you get hung up on trying to manifest a leverage based on your experience (which, by the wording of your post, strongly implies that you are) that is more transparent than IR radiation going through a symmetrical bond.
 
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I'm very glad things worked out for you, but applicants having severe illnesses are not uncommon. I've had several students who were cancer survivors, including several transplant recipients.

It does make for excellent material for your PS.

Your app so far looks solid, and with a decent MCAT score, your chances are excellent. Good luck!
Thank you!
You aren't the first one to use personal medical conditions as a leverage in the admissions process. There are two things you need to be aware of:

1) Do NOT use this as an excuse of poor grades or MCAT score. The unfiltered reality is that a doctor MUST have competency in diagnosis and know what he or she is doing. If you got poor grades because of your medical condition, it does NOT prove that you would have had a decent grade otherwise. The same thing goes for college ranking. Just because you got a 3.2 at Princeton and were under a harsh curve, it doesn't mean you would've gotten a 3.8 at another school. It's unfair to other applicants to make that kind of assumption. So if you got any low grades during this period, don't use that as an excuse. But your overall GPA is strong so this shouldn't be too much of a concern to you.

2) Make sure that you express how this has helped you understand medicine better, rather than why this makes you more competitive. If you get hung up on trying to manifest a leverage based on your experience (which, by the wording of your post, strongly implies that you are) that is more transparent than IR radiation going through a symmetrical bond.

I appreciate the response, I definitely don't think I deserve to be more competitive based off what I went through though, just merely wondering how it affects my chances. I didn't mention it in my PS as leverage, it's what drove me to pursue medicine and what motivates me everyday. Hope it doesn't come off as anything more.
 
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