Customer Reviews

Medical School Essays That Made a Difference (Graduate School Admissions Guides)

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This book gave me a lot of confidence when writing my personal statement. You can find a lot of information online that gives you suggestions on how to format your essay and what to include within the essay. For example, "start your essay with an interesting antecdote" or "tell stories instead of listing accomplishments." However, it doesn't all "click" until you see examples of other personal statements. This book provides 41 actual, unedited medical essays that other students used in their applications. The essays are of varying skill levels- reading the bad ones lets you become more aware of what you want to avoid and the good ones give you ideas of how to make your essay more appealing. Great book :-)

This book should be called "Random assortment of Medical Essays that mostly didn't work". As a medical school applicant, I thought I could get some insight into the anatomy of personal statement by reading other examples. The truth is that most applications with these essays resulted in rejections. The essays are of no higher quality than a random assortment.

Why are these essays held up as exemplary examples when most of these candidates (and their essays) only get into 1 out of 5 schools that they apply? Even few applicants featured in this book got into top tier universities. AAMC indicates that 50% of students who apply to medical school end up getting in somewhere. I fail to see how reading essays--only to find that it was part of a denied application--helps candidates. Granted, a handful of essays in this book are well written and the students did well with their applications.

In sum, I flipped through this book but it didn't help me with my personal writing process.