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So, welcome, welcome! Thank you for having us again. We love doing these, and when we got the opportunity to be here and present to you again, our team jumped on it. We think you have such a fantastic premed club and some really amazing presidents and exec team. So thanks—we’re excited to be here.
My name is Andreja. I will be your moderator this evening. With me, I have Bima, who will be introducing himself momentarily, and we make up a very small portion of the Inspira Advantage team.
As mentioned, we are Inspira Advantage. I know we’ve presented to you in the past, but in case there are some new faces in the room, we just want to let you know that we’re a globally recognized admissions consulting and test prep firm with over 16 years of experience.
What do we do? We specialize in helping students gain admission to top graduate healthcare programs, meaning medical, residency, dental, veterinary, NP, and PA school—all with a 98% acceptance rate. This is something we’re extremely proud of.
We believe in starting really early, which is why we offer a program called Pre-Health Advising. This is tailored for college freshmen. We help our students build a tailored academic timeline, including course selection and GPA strategy. We find impactful experiences such as research, shadowing, clinical and non-clinical volunteering, extracurriculars, and leadership roles. We also help them create a strong, standout profile and make sure that undergraduate experiences check all the boxes top medical schools are looking for. This lays a strong foundation to help differentiate our applicants and leave a lasting impression.
In addition, we have tutors who offer personalized one-on-one test prep for the MCAT, DAT, and GRE. We begin with diagnostic tests, then move into custom study plans, interim progress tracking, and our students actually see a score increase of 15 points on average. Our 48- and 60-hour programs even have score guarantees of 515 for the MCAT, 21 for the DAT, and 320 for the GRE when it’s all said and done.
When it’s time to apply, we have something called an all-inclusive application program, which offers unlimited support through the entire application cycle. This includes the creation of a personalized narrative and school list, perfecting your personal statement and secondaries with unlimited edits, providing interview prep, scholarship guidance, and waitlist strategy. We’re by our students’ side until they receive their acceptance—until the very end.
Our goal is very clear and simple: it’s to create the most competitive candidates and applications, ensuring our students shine in this super-competitive admissions landscape. If you’d like to learn a little bit more, we offer personalized consultations via video, phone, or email. No matter where you are in the application process, we’re here to support you along the way.
You have our email as well, so if after this webinar you have a question or you’d like me to follow up with Bima on something, or you’re looking to maybe gain a little bit of extra support throughout the admissions process, we want to make sure that we’re available to you and your team. With that being said, Bima, I’ll pass it over to you.
Awesome. Thanks, Andreja. Hi, everyone! My name is Bima Hasijm. I’m a general surgery resident at the University of California, Irvine.
A little information about me: I did my undergrad at UC Irvine and was fortunate enough to matriculate into their School of Medicine. Now, I’ve matched into my general surgery residency, and I’m currently in my fifth year of residency, with an interest in abdominal organ transplantation.
Even though the base of my education looks very California-centric, I did interface with the Midwest a bit. I heard you guys are from the University of Wisconsin. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and spent two gap years there doing research at the University of Pittsburgh. Most recently, I completed an NIH T32 fellowship at Northwestern. While I was in Chicago, I took a couple of trips to Wisconsin to catch some Milwaukee Bucks games. I enjoyed them—I’m a Warriors fan at heart, but it was nice to see your championship trophies displayed there. You guys should have a pretty exciting March with your basketball team in the March Madness tournament.
All right, so before we get into the nitty-gritty details, the theme of this session is on how to build your narrative. That can come in different shapes, forms, and sizes. Since it’s a smaller crowd, feel free to put in the chat where you are in your own pre-health journey—whether you’re a freshman or senior. I’ll try to multitask and keep that in mind, tailoring my advice based on what I see in the chat, if you guys find it helpful.
When you think about how to put who you are on paper—how to define your unique story—there are obviously two aspects to this:
It’s definitely easier said than done, and don’t feel bad if you find this hard to do. For myself, it’s tough to promote yourself if you’re a little shy or soft-spoken. It’s hard to write about yourself and share that with strangers—future readers on admissions committees. The best advice for those who have a hard time putting words on paper is to prepare early.
You all know the medical school application portal opens on June 1st. It’s rolling admissions, but just because they accept applications after June 1st doesn’t mean you should submit later. Try to be in that first wave of people applying on the day the application opens. That means you need to be thinking about your personal statement and your story well in advance. The rule of thumb I give my mentees is to give yourself at least four months to start thinking about how you want your application to represent your life’s work up to that moment.
Your “why”: Of course, everyone wants to help people, but you have to differentiate why you specifically want to help people by being a doctor. These questions will come up in your primary application, your secondary application, and your interviews. For example, you like the sciences and want to help people—why not be a researcher who makes scientific discoveries and helps people by publishing manuscripts? Or maybe you want to interact more with patients directly—why not be a physical therapist, occupational therapist, or speech therapist? There are different ways to help people while still having your own patients. This is the needle you have to thread when you define your unique story: why you want to be a doctor specifically.
When you’re thinking about how to differentiate yourself from other applicants, don’t be afraid to be different. Just because a medical school requires certain volunteer hours, work hours, or shadowing hours, that doesn’t mean they don’t care about other extracurricular activities. If you were a collegiate athlete or involved in a Greek social fraternity or sorority, don’t feel like you have to hide those aspects of what makes you happy. Ultimately, those things can make you unique. In fact, as I went through my own application trail, during my interviews I’d see a school share statistics of who they interviewed: maybe 20% were collegiate athletes, 15% were in Greek organizations, and 45% were leaders in something else. So don’t be shy about sharing those parts of yourself. They can make you relatable to admission committee members.
When brainstorming what to write about, this starts even earlier than four months. This is where your experiences—through volunteering, patient interactions, or at a hospital—come in. If you’re earlier in your undergrad career, keep a notebook where you jot down different experiences. That will really come in handy later on when you need to put words on a page.
Eventually, you’ll see a pattern in the experiences that stand out to you. Don’t be stressed about “finding your identity” right away. It will naturally come through the experiences that you actually remember. From there, try to frame your personal statement or secondary application around those key moments, finding the common thread of how that will ultimately make you a better physician. Also, when describing your experiences, don’t just tell the readers what you learned or accomplished; show them. I ask my mentees to put me in their shoes. I want to smell the air you’re breathing. I want to see what you’re seeing and walk through the conversation with that patient—observe their body language, their tone. If I’m reading a personal statement or an experience description, I should feel like I’m right there with you. That captures a reader’s interest and shows authenticity. It also suggests you were really paying attention in that defining moment.
Writing with authenticity is crucial. Using details shows how genuine you are and how much you care about this journey. We’re at a point in time where ChatGPT is widely used. It’s a good tool to brainstorm and get past writer’s block, but it hallucinates and makes things up. It might produce paragraphs that look legitimate but aren’t actually saying anything. Sometimes it generates experiences or details that never happened. Never include something you didn’t actually do. Also, ChatGPT often uses language that doesn’t match your personal tone. An admissions committee can sense a mismatch in tone if part of your application is written by AI and another part is written by you. So be mindful of that. ChatGPT can help, but it can also result in an automatic rejection if you’re not careful.
When you’re building a narrative arc, remember that you need to be intimately involved in crafting your story. Only you know how you want your entire application to come across to readers. A personal statement isn’t a resume; it’s a story. A common mistake is to list extracurriculars in the personal statement. That doesn’t tell me who you are. There’s another part of the application where you can list achievements. Focus your personal statement on something that wouldn’t necessarily appear in a resume. Give the admissions committee a reason to invite you for an interview. That’s how you can “play the game” of the medical school application process.
Some key elements of a strong personal statement:
If you have a sad or dire clinical experience, don’t end on a hopeless note. Show how it inspired growth or perseverance. Reframe difficult moments in a positive way that explains how you’ll handle similar situations when you’re the physician in charge.
In your application, be strategic. Maximize each field. Your personal statement should focus on your personal narrative, not bullet-point achievements. Your extracurriculars section is where you detail your accomplishments. You get to expand on three of your most meaningful activities. Make each of those different—maybe one is being a collegiate athlete, another is research, and another is volunteering—so you showcase your breadth.
Letters of recommendation also reinforce your storyline. Choose recommenders who know you well, not just those for whom you did well academically. If you took their class a few years ago, keep in touch with that professor. It’s not bothersome; professors expect to write letters. They love supporting stellar students they’ve watched grow. Also, don’t be afraid to ask directly for a “strong letter of recommendation.” Provide them with your personal statement draft and extracurricular write-ups so they have enough material to speak about you. That transparency helps them decide if they’re comfortable recommending you.
Common pitfalls in the application narrative:
Turning weaknesses into strengths is common in interviews or secondary prompts about challenges or failures. Be open about your struggles. Everyone faces adversity, and you shouldn’t hide it. Show how you overcame those setbacks or plan to overcome them—admissions committees want to see resilience and solution-focused thinking.
If you took gap years, make them meaningful. If you have a poor semester or lower test scores, explain how you rebounded or improved. Non-traditional paths can be valuable—your previous experiences outside medicine help you relate to patients from many backgrounds.
By the time you reach the final stages of application prep, pat yourself on the back. Have your personal statement, activities, and secondary answers reviewed by as many trusted mentors as possible. Each person—from peers to advisers to family—can catch different things. Don’t be afraid of constructive criticism. Feedback helps make your application stronger.
Watch for clarity and conciseness. Adhere to word or character counts (and check if it’s with or without spaces). You don’t want to realize last-minute that you need to cut hundreds of words. Finally, ensure each section is cohesive and free of grammatical or technical errors. A copy-paste slip can cause big headaches.
In summary, be authentic and genuine. Reflect deeply on experiences that truly impacted you. Every section of the application has a purpose. Use each section optimally. Admissions committees remember stories and how you made them feel about your potential as a future physician.
Bima: I wish I knew not to stress so much about shaping exactly how I wanted to be perceived by the selection committee in a forced way. Initially, I tried to say, “Okay, I want to be known as this type of person,” and then I chose experiences that fit that exact mold. That approach can work, but it can also make your descriptions sound less genuine. Looking back, I think focusing on the experiences that truly impacted me first—being very honest about them—and then finding the common thread afterward is better. Once you see three or four impactful experiences written out, you look for the theme that ties them together organically. If you do it that way, you’ll avoid a lot of writer’s block and come across as more authentic.
Bima: There’s definitely a ton that stands out. A lot of people write about a family member’s health struggles, like a grandparent who passed away from a certain condition. If it directly impacted your entire way of life—if you were their primary caretaker, for example—that can really shape your motivation. But if it’s just, “I witnessed a relative get sick, and I realized I want to be a doctor,” that’s not as unique as you’d think. Every patient is someone’s mother, father, or sibling, so that story alone can become mundane to readers. It’s still important if it truly shaped you, but make sure there’s a unique angle or deeper significance if you go that route.
Bima: They vary. The minimum is about two; the maximum might be six. The length of responses also varies. Some schools offer optional questions about a rural track or other specific programs, and you only answer if it applies. Most schools have at least two or three core questions—usually, “Why this school?,” “How do your values align with ours?,” and possibly a character-based prompt.
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