We’ve created this online video help course to help give you the best start to your essay writing process! Feel free to read more on each topic from these videos in the lessons below as well.

Congratulations. You’ve decided to embark on probably one of the most expensive, time-consuming journeys of your life—the journey of applying to med school, which, arguably, can feel just as intensive as med school itself.

Because an undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for medical school, it’s easy to think about the application in terms of the applications you wrote five or more years ago. Because of the large number of high schoolers applying to four-year colleges and universities, a huge industry has emerged around the gatekeeping of these institutions. From the large admissions offices to the test-prep and admissions consulting programs, the audiences of these applications are a tad different from that of medical school applications.

A good story is not dictated by its content. Rather, its form dominates the way a reader perceives it. For a prospective medical school applicant, this can be quite liberating. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to what ideas you’ll want to express to the admissions committee. In fact, with tens of thousands of applicants to medical school every year, you’re not going to reinvent the wheel. Instead, you should focus on conveying your thoughts with precision and clarity.

In the admissions rounds where the essays matter most, admissions committee members spout a common refrain when discussing less-compelling applications: “I’m not convinced this person wants to be a doctor.”

While the editing and revising stage is the most crucial and intensive part of the writing process, just getting your thoughts onto the page for many people is the biggest hurdle. 
The Personal Comments essay aims to argue for medical school as the inevitable next step in your journey…

I can’t stress enough just how important the role revising and editing plays in the overall essay writing process. Whether you’re closely following an outline or just vomiting words onto a page, the process of writing is, and always will be, a loose, incomplete procedure of translating a vision in your head into words on a page or a screen. 

As discussed in Section 1, the Personal Comment essay on the Primary Application is generally the essay that one should spend the most time brainstorming, writing, and polishing. The length of this essay—around one-and-a-half pages single spaced, or 800–1000 words—allows applicants to really zoom in and discuss a moment (or, sometimes, a sequence of well-described moments) that provide foundational reasons for one to want to become a doctor.

While the Work and Activities section is often an afterthought for students, it should be considered just as important as the Personal Comment essay.
Further, a reader will encounter this section before the Personal Comment, meaning that this section has the potential to either set the tone or ruin the mood for the long-form essay to follow.

Because people are often most interested in demystifying the process of applying to the most selective of institutions, we’ll pretend we’re a highly motivated, highly accomplished prospective applicant who will only be applying to the US News and World Report Top 10 Medical Schools. 

This is not an exact science, but it does begin to make the essay responses feel a bit more manageable.

There are certainly some specific prompts for some schools, but if you group the majority of the prompts into a few umbrellas, you’ll have a starting point from which to draw the majority of your responses.

Top 10 Medical Schools that Use This Prompt:

·       If you have already graduated, briefly (4000 characters max) summarize your activities since graduation. (Harvard)

·       Have you taken or are you planning to take time off between college graduation and medical school matriculation? If so explain in 500 characters or less (Penn)

If there is an important aspect of your personal background or identity, not addressed elsewhere in the application, that you would like to share with the Committee, we invite you to do so here. Many applicants will not need to answer this question. Examples might include significant challenges in access to education, unusual socioeconomic factors, identification with a minority culture, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity. Briefly explain how such factors have influenced your motivation for a career in medicine.

The ultimate goal of our institution is to produce a population of physicians with a collective desire to improve health of all segments of our society through the outstanding patient care, research and education. In this context, where do you see your future medical career (academic medicine, research, public health, primary care, business/law, etc.) and why? Your answer need not be restricted to one category. If your plans require that you complete a dual degree program, please elaborate here. (2500 characters) (NYU)

The Admissions Committee uses a holistic approach to evaluate a wide range of student qualities and life experiences that are complementary to demonstrated academic excellence, strong interpersonal skills and leadership potential. What unique qualities or experiences do you possess that would contribute specifically to the NYU School of Medicine community? (2500 characters) (NYU)

Briefly describe your single, most rewarding experience. Feel free to refer to an experience previously described in your AMCAS application. (max 2,500 characters) (Johns Hopkins)