commissioned: medical school personal statement rewrite

I was hired to help a medical school applicant rework their personal statement for admission. I worked t clarify and simplify her original draft and to edit the copy to meet the required word count. Her admissions counselor said it was one of the best personal statements he had read.

This is the statement before:

I was born in one of the most contested nations in the world, the daughter of Jewish refugees, the first in my family to grow up without antisemitism leading my path. Northern Israel is a beautiful place both dry and arid during the summer yet lush in the winter, leaving the hills covered in poppies when the two seasons meet. The place I was born in was turbulent. As the bus bombings crept their way up the country in coordinated efforts known as the second intifada, my childhood memories omitted those details. What I remember most are my days as my father's shadow.  The twisting car rides accompanying him, an internal medicine doctor, as we travelled between assisted living facilities and small rehab’s so he could perform his consults. This childhood of mine filled me with romantic notions of what being a doctor would be like, as I watched my father treat his patients. And as he would leave our family each month to serve in the Israeli Army as a physician on the frontlines, I grew to think of medicine as a profession built on the highest values of service and healing which appealed to me instinctually. There is no question that my father is what initially drew me to medicine; both in the way in which I admired watching him work and the deep respect of knowledge and probing he imparted in me. [My grandfather was also a doctor The child of a doctor does suffer as a consequence of the doctor's life, yet this is when the seeds of inspiration were planted. When we left for America when I was 8 years old, I grew intimately familiar with the tolls of the workload on my parents, with the massive time commitment of residency and with being the primary caretaker for my youngest sibling, as our family struggled to plant roots in this country. These early struggles have shaped my core values  as I grew familiar with the consequences of a doctor's life and retrospectively I think of these moments of struggle at the root of why I want to be a doctor. At my earliest recollection, I knew that being a doctor was all I could really see myself doing day in and day out regardless. I have spent the better part of my life so far reckoning with twists and turns that have bolstered that desire. 

When I enrolled in college on the pre-med track, after years of shadowing doctors and grooming myself to join their ranks, I figured my path would be linear. However, I found myself struggling, as my relationship with a tumultuous parent became more strained to the point that I found myself cut off from my family. This meant that I had to find a new way to finance my dreams of higher education. Academically, I struggled as the balance between work and school eluded me, and I took this wavering to mean that becoming a doctor would never be in the cards for me. Instead, I turned my attention to focusing on all the things I have always found interesting but never allowed myself to explore and root out because it did not fit cleanly into the image I had of a doctor. I very proudly got a college education covering the span of women’s studies and political sciences, and started a photography business to sustain and fund me. For the first time in my life, I was being told about the massive socio-economic biases which uphold our society. My own story and struggles were are the center of my educational pursuits. HearingI got to hear Kimberly Crenshaw analyze and speak aboutrip the cover of 21st century institutional racism and while attending the national peace and conflict studies conference in Birmingham, Alabama, accompanied by a civil rights elder created an educational environment that taught me to think systemically and intersectionally. I wrote and reflected on standpoint theory, race relations, and Middle East conflict themes and found myself consistently called to action. I worked as a professional, freelancing for publications and building client relationships to move my business in new and innovative directions that fulfilled me, while incorporating the lessons of my education into my daily operations. IDiverging from a goal I had prepared for all my life felt like I had failed and created a messy alternative. UI unknowingly, found all these hidden advantages to a massive mess that I thought I was dealing with. Out of that, I got an education rooted in equality and intersection that allowed me to help my community and approach problem solving with a multidisciplinary approach.

 Two years into running my business, aAn assignment from a publication I was working for led me to my local ambulance corps to take portraits of first responders. While there, I saw multiple crews go out as 911 calls came in describing patients in various forms of distress.I found it really interesting especially after talking with one of my subjects, the chief of the station. After going out on a couple ride alongs, I felt a familiar excitement and draw to practice medicinecall to become a doctor, and so I became a volunteer EMT. Hoping to satisfy my desire to help people through medicine and explore this inclination in a prehospital setting, while continuingI also continued to grow my business after college to create a life balanced between medicine and creativity.

  In the time since I have gotten my EMT license, the experiences I’ve had have left me with new motivating factors to become a doctor. Various patient encounters have left me with a desire for both a much deeper knowledge of medicine including pathophysiology and disease as well as a bigger opportunity to be a bigger instrument in the patients journey back to health. I mean that to say that I find myself deeply craving the ability and knowledge to interact with patients on a level exceeding what I can in the back of an ambulance.and longer, bigger conservations to create health care plans. I have helped unresponsive patients that require paralytics and intubation, and stroke patients that needed the quickest transport I could give them for CAT scans and clot busting IV drugs; myocardial infarction patients that needed more than the nitroglycerin I could provide, but a catheterization lab where a doctor would save them with a stent; and patients so hemodynamically unstable that the only thing I could do was transport them to the ER as quickly as possible. The emergency department is the frontline, taking whoever, whenever, and these patients have shown me what it is like to be part of a healthcare system, where I am not an individual but part of a collective “we” charged with serving the patient to the best of our abilities. It has also shown me how much more I want to be able to do for my patients; how much bigger of a role I want to play in their journey back to health.

Now, I come with not only the goal but the vision of the kind of doctor I will become, reinforced by the experiences I’ve had that have time and time again led me back to this goal. I want to be the sort of doctor that is a healthcare leader in her community who infuses her practice with the teaching of Peggy Mcintosh & Simon De Beauvoir. I want to address biases in medical practice that affect communities accessing the care they have a right to, leading to patients falling through the cracks. Becoming an emergency room doctor that shows every single patient that I am both their healer and their advocate is the image I have of myself in my head. One that is able to intubate, read CT scans, suture and understand the pathophysiology of the most rampant conditions ,molded and empowered by my childhood and what I have observed as an adult.

• Motivation refers to a student’s ongoing preparation for the health profession and can include the initial inspiration.

• Fit is determined through self-assessment of relevant values and personal qualities as they relate to the profession.

• Capacity is demonstrated through holistically aligning with the competencies expected in the profession.

• Vision relates to the impact you wish to make in the field.

• A strong non traditional personal statement should prove three fundamental things:

This is the statement after my edits:
I was born in one of the most contested nations in the world, as the daughter of Jewish refugees. While turbulent, my homeland of Northern Israel is a beautiful place: both dry and arid during the summer yet lush in the winter, leaving the hills covered in poppies when the two seasons meet. These are the memories I strive to hold onto when I reflect on my childhood, not the bus bombings that crept ever closer in coordinated attacks known as the Second Intifada.

In those days, I was my father’s shadow. A second generation medical doctor himself, my father would take me along on the winding rides that marked his rotation of consults between assisted living facilities and rehab centers. These ride-alongs filled me with a romantic notion of what it meant to be a doctor, while his commitment to monthly stints as a physician on the frontlines with the Israeli Defense Force only intensified my admiration for my father and his profession. I grew to view doctors as champions in the arena of service and healing, which appealed to me instinctually.

At eight years old we immigrated to the U.S. While we had fled the conflict of our homeland, a new conflict set in within our family. The toll of my parents’ workloads began to wear on us all, as my family struggled to put down roots in this new country. I had assumed that this family turmoil would dissipate as we became more settled, but in reality, it would only grow for me.

It was a fracture in my relationship with my mother that threw my academic standing into peril. Due to our tumultuous relationship, I saw myself become abruptly cut off from family resources at a critical point in my undergraduate career. With the sudden financial responsibility for my tuition and housing on my shoulders, while trying to balance an already intensive curriculum, I felt like I was drowning. Suddenly, without family support of any kind, my conviction and confidence in my future as a doctor began to falter, as I mistook this wavering to be a reflection of my abilities.

I was able to carry on with school, however my focus had shifted. Self-discovery came through the words of Simon De Beauvoir and bell hooks, scholarly giants that led me to the field of Gender Studies and Political Science. Supported by a commissioned photography business I had established to provide for myself, my studies and my work altered my worldview, as I learned in great detail about the injustices and class disparities that mark life in the U.S and my home country of Israel. 

In hindsight – although I couldn’t see it then – these revelations and this specific education would become the groundwork for my impassioned and committed return to the pursuit of becoming a physician. Understanding the intersectionality between who receives subpar care, and what social factors contribute to medical interventions, gave me something more than paternal admiration to fuel my fire. 

To that end, it was an assignment to make portraits of first responders that led me to medicine. While fulfilling this assignment, I felt immediately called to volunteer. Since then, I have continued to grow my business to a degree that I have financial stability, and now have struck a balance between medicine and creativity, through my work in emergency medical services and with the camera. 

Since earning my EMT license, my education in the areas of intersectional justice have merged with a passion for medicine, and have left me with new motivating factors to become a doctor, centered on empathy. While my initial motivations were pure, the admiration of my father’s career and my own general interest were simply not enough to validate the enormous commitment that a medical vocation requires, especially a self-financed one. Now I feel focused, and fueled by a desire to combat social injustices by providing equal access to care. I have now seen pathways for change-making within the profession that speak to me.

I come with not only a goal, but the vision of the kind of doctor I will become. I believe in the art of medicine. I want to be a healthcare leader in my community and infuse my practice with the teachings of the feminist scholars so integral to my undergraduate coursework. I want to address biases in medical practice that affect communities accessing the care to which they have a right. Drawing on both the turmoil I have witnessed in a time of great social upheaval and the challenges I have navigated in my own life, I feel ready to devote the next chapter of my life to applying an intersectional justice approach to practicing medicine. I will become a doctor that shows every single patient that I am both their healer and their advocate — one that is able to intubate, read CT scans, suture, understand the pathophysiology of the most rampant conditions, and help create a healthcare environment that is just.