[00:07] Torah: Hello, welcome to the Prep Me Podcast. I’m Torah, and as always, I’m here with Chansey. I can’t seem to get rid of him.

[00:13] Chansey: I’m stuck here. I’m not going anywhere.

[00:15] Torah: And today we are talking about the personal essay. But before we get to that, let’s talk about sponsorship. We have a wonderful sponsor, Prep 101. They are your all-inclusive vacation for MCAT prep. You get everything, you get all the materials, all the amazing instructors, all the practice exams, and all the instructions you need to rock your score on test day. Now let’s do it Prep Me listeners, Let’s ask Chansey a simple question. Why did you want to be a doctor? Isn’t that the basis of the personal essay? Is that the first question? Why do you want to be a doctor?

[00:49] Chansey: Because I want to help people. Next question Torah.

[00:51] Torah: Yeah. Right. Okay. So what was in your personal essay?

[00:55] Chansey: Which draft of the personal essay?

[00:57] Torah: How many did you write?

[01:00] Chansey: There were probably two or three versions and then I picked the version I liked and then I sent that out to people and I drafted off that. So, I don’t know, three versions and then maybe four or five drafts after that, just trying to hone the language and the sales pitch, I guess over time. So quite a few.

[01:17] Torah: Okay. So what is the purpose of the personal essay in an application?

[01:22] Chansey: Okay, and this is sort of two lenses. It’s one as somebody who’s written one and it’s one as somebody who’s tried to appraise and review them. I think of it as your first written impression because on an MCAT or a medical school application, you spend so much time filling in line items for an autobiography for your academics, your MCAT, you name it. This is your first chance to really speak in your tone, and your language and try to sell yourself as a candidate and make an admissions committee excited to meet you and feel like you meet the objectives of that program and what they’re trying to get out of their medical students. So sales pitch is one word I’d give it. I’d give it my first impression. And it’s your chance to speak probably direct, as directly as you can without being in person to somebody on the admissions committee.

[02:09] Torah: I feel like if I was to write a personal essay, especially now that I’m older. And I’m kind of out of academia and that hardcore academic, really clinical cold writing, I feel like my personal essay would be really casual. I mean, not having ellipses and like, Hey, what’s up? But just have a familiar tone to it. So should the personal essay be formal, bow tie kind of tone, or like a, let’s sit and have a beer kind of tone?

[02:41] Chansey: I see. And from helping students, like the listeners that are applying and being like the unofficial reviewer and editor to being the one who’s actually in the role of running my own. And I had all the above and I see all of the above as more casual essays. There’s a trend in medicine for these personal statements to start almost with a narrative, like jumping right into a story, which is just, I mean, the proof is in the pudding that you can be more engaged as a reviewer when you’re jumped and thrown into a situation rather than addressing the question by repeating the question, which you’re not only wasting word count, but you’re really boring to some degree the reviewer because they’re like, okay, this is just like the other 50% of essays that as unappealing as a reviewer.

[03:23] And I lose my attention within the first 60 to 90 seconds and I’m going in, kind of like me doing a CARS passage. If I don’t go in with that enthusiasm, I can’t keep it going in real time as I get through the rest of the passage. The same thing’s true of a personal statement, which is I want to be engaged from the get-go. And I’m not saying you need to start your essay by saying, I just jumped out of the plane. My adrenaline was thriving. I was looking at the ground below me wondering would this shoot go? That’s one end. That’s very much one end of the spectrum versus some folks that talk about, their opening line might be, I remember my last day of rotation in a hospital as a volunteer.

[03:59] I’m like, Oh, you volunteered at a hospital. Tell me more. Like you’ve got me in the first sentence. So a lot of those narratives tend to be where the majority of essays are going, but it’s not a requirement. There are lots of people that start with a quote, an analogy, a reflection of a piece of literature, and then tying in why that makes a good opening for them as a person and again, selling themselves. So that’s one way to go about it I’d say is to take the narrative approach. But other people are very casual in that approach too. They’ll really use their language and you just have to be careful because you don’t want grammatical and spelling errors and things like that, but just don’t want to be you.

[04:33] Torah: So what you’re really doing is almost like a dating profile. Like, do you want to meet me? Can you meet me? 

[04:39] Chansey: Pretty much. That’s not a bad way to put it.

[04:43] Torah: Okay. So I feel like mine if I was to write one, I mean I know my story like I know my story very clearly, it would be because, I don’t want to be a doctor, you guys are crazy. You like to deal with blood and stuff. But if I was. My daughter was born Chansey and I have talked about this a lot with a heart defect. She has a nightmare. I mean, it was a nightmare. As it was the nurse came in. I was in labor like I was fully in labor, contractions were close. And the nurse comes in and is like, oh, as the doc comes to talk to you about your little ones VSD? I was like, no. And then she left. So we were left with our phones VSD infant and it was like a potentially fatal hole in the heart. 

[05:31] And that’s how I found out. And I just feel like I had wonderful care for so many places, but there was this moment where I felt so helpless. I felt as a parent, you stop all conscious and reasonable thought once you are a parent, let alone during the birthing process. And all of it was just such a blur and it was so hard and I felt like, man if I could be a doctor and help people through situations like that, and particularly parents who don’t know the right questions to ask, all these things are just, you’re so helpless. And if I could empower a parent in any way to navigate, I’d probably be some kind of pediatrician or like you chance like some sort of dealing with the parents and kids. And I feel like that would be a fulfilling role for me in my life and I could really add a lot because of my personal experience. So I think that would be a powerful personal essay, right?

[06:29] Chansey: And you’ve given that example, you’ve opened the door if you so allow us to go down it as giving us like a real time example, if you were applying to medicine this year and you were to use that as the foundation of your essay, we can kind of deconstruct what would be good things to mention because the situation is scary. It involves more instinct than it does like academic excellence because you don’t know what a VSD at the time is. You’re learning on your phone, you’re scared for your baby, you have a partner involved, you have family wondering what’s going on. You’re wondering what the next 30 minutes, hour two hours means and the future. 

[06:58] So in an essay it’s so vulnerable to bring that up. And as a reader, I’m intrigued and I want to know more and I commend that applicant and you in this case of being vulnerable. But now I want to know you’ve lived that. How does that take you down this journey and what about that experience motivated you, well say you want to go into medicine. Motivated you now and like you hit on points of I want to improve the experience because maybe you didn’t like how it went over with a random RN coming in, giving you a piece of information that was the first time you heard it and then exiting the room. Not a great way to deliver something that is pretty serious. 

[07:33] Torah: Well that’s the thing. So I have that story. I don’t want anybody else to have that story. It was not a good one. And I know a lot of people who are like, well should I reveal my own personal medical journey? But what if you don’t have that? What if you have almost no interactions with the healthcare field because you’re so lucky as to have lived such a healthy life and you’ve never even done so much as break a bone. You don’t have that story to tell.

[08:04] Chansey: No. And a lot of people won’t. A lot of people aren’t going to have the firsthand patient experience or even like in your case, sort of a first to second person case experience. They do exist. But I’m not looking for somebody to obviously fabricate a situation or overstretch details of an experience in the healthcare field. But if you have it and it truly was a motivating piece or even if it wasn’t the first spark for medicine, if it was just like a reassurance like yes this experience I’ve learned that I can do better. I learned that I want to be the person who came in that room. I want to be the person that’s there because I want to be an obstetrician or whatever it is, run with it. 

[08:35] If you don’t have it, you need to find other ways. You need to think about what have I done in life that I can draw a comparison to that will make me a strong doctor or gave me the idea that I want to pursue this in the first place. Like you need to try to convince me that you know what you’re getting yourself into. And either that’s from experience from yourself or from others or what you’ve understood or maybe you’ve been able to draw comparisons between being a musician and a physician. I’m interested. Get me in. Let’s hear it.

[09:01] Torah: Okay, so without revealing too much, I know obviously you can’t speak to too much but what are some of the more creative, where it’s a stretch to relate a personal experience to medicine, like being a musician or something but yet it worked and you were like, huh, this person has a mature outlook on what it takes to be a doctor and all the different strengths that they might bring to it.

[09:27] Chansey: I’ll tell you, I’ll give you one that does not involve, like you said, a patient experience directly or the individual did not have a medical diagnosis. It was, and it is actually a theater musician major that I think of and they would never mind and I won’t disclose name, but their essay was so different and so unique and so refreshing for somebody who didn’t have those set experiences in medicine. They literally jumped in and we were describing what it was like to perform like one of their final examinations and everything that they felt in their body at that time. From the adrenaline to the sweating to the heart rate, to the anxiety to the feeling that they were going to vomit, to feeling vulnerable, having people judge them, having people looking at them that know way more than they do and have way more experience in evaluating them and what that felt like.

[10:05] And then essentially saying, I think all these things happen in patients and they describe what patients go through in their opinion and what parents go through and what they would go through as a physician and how what they’ve undergone as a musician and the rigors of going through that program, how it could be employed in the medical profession. And of course they talked about almost more real world people experiences that motivated them to go into medicine that aren’t directly healthcare per se, but wanting to take those skills and apply it to an intellect in this case because they did sort of an undergrad, started in bio and always did sort of health sciences but music is where they ended up but now they want to come back and find marriage between the two. And I thought it was just beautifully done and very original. And I mean they got a seat in med school so the personal essay went great. 

[10:52] Torah: Then that’s the thing. So how much does the personal essay matter in the application?

[10:55] Chansey: Oh gosh. Yeah. It kind of depends on the school and if the school even wants a personal statement. You’ll see across Canada because I read up on this so that I actually know what’s going on. A lot of schools still require personal essays, but you know what’s changed is they don’t want this like 2000 or 3000 word one document entity. They’re instead breaking down the essay into like topics essentially mini essays, like the multi mini interview that we’ve discussed in the past, this is like the multi personal statement submission where they’re going to ask you five questions and they want maybe 250 to 500 words on each question and they’re doing it because they find, as you alluded to, personal essays can be so different and written so different and have so many different experiences. But if we want to really gauge objectives and attributes of a candidate, let’s give them a specific question, still allow them to run with it, draw on experience, provide exact examples, but hone in a little bit on what we’re asking of them and directing them a little bit more. And you see this a lot with Dalhousie now, with UFT, UBC, they’re going towards these multi statements rather than the, not archaic but maybe a bit further back as of at least 2019 before COVID the big statements. So there is a transition for sure.

[12:08] Torah: Do they still allow room for that creativity?

[12:11] Chansey: Oh for sure. I mean it depends. Creativity in a word count, which for me is not my strength. I try to be concise but I find I need more words than most to kinda get my point across. Maybe you’re different, when you write large bodies of text you find you can do it in 250 words or do you think you need like a thousand?

[12:26] Torah: I’m pretty, to the point so I can get it across. Yeah.

[12:30] Chansey: So then you’re great. But for someone like me going through this process again or any listeners that might be something you need to work on, is you really need to think about how do I write why I want to be a position or what altruism means to me or this particular quote from an old health text and how it relates to my life. How do I get my response out in 250 words? That might be the hardest part of writing these things for people. It’s not the content, it’s just how I get it in the word count so that I feel like I’ve really hit the point of quality over quantity. That’s tough.

[13:00] Torah: The other thing, I just hear you saying that altruism one, my knee jerk reaction to this is there these vampire bats that display sharing of meals between non-kin. But because it’s reciprocated and I just feel like I would, I probably, because I’d be willing to take a lot more risks in an application, probably kind of what does altruism mean to me? It would be like these vampire bats who like sharing blood between them and it’s just a really cool story and I think it’s a really good example of the biological basis of altruism and how I see it. But I don’t know if people who really are sitting there and say like, I really want to go into medicine, this means so much to me. Do you say take that risk or do you go, whoa, let’s just stay a little bit more into the formula?

[13:45] Chansey: Right, like do you stay in your lane or do you say I’m going to take this back road here and just see where it goes. I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. It depends on where you go with it. I think you need to be able to circle back because you could go altruism for like a species working in an above symbiotic relationship if you’re going the bio route, but then be way, way off by the time you circle back and say, and that’s why I want to be a doctor. I think if you can tie it in, why not? Like there are no rules to a personal statement. It’s just, you know the objectives and the objectives are two parts. Part one, the way I think about it would be schools will list what they want in an applicant and many schools are going to base it on canned meds.

These particular attributes that they believe and in the country we believe makes a strong holistic practicing position. You can be a professional, you can be a communicator, you can be an advocate, you can be an academic, all of these have to factor in and you’re not expected to write a paragraph on each, but you should be able to draw on some of these objectives and how maybe an experience or you now meet that certain objective or you’ve begun your journey down that objective. So that’s one guide I’d say, not a rule but a guide. And then two is, you know this is a sales pitch so you need to be able to take this, read it yourself, have others read it and come back and say, you know what? I was interested in that. Or oh I learned something about you by that. Or oh you really explain that in more detail. And I can see the connection to medicine. So these are like Chansey’s guides, they’re not dogma, they’re not rules. But I think this is what works for a lot of people.

[15:06] Torah: Okay. And you said this twice now, you have other people read it. Who?

[15:10] Chansey: Anybody and everybody. Have you ever been asked to read a personal letter? Has it ever come up?

[15:14] Torah: Yeah and I feel really weird giving feedback because often they’re the exact same story. When I was in the hospital and watching my grandparent die, I realized I wanted to be a doctor.

[15:22] Chansey: And what do you do for feedback on that? So you’ve read one or two, you’ve been in the medical realms.

[15:26] Torah: I’ve seen like 20 like that.

[15:28] Chansey: Okay, so what feedback do you give? What’s honest?

[15:30] Torah: I’d say you’d need to be a lot more personal and a lot more creative because I’ve seen this letter a million times.

[15:36] Chansey: And do they ever come back with like a revision and say okay, how about now have you seen like an after project from people or is it sort of like advice and then they run away? 

[15:44] Torah: Well I think I also scare them away because you know, you want the positive feedback because by the time they come to me, like they’re former prof, they’ve probably already put a lot of work into this and then I’m like go back to the drawing board, which is maybe not what I should be doing, but no, a couple of my former students also would come with the second version and it was better. But I would still say the ones that I’ve seen, and again you’ve seen way more, but the ones that I have seen, it’s almost not personal enough. It’s like they’re writing what they think the committee wants to see instead of writing how they really want to answer the question.

[16:27] Chansey: Again it’s that marriage of yes you want to be able to show that you did some reading on them or you have some element of their curriculum or objective that you think you fit that mold or you want to train under that mold. But you have to be personal enough so that I get to know you. And I get to understand your aspirations and maybe it’s coming from a place of an experience like we talked about. Maybe it’s just coming from something you did like a job, other experiences like drawing them into your essay so that you can expand on something that you might have been limited on in another part of the application. I’ll give you an example, some people don’t come into medical school and have that killer GPA.

[17:03] Maybe they do average to good in the MCAT and they met the requirement but their GPA is just there. Some people will use the personal statement as a way to address that. And then hardships come up, and I’m not talking about health or medical hardships, but other hardships, whether it be personally or involving something around them. They come out in that essay. And that level of maturity to appraise like false and hardship is very, very, I commend it, I think it’s pretty inspiring sometimes to read that and that essay didn’t spend any time mentioning altruism or mentioning I was a paramedic or I was a doctor, I was a nurse, which are all fine things, but it’s just to motivate those that don’t have the luxury or maybe they’re fortunate enough is a better word to not have had lived those experiences. But you have so much more to offer. You just have to think about how you’re going to spin it and like you said, make it personal so I don’t feel like I’m just reading, these are all the things you want, I am all these things and that’s it. Like give me context.

[17:54] Torah: Okay. So should you get your parents, your partners to read it and reflect and say does this sound like me?

[18:04] Chansey: Before getting there, I have a question for you and I will reflect in my response. Do you remember being a little younger than we are now and having to, you’re in research, like handing your first version of a grant and being nervous to send it in? Like, did I do enough work? Like what did that feel like? 

[18:17] Torah: It was terrifying. I was terrified. It was my first year at grad school and I wrote a paper and I sent it to my supervisor who was super cool and wonderful and I was still absolutely terrified. And then thinking that anyone in the world would read it, nobody did. It was about worm gonads but nobody actually read it. But even the idea that it was like going to be published in a scene. Ah, terrifying.

[18:41] Chansey: Right? Like a lump in your throat. And that’s something that I don’t know, I think when I do anything for the first time with you, I always have a little bit of that. But going back to being in undergrad or grad school and thinking of having somebody read something so personal to me and something that was so important to me because it was that stepping stone to medicine was very overwhelming. And these stats, I’m just pulling out of the air, but I would say at least half, if not a third, people will never send their personal essay to somebody for revision or a review. And it really hurts them, right? Because then it’s really siloed to what they think of the essay and their appraisal and they don’t have that feedback from others like you have had in the 20 some experiences. Whether they are really short and sweet, I’m going to be honest and I tell people, I’m going to be honest too, this might sound really rude and it might be hurtful and this is not a magic formula.

[19:30] I can’t guarantee that my revisions are going to get you to med school. But my opinion is, like you said, this is not personal enough. You spend way too much time talking about this. You talked about 10 experiences and not one of them has any depth. So it seems like there are too many ideas here. That’s intimidating. So to come back to send it to somebody and to think, okay, somebody’s going to rip this apart, but as applicants, like listeners, if you’re going this route, you have to get over that and you have to send it to anyone you’re comfortable sending it to. And having diversity is helpful. Send it to Torah. She’s got an academic, professional career right now. So she understands the writing potential. She teaches the MCAT so she can think about what her idea of an applicant is as well as give you spelling and grammatical and flow, like that’s inevitable. 

[20:10] Get somebody who knows you super close, a partner, a parent, a friend, a brother or a sister to keep you honest to some degree about maybe the story, the flow. And then have somebody who’s really strong perhaps in essay writing or have somebody who’s on an admissions board who sat in the past or another professor, a physician, anybody you want. The more people you get, the better, as long as you can organize all the responses back and obviously keep track of those track changes, there’s no limit to how many people should be reviewing your essay if you’ve got the time to reach out.

[20:41] Torah: And yet you have to park your ego a bit when it comes back with like, try this, this, this, this, this. And that’s hard. It’s hard.

[20:50] Chansey: And some people won’t change. And you know what, maybe it’ll still work in the end, but some people will change. And I think, I don’t know about you, but I find like the first pass, maybe I’ve got a little bit of a guard up because I think I’ve got a good product here. But you have to set it aside, you said it. You gotta think about, well they said that for a reason, they took the time to read this. They I hope didn’t just glaze over it and then write back. I don’t like it. They gave you some context, some critical feedback and you gotta do it.

[21:16] Torah: I think that, okay, this is the advice that I felt like I was giving a lot and I’ve read a lot of like undergraduate papers, whether it’s personal or submission of a lab report. I think the dominant advice I generally give is don’t try and sound smart, you are. Try to sound like you’re communicating and you’re telling the story you’re not trying to make it sound like, use all the big words, just put the thesaurus away and use what you would normally use in normal language. And if you’re a natural writer that comes and I realize that that’s just a talent that I don’t have either. I get it. And there are the natural writers and then there are the ones who force it and it’s really obvious when it’s forced. So I think be you.

[22:04] Chansey: For sure. And don’t use that form to regurgitate things I’ve already learned about you on the application either. In med school there are so many other components, many of which we discussed in this podcast. But the personal essay does not need to be you regurgitating year one of undergrad and how well you succeeded in that academic year and year two and three and four. And tell me your grades and how you were so organized to achieve those grades. Like that needs nothing to me, it’s a waste of word space and it happens. It sounds silly that I’m mentioning it and I hope listeners are like, why would they do that? I ask the same question and it still happens. You need to talk about things that aren’t already on paper or expand on things that aren’t on paper to any level of depth.

[22:42] Torah: I feel like we’ve put a lot of pressure on the personal essay. I think that this conversation has taken it to the point where it comes with a lot of maturity and thought and sitting with it and sometimes just a lot of drafts and all those kinds of things and making it truly personal. But did the person that wrote, Hey, this was my GPA and I’m really good and blah blah, did they get in?

[23:02] Chansey: And probably not, I don’t know the outcome, but I would think, if I was reviewing that we’ve got rubrics, like everything when you’re grading and as a reviewer for an essay, I’m usually, or that person is somebody who hasn’t seen any other components of your application. So they have a very non-biased sort of approach going into it. But as individuals, we’re subjective. So we want to be. I don’t know if these are the right words, but we want to be entertained and interested and feel excited to meet you if you were going to be our doctors. And that’s the approach we’re going in with. All you have to do is be yourself. It’s just like the interview. You have to be yourself. Write the way you write, use the experiences that actually happen to you and try your best to address in some manner the objective or the reason you want to go to that particular program. And that’s the Spark note concise summary. I don’t know if I’m dating myself when I say SparkNote, is that still a thing Torah?

[23:48] Torah: I say Cole’s notes.

[23:50] Chansey: Okay. Maybe, oh gosh.

[23:51] Torah: I’m even older. The wiki page.

[23:56] Chansey: Okay. The wiki page summary, the Spark notes, Cole’s notes is to be yourself and get others to review your personal statement. The questions are pretty clear. Just try to stay to what’s being asked of you.

[24:06] Torah: Do you think you got a good grade on your personal essay?

[24:09] Chansey: I do. I worked hard on that sucker. I worked very hard and I think I had maybe seven or eight people review it Torah in the end and from different people and I got some bad feedback on some of those first drafts. But what I did is I incorporated it. I couldn’t incorporate everything because eventually it becomes not you, if you’re following too much direction from different reviewer types, but I did my best to clean it up. I remember moving paragraphs around like just restructuring it, made it a better essay and had a better narrative and more information came to the reviewer at the appropriate times. And I sent it back to those same editors because they said they would see a second draft and I got a lot more like, this is so much better. This flows so much nicer. And now you added this experience. Now I get what you’re going at when you’re talking about, oh, I want to go to UFT because of your research drive. You mentioned research now, the connections there like a lot of praise and a lot of reinforcement for a lot of work, which is what we want. 

[25:00] Torah: And we will talk and we’ll spend another episode. I’m not sure when we’ll do this, I don’t know, but we should do another episode on the autobiographical sketch because it’s not a personal essay.

[25:10] Chansey: It’s not. It’s very much not. Fewer character counts.

[25:14] Torah: Okay, good. I will do another one on the autobiographical sketch, but we will wrap now. You have been listening to the Prep Me podcast sponsored by our very generous sponsors, Prep 101. They are the ultimate MCAT prep course, so please look them up at prep101.com/mcat. But more importantly, subscribe to us. Let’s make it about us, the Prep Me podcast. Sign up and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. It’s PrepMe, all One Word. I’m Torah and Chansey. See you next time.

[25:44] Chansey: See you now.