Writing the Personal Statement

Source: AAMC ERAS Resources, Careers in Medicine, ISMMS Faculty and Staff

ERAS Personal Statement Guidelines

• Each personal statement must contain a Personal Statement Title and the Personal Statement Content. The title will be visible only to you to help you correctly assign it to programs, and the content will be visible to both you and the programs it is assigned to.

• The personal statement is limited to 28,000 characters, which include letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation marks.

• There is not a limit to how many personal statements applicants can create.

• Personal statements created outside the MyERAS application should be done in a plain text word processing application such as Notepad (for Windows users) or SimpleText (for Mac users). The statement should reflect your personal perspective and experiences accurately and must be your own work and not the work of another author.

• The use of AI tools is acceptable for brainstorming, proofreading, or editing the personal statement, but the final submission should represent your own work.

• Personal statements created in word processing applications not using plain text may contain hidden and invalid formatting.

The Purpose of the Personal Statement

• Introduce yourself and tell the story of your journey to the specialty

• Show how your skills and attributes align with the specialty

• Highlight unique skills, interests or goals

• Explain other parts of your application in more detail

• Establishes your attention to detail and professionalism

• Makes the program want to meet your and believe you would go there

Outline

• Start brainstorming early

• Keep a journal or note of important experiences and patient interactions

• Review your CV- are there things you want to highlight or emphasize?

• Do not censor yourself- write everything down

• Find 2-4 take-home points

  • Decide what you want the program to know about you by the end of reading your statement

  • Examples: I am an excellent team member, I have a non-traditional path to medicine that has built resilience, I am an empathetic survivor of childhood cancer who does cutting-edge research in genetics.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• Does anything from my application need more detail?​​

• Is there anything important that is not anywhere else in the application?​​

• What are the 2-4 things it is essential to know about me?​​

• What are my core strengths? What am I proud of?​​

• How do I embody the qualities necessary for my specialty? Why am Ichoosing it?​​

• What learning/clinical experiences strongly impacted me?​​

• How does my life experience inform my practice in the specialty?​​

• What issues do I care about? What are my core values?​​

• What excites me about my future or the future of the specialty?​

Structure

• 4-6 Paragraphs

  • ~1 page, 28,000 characters max

  • Intro and Conclusion

  • 2-4 Body Paragraphs

    • Each body paragraph should highlight one key takeaway with specific examples

    • the examples should highlight your achievements and behaviors

Introduction

• Use a hook

  • Defining clinical moment

  • impactful moment in personal history

• Transition from hook to your "point"

  • reflect on the hook and expand to the pattern/point you want to emphasize

• Name the specialty

• Preview main points of the statement

Conclusion

• Write this last

• Keep it brief

• Do not feel the need to sum everything perfectly or make grand statements

• Can include:

  • Short summary

  • Looking forward to the future

  • Ending the story

  • End on a callback to Intro

Editing

• Emphasize your actions and outcomes. Be as clear as possible about what you did and its impact. Don’t spend too much time in clinical stories on the patient’s health history.

• Emphasize what YOU did. Don’t list achievements – expand upon a few things.

• Do not get into the deep details of your patients’ diagnoses. Describe enough for the reader to understand the scenario and keep the focus on what you did and learned.

• It is okay to talk about experiences outside of your specialty or prior to medical school; it is even okay to talk about personal diagnoses or sociolegal issues in your family. However, the focus should be on your attributes and some of the writing must pertain to your specialty.

• Edit for conciseness and precision. ​

  • Use active voice when possible. ​

  • Make sure each sentence has a job. ​

  • Avoid acronyms or define them at first use. ​

  • Let go of weak or redundant examples or phrases.

• Read it out loud. Have someone else read it. You are looking for:​

  • Correct grammar/spelling.​

  • Good flow/varied sentence length and structure.​

  • Examples as opposed to declarations. Anyone can say “I am passionate about…” but you have to show it.​

  • Tone. The writer should seem humble and compassionate. Equally, others must edit to make sure they are at the center of their statement. ​

  • Voice. Does the writer seem authentic and professional?​

• Pitfalls to Avoid:​

  • Overt negativity, judgment, or political statements.​

  • Unprofessional or unethical choices​

  • Length over one, single-spaced page with normal margins, in a normal font​

Personal Statement Reviewers

Name​	Email​
Ashley Michelle Fowler​	[e-mail]​
Vasundhara Singh​	[e-mail]​
Teddy Holzer​	[e-mail]​
Jacob M. Appel MD​	[e-mail]​
Peter Gliatto ​	[e-mail]​
Diana Yan​	[e-mail]​
Cynthia Abraham​	[e-mail]​
Barbara Paris​	[e-mail]​
Beverly Forsyth​	[e-mail]​
Staci Leisman​	[e-mail]​
Your Career Advisor	Specialty Adisors
Alex Posner	[e-mail]