Personal Statement for Medicine

Reflecting on your work experiences, wider reading and other relevant activities will form the bulk of the main body of your personal statement. Reflection is imperative to a successful application. A well-reflected personal statement shows that you have given serious thought to healthcare as a life-long career and goes down extremely well with the admission officers. The General Medical Council (GMC) have created a guide for medical students about reflection – most of the information is transferrable to medical applicants.

It is crucial to understand that the lessons and skills that you take away from an experience are far more superior to the number of activities you have undertaken or descriptions of consultations you may have seen. Therefore, this section will delve deeper into how you should reflect on an experience whilst undertaking it, as well as how this reflection can be incorporated concisely into your personal statement.

How to reflect on an experience

Below are some general questions to think about when reflecting on any type of experience you have partaken in, ranging from clinical work experience placements to leadership roles, voluntary commitments, and part time jobs.

• Description of the experience: what was your role? If you are telling a story, what happened or what was the task at hand?
• Feelings and thoughts about the experience. What resonated with you or affected you the most?
• Analysis and evaluation of the experience: what went well and what didn’t? Which parts stood out to you? Did you have any challenging experiences? How did you deal with them?
• Conclusion and action plan: summary of what you learned and what you could have done differently, and how you could relate this to your development as a doctor.

How to reflect on your learning

The following questions will help you reflect and think critically about learning experiences. This includes anything you have read, listened to, or watched to gain a deeper insight into the life of a medical student and/or doctor.

• Description: What is the idea or concept you have been exposed to?
• Feelings and thoughts about what you have learned. What resonated with you or affected you the most?
• Analysis: Is there anything that drew your attention, or anything you found challenging? Does this build upon what you had previously known or read about? Has it changed the way you think, opened your eyes to something new, or made you more confident and assured in a belief you already had?
• Conclusion and action plan: What other avenues of this concept would you like to explore? How can you implement what you’ve learned in your clinical practice?

How to include reflection in your medicine personal statement?

Before you sit down and start typing away at your statement, we highly suggest that you first read through all of the reflective notes you wrote when undertaking any experience or activity which gave you an insight into medicine. This will allow you to look back at all of the wonderful experiences you have had and focus on the key points you can take away from them.

There are so many different approaches you can take to reflective writing in your personal statement and different people prefer different methods. For example, you can structure your reflection according to Gibb’s reflective cycle. Another approach is the ‘STARR’ framework which stands for ‘Situation, Task, Action, Result and Reflection’ This is often a favourite among applicants for medicine interviews but can also be used in the personal statement to write structured reflections.

• Situation: What is the setting in which you have undertaken your experience?
• Task: What was the position or role you held?
• Action: What actions did you specifically carry out on a regular basis?
• Results: What was the most relevant and significant outcome of your activities?
• Reflection: What skills and knowledge have you acquired as a result of this activity? How and why had this experience influence you?

Work experience can be loosely defined as any activity which is designed to sufficiently broaden your understanding of a particular career path. The aim of this section is to provide you with examples of the different types of work experiences you can undertake and how you should go about reflecting on them in your personal statement.

Why is medicine work experience important?

Most students will feel that work experience gives the most realistic perspective of medicine as a career. Through shadowing in consultations, watching surgeries, and perhaps even just being in a clinical environment, you will start to build your understanding of the role of a doctor. Applying to medical school is a huge commitment, so exploring the working life of a physician is definitely a wise thing to do. Work experience allows you to gain valuable skills that may be useful throughout your university life and your career as well.

Moreover, work experience is evidence to show that you have taken time to find out more about the realities of a career in medicine. Therefore, it is a vital aspect of the not only the personal statement but your medical school application as a whole. The purpose and overall aim of your work experience will broadly fall into one or more of the following categories:

• To understand the realities of life as a doctor and medical student
• To develop the skills and qualities needed for a career in medicine
• To acquire more knowledge about your particular interests

Traditional medicine work experience

Firstly, we will consider traditional in-person work experience activities, which are usually undertaken in a healthcare environment. This can include hospital, general practise, or pharmacy shadowing placements, as well as voluntary roles in a care home or hospice. To make the most out of these types of experiences, we would recommend the following:

• Listen to the types of questions that healthcare professionals use when taking a history or interacting with patients. What did you think about their interactions with patients? How do they adapt their communication style?
• Ask questions. This is an opportunity to ask all those burning questions, do not be shy! If possible, ask questions to a wide range of health care professionals about each of their individual roles as well as their experiences working in a multi-disciplinary team.
• Try to look up one of the common conditions that you have seen during your placement and are interested in finding out more about it.

The above points will form the basis of your reflection, so it is important to start thinking about them as you go along your work experience. Keep a reflective diary to jot down these thoughts and experiences. This diary will become especially useful when sitting down to write your personal statement.

Tips for writing about medical work experience

• Mention the transferrable skills and attitudes you will have developed. Sills such as teamwork, communication, problem solving and resilience in the face of adversity are vital to a career in medicine.
• State clearly the insights you have gained. For example, as the GP demonstrates active listening and shows empathy, you will see that the patient immediately opens up and gives more information which will be helpful in establishing a diagnosis. If this resonates with you, include this in your personal statement.
• It is important to show that you understand the challenges a doctor will face. Be sure to reflect on any negative experiences, which made you more aware of the demanding nature of the profession. What could have been done differently in the scenario you witnessed?
• Be as concise as possible, descriptions should be kept to a minimum. It is more important to highlight your thoughts, understanding and values before and after an experience, rather than details about the experience itself.

Avoid

• Viewing medical work experience as merely a tick box exercise. Try not to view work experience as the requirement for university statements or interviews. Instead, you should view this as a learning opportunity for yourself, so that you can develop both academically and personally. If you have this mindset, you will be able to truly discover a lot more about the subject and about yourself too!
• Concerning yourself too much with the medical jargon and knowledge you come across on your work experience, whether in-person or virtual. Focus on the attitudes and transferrable skills, and definitely do try to explore the science but ultimately medical school will teach you the required knowledge for your career
• Breaching confidentiality when writing about your work experience, whether it be in your personal statement or reflective diary. This means that you do not include any identifiable information in your personal statement, such as, ‘I witnessed Mr Smith undergoing an ECG’.

Volunteering is the idea of offering your time or skills to benefit an unrelated person or organisation with no formal payment in return.

Relevant volunteering can be considered a form of work experience and can greatly enhance your personal statement. Whilst grades are important, medical schools are also highly interested in students who exhibit genuine care and compassion. Doing voluntary work can highlight this side of you and give some insight into the life of a doctor, which is very much a caring profession. Volunteering can assist you in developing the necessary skills and qualities relevant to medicine.

The types of volunteering roles and commitments you can include in your personal statement, can vary extensively. Moreover, the volunteering you have undertaken does not need to be within a healthcare setting. It is more important that you can reflect on your experiences and appreciate how the skills you have developed are relevant to career in medicine. Below are just some examples of voluntary roles you may include in your personal statement:

• Carehome/hospice volunteer
• Hospital volunteer
• School mentor
• Charity shop assistant
• Youth group coordinator
• Foodbank volunteer

Tips for writing about voluntary roles

• Emphasise any long-term or frequent volunteering commitments. This shows commitment to medicine and determination. Whilst long term volunteering is favoured, do not worry if you were unable to complete any due to the pandemic!
• Use buzzwords alluding to the relevant skills and qualities learnt.
• Discuss briefly how you found any volunteering opportunities, especially if you organised it yourself. This shows initiative! If an opportunity is extremely rare or competitive, make sure to highlight this.
• Group together experiences where you gained similar skills and insights, rather than discussing multiple experiences individually. This can get messy and take up a lot of your time
• Speak about your feelings and emotions during your volunteering! This shows you are human and comes across much more genuine and sincere.
• Clearly state your contribution and actions, not someone else’s!
• Discuss any sacrifices, mistakes, or challenges you faced during your volunteering. Also make sure you are prepared to describe what you did/would do differently to overcome these challenges!

Avoid

• Rambling on about experiences, use the STARR structure to organise thoughts. Keep it concise!
• Writing a long list of all the voluntary roles you have ever held. Focus on one or two that you benefitted from greatly and reflect on them.
• Repeating experiences, certain insights, or qualities. Demonstrate variety in what you have learned.
• Lie or exaggerate any details!
• Superficially state what happened. If you are able to, delve further into your thoughts before, during and after volunteering.

When it comes to extra-curriculars, it easy to get confused on what you should include and how to include it in your personal statement. As an aspiring medic, you might have done many different activities at school (and outside) that may be related, or seemingly have nothing to do with each other. This could range from part time jobs, to being a prefect in your school, societies, clubs or even your personal hobbies or sporting interests.

In your personal statement, a great way to tie it all together is to use your activities to reflect on how they made you the person you are today. Instead of simply listing all of your positions or engagements, think about what qualities you were able to gain from them that would make you a better doctor. Among others, qualities like compassion, empathy, time management, organisation, critical thinking, teamwork, and leadership are essential in medicine, but they’re not necessarily born in a hospital or through direct engagement in clinical experiences. You have probably been doing some of these activities for a really long time, now let’s frame it in a different context for your application.

Quality over quantity

In a large pool of applicants, it is easy to think ‘have I done enough?’. Sometimes, this can be the wrong question to ask, as most medical schools do not look at the ‘number’ of things you have done, but rather how the things you’ve done can help you as a doctor. Do not worry if you have not done a lot of activities in your time at school. The number of things you’ve done doesn’t matter as much as what you’ve learned from them, how you’ve reflected on them and extracted moments and experiences you can work on, and how you’ve later developed as a person and an aspiring medic based on those experiences.

What Goes Where?

With a limited number of characters, every word counts. You want to make sure you make the most of everything you have done, but at the same time frame it in the most effective way for your application. This is why you might want to focus on some activities over others, or group some activities together to give yourself space to write about and reflect on your experiences in a more elaborate way, and relate them to your future career. There are many ways you can group your activities, mainly either by the type of activity (academic, sports, or volunteering for example), or based on what qualities or skills you’ve developed as a result of partaking in this activity.

Should I include my hobbies?

The short answer is yes, if you want to, but – make sure you’re not just taking up space by listing them. You don’t need to elaborate on them too much if you don’t want to, but try to strike the balance so as to show the admissions committee you value your time spent doing these hobbies, but at the same time you’re not taking away from all the other elements of your personal statement. You could also relate them to having work-life balance – an essential trait in medicine.

Tips for writing about extra-curricular activities

• Use your experiences to highlight your strengths and your skills. How did your activity help you develop a unique skill?
• Focus on the activities that have benefited you the most.
• Elaborate with insight and introspection on the activities you’ve chosen to focus on.
• Group other activities together to help you use your limited characters where they matter most.

Avoid

• Listing things, you have done without further elaborating on them.
• Elaborating on every single activity, or being repetitive – if they sound similar, group them, or take some out if you don’t think they’re important.
• Faking interest or passion in something you do not actually like or mention an activity you did not really do. It takes away from the space you have to talk about things you are passionate about, which is a lot more valuable and impactful.

This is your final chance to make an impression on the admissions tutor, so make it count! The aim of your conclusion should be to tie together the key points that you included in the main body of your personal statement. Along with the introduction, this is one of the most difficult parts to write, so writing both at the end, after you have a coherent idea of the ebb and flow of your piece is advisable.

Ideally, it should only be a few sentences long. Make sure you give yourself plenty of time to revisit your conclusion multiple times before submitting. It is important to end on a confident note by expressing a real passion for medicine.

Tips

• Summarise and reiterate your key points – skills, experiences, and interests and how these make you suitable for studying medicine. For example, if your experiences have taught you the importance of resilience, how will this skill help you to progress in your future career?
• Mention the takeaway points that you want the admission tutor to remember about you.
• Revisit your conclusion and read it aloud to yourself. Reading it out to yourself and others helps to determine if you’re being concise and getting straight to the point without waffling.
• Write a couple of drafts of different conclusions and choose the one you like the most or combine ideas.
• Acknowledge the difficulties and demanding nature of studying medicine and show how the skills you’ve developed will assist you in overcoming difficulties.

Avoid

• Writing a conclusion which is too long. You will probably find that the 4000- character limit of the personal statement will restrict the length of your conclusion. So ideally, one or two succinct sentences should be more than enough to summarise.
• Introducing completely new points – you do not want to leave the admissions tutor confused by bringing in new ideas that you cannot elaborate on further.
• As with the introduction, avoid clichés and quotes.
• Avoid repeating sentences form your main body of the personal statement.
• Avoid making your conclusion too specific to one university. For example, don’t mention a particular teaching style if it is not offered by all the universities that you are applying for.

Now that you have written your personal statement, the hard part is over, right? Well, in all honesty you might find yourself spending more time editing your personal statement than writing it! It is important to give yourself enough time to perfect your personal statement before the deadline. Our advice at this point is – before you start editing, put your personal statement away. By the time you have finished writing, you will have read and re-read it countless times in the process. You need to take the time away from it to get a fresh look. This will be invaluable when you start editing.

Spelling, punctuation, and grammar

First things first, triple-check that your word processor has spell-check on with UK English, so that you can correct any spelling mistakes. It may sound obvious; however, technology can often malfunction!

You are a school-age pupil, so the piece should sound like you wrote it. It does not have to sound like you have taken letter-writing classes and have used a thesaurus on every other word. However, you also need to come across professional. It is best not to use contractions such as don’t (do not), as it is too informal. Make sure you have used a combination of long and short sentences so that it has structure, as well as making sure every sentence doesn’t start with ‘I’.

There are many ways of making sure your personal statement reads well. One method, which is particularly helpful is to read your personal statement aloud to someone else. It becomes very obvious when a sentence is too long, does not flow or make sense when you say it aloud. The person listening will be able to tell you which parts do not sound right. When we write, we often overestimate how well the writing sounds, because you will of course know what you meant to say. However, to another person and the admissions team reading it – you want them to know exactly what you mean, rather than having to decode paragraphs that are not crystal clear

You could try asking an English teacher at your school, or a friend who is studying English to read through it. The spelling, grammar and syntax is independent of the content, and so this could be really useful in ensuring it flows well.

Seeking another opinion

Whilst it may seem tempting to gain as many opinions as possible on your personal statement, it is better to seek the advice of a few trusted individuals. The medicine personal statement is by nature a subjective piece of writing. Having too many people read your personal statement and suggest changes, can become quite confusing and stressful very quickly! Listed below are some tips to help avoid this situation.

• Make sure you are close to your final draft before giving your personal statement to someone else to read. However, still ensure you have enough time to make changes.
• If your school has a careers advisor or team of teachers familiar with reading personal statements, it is worth having your personal statement read and critiqued by them.
• When listening to feedback from others, consider all you can get, but don’t be afraid to not include all the feedback you receive since your personal statement should be truly reflective of only you.
• If you would really like a raw opinion, find a way to have a teacher read it anonymously! The admissions tutor will be reading your personal statement with no knowledge of who you are. If you want someone to read your personal statement with no knowledge of your background, print off a copy with your details omitted.

Tips to shorten your personal statement

• Do not waste characters writing about things that are elsewhere on your UCAS form. For example, your A-level (or equivalent) choices can all be entered in the qualifications section.
• Remove unnecessary adverbs such as somewhat, rather, sometimes, fairly, pretty really, quite, basically, hopefully, luckily.
• Use the verb form of a word over the noun form – this should reduce words. For example, ‘I created a MedSoc’ vs ‘A MedSoc was created by me’
• Print off your personal statement to edit and cut words. Print it off in a different font to the one you typed it in. This will provide an experience of looking at your personal statement with ‘fresh eyes’.
• Use the ‘Build, Blur, Corrode’ method to identify the weakest parts of your personal statement.
• If you cannot bear to cut sentences, copy and paste them into a document called ‘Scrap’, that way you know exactly where to find them if you were to want to add them again.
• When focusing on a specific paragraph, copy it into a new black document and separate each sentence with a line between them. Use this technique to perfect each individual sentence and identify those that are too long.
• When retelling encounters from your work experience, detail of what exactly happened is not always necessary!