Writing and finalizing an ERAS personal statement is challenging for many applicants. Margot had spent years honing her academic writing and communication skills but found writing any autobiographical “akin to pulling teeth.” She was concerned her tone would come across as too monotone or harsh, and she wasn’t sure how to “show” programs why she would make a stellar addition to the program and general surgery as a whole.
Margot had spent a lot of time agonizing over her personal statement’s first draft, feeling like nothing she wrote hit the mark. Every aspiring medical resident wants to maximize their chances of matching – that’s why Margot came to us for help.
Margot’s concerns are common among aspiring medical residents; sitting down to write your first personal statement draft can be challenging, especially without enough prep work. After learning more about Margot and the support she was seeking, we crafted a detailed plan to help her commit enough time to developing her application narrative and other documents.
We helped Margot identify key experiences from her completed persona assessment form and formulate answers to high-level questions that could be used to build the framework of a winning personal statement. We connected her experiences with the questions a residency personal statement should answer (such as what drew her to surgery and what experiences prepared her for this field) while weaving in experiences demonstrating her commitment to excellence and patient care.
Afterward, we helped Margot edit her work for tone, sentence structure, spelling, grammar, narrative flow, and concision. These multiple edits allowed Margot’s writing to take shape and transform her multiple experiences and stories into a cohesive narrative that would strategically position her as the ideal applicant.
Margot received interview invitations to 14 programs and matched with her first choice: Johns Hopkins University!
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