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Try some other community service in your area (soup kitchen, food bank, Habitat for Humanity etc). Primary care shadowing as well to get to 50 hours since your only exposure has been to ENT.>2000 additional hours as a scribe/MA at ENT clinic
100-200 additional hours as ESL teacher (I can't continue with food dist. program because I have moved from where my college is)
BCPM upward trend is 3.09 freshman year, 3.13 sophomore year, n/a junior, 3.93 for combined summer before senior year and senior year. More than half of my BCPM credits were completed in that last summer+senior year section.
So I read your personal statement as linked above, and I have to say I really hope you rewrite everything from scratch. The biggest thing I noticed was the utter lack of passion towards medicine, no connection with you and other people, or the humanity of medicine. Most careers in medicine are clinical and patient-facing, and you will have to demonstrate a passion for working with and talking to people. Everything you spoke about related only to academics, classes you took, and how you felt about certain subjects. I have to ask, does organic chemistry really drive people toward medicine? Will your initial enjoyment of organic chemistry keep you sane throughout the grueling hours of residency and 24-hour shifts?
You seem to have many hours working in clinical settings and specifically as a scribe. If I were an admissions committee member I would want to read a story about a time you felt emotionally impacted by a patient or did something uncomfortable or new in this setting, and how that make you feel invested in this career path. You mention how every patient is different, diverse, etc but have no specific story to connect you to these patients. Start journaling your patient encounters. If the only thing medicine means to you is “a career, I guess, because nothing else worked out” you will not be selected for an interview.
I also noticed you brought up some concerns with a career in medicine but didn’t address them. You admit you were worried about the long years of training and heavy coursework but didn’t mention that you changed how you feel about this. I wouldn’t mention any hesitation towards medicine in a way that you can’t directly address, backed up with experience, how you were absolutely proved wrong and that you know you can do it. If you don’t really have that experience I would leave out mentioning hesitation.
Please don’t take this personally, but overall as a reader, I found it very hard to ‘like’ you. Your passages made you appear as a noncommittal, wishy-washy, passionless student, just sort of letting the tide take you wherever. In your next draft, I would lead with an impactful patient story and let the rest of the paragraphs support your drive toward MEDICINE. Anything about other career paths or hobbies in the personal statement just takes away from your hypothetical future as a physician.
Good luck!
It is perfectly fine to write about what you've learned from seeing the same patients multiple times and how you have enjoyed developing relationships with patients. You do not need a dramatic ED scene, and I encourage you to stay away from that kind of writing as well. That is a misconception people have since some older personal statements that were published in articles and books relied on this kind of setting heavily.Don't get me wrong, I do have a lot of great memories from interacting with patients, mostly from the patients that have been to the clinic a million times and I have developed a relationship with. Maybe it's just that it feels weird to me to talk about ordinary, everyday interactions in response to the question "why do you want to go to medical school". I want to go to medical school because I really like medicine, not because I helped one particular patient and it was super epic.
I’ve considered a lot of other options, but I think medicine suits me quite well. Subjectively, it also just feels like the right way to go. At this point it’s hard to see myself doing anything else, so here’s hoping you accept me.
It can be hard to pin down which experiences best represent those feelings that can be hard to put into words. It might help to first just draft up a bunch of paragraphs about meaningful experiences and then see if any common themes arise out of them. Then you can try to organize your strongest narrative out of those ideas and themes. This will help you avoid falling into the "chronology" trap where you are just explaining year by year what you did.I think this is really a big thing that I struggled with. I can think of lots of times I felt emotional/impacted at work. Being in the room during a new cancer diagnosis (terrible feeling). Asking a patient how they feel at a postop visit and being told that they feel fantastic. Pushing a patient's wheelchair out to their car (I love doing this). One patient, an very severe older guy, told me he thought I would make a great doctor. He didn't just say it, he looked me in the eye for a solid two or three seconds and really meant it, like he wanted me to take it to heart. That felt really good.
I can also think of things that were uncomfortable - doing a nasopharyngeal covid swab on a child (feels bad). The first few times I talked to patients about their test results. Relaying a patient's history to one of the doctors and forgetting stuff.
I still haven't fully figured out how to use these experiences to answer the question "why medicine". Perhaps I am a person more motivated by feelings than facts and I have a hard time pinning down why I feel the way I do about certain things. I am going to figure it out though.