The Main tips
Write reflections in your notes on any experiences that are noteworthy – this means writing about you giving good customer service at work one day or about work experience etc. This will provide you with a good bank of content to put into your personal statement which you can then expand on or make more concise.
Always make links to traits of a doctor – this entails you talking about how you used a certain skill, acknowledging its importance in the life of a doctor and linking to a possible time you’ve seen a doctor use this skill in action if possible. This is a really effective way to write about different experiences as it really shows that you are aware of what it takes to be in the medical field.
Be concise – please don’t waffle! This is the worst thing you can do as you have a limited character count which seems big at first but you will realise very quickly that it will get taken up rapidly. What I mean by waffle is the parts of your statement that don’t actually provide any useful information about the experience you are talking about. An example is writing an intro to your statement about how old you are and where you went to school. This info is irrelevant and will make the person reading it uninterested. An exception to this is building a bit of context where necessary as this is necessary to show the complexity of different situations.
Find a balance between quality and quantity – mentioning 1 book effectively is better than mentioning 4 briefly. The reason why I found this to be the case is the fact that you won’t sound genuine. I know this sounds counter intuitive, but if you think about it who would you see as more genuine… a person who tells you about all the books they’ve read about medicine, or a person telling you about how one book really gave them a good insight into the reality of medicine and provided an example to back it up? I am pretty sure the second person would sound much more genuine.
You don’t need lots of drafts – I did mine in 2. The reason why you shouldn’t need so many drafts is because you should have many reflections already written up, so you should be able to put these into your word document and link them together and clean them up a bit – that’s your first draft. Then you go through and refine and adjust it more and more until you are happy. Then get a teacher you trust to give you feedback and adjust again and do this again and by then you should have a strong personal statement. Having too many drafts can make you overthink it too much which could hinder the charisma that would’ve been present in it otherwise.
Here is my Personal Statement that you can view and get inspiration from
Please make sure you don’t copy my personal statement as this would be plagiarism😅.
Please comment or DM me on instagram if you have any questions 🙂
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