Applications close Nov. Glaucomflecken, Nov. Choose from half day sessions or complete the entire course. Earn up to 28 Prescribed credits. As an AAFP member, you'll have access to an expansive collection of valuable resources that will help you along your medical journey—whether you're a student, a family medicine resident, or a practicing family physician. AAFP President Sterling Ransone, MD, testified to a Senate subcommittee that improved broadband access is essential for building on the success of telehealth and promoting health equity.
Personal statements are an essential, required part of applying to residency. Residency programs screen thousands of applications every cycle and read many hundreds of these statements in the process. You should aim to write an interesting statement that showcases your personality as well as your achievements. Perhaps most importantly, you will need to skillfully articulate the reasons for your interest in family medicine and the particular program you're applying to.
You may choose to relate significant personal experiences, but do so only if they are relevant to your candidacy for the position. Be open about your long-term professional goals. Describing a couple clear, realistic, and carefully considered goals will leave your reader with a strong impression of your maturity, self-awareness, and character. The importance of good writing in a personal statement cannot be overemphasized.
Unfortunately, not only are good writing skills allowed to deteriorate during medical school, but in some sense, they also are deliberately undermined in the interest of learning to write concise histories and physicals. For the moment, forget everything you know about writing histories and physicals. While preparing your personal statement:. If you have friends or relatives with writing or editing skills, enlist their help.
Student organizations at your school may host personal statement clinics, or your school may offer review services.
Many student, medical, and specialty societies, local and national, may offer personal statement reviews or workshops. Even if you're a great writer and feel confident about your application, you should ask trusted advisors, mentors, and friends to critique your personal statement and your CV!
They can help you make your statement as flawless as possible by giving you feedback about areas that might have been unclear or things that should be added.
Your personal statement should remain an original composition, even as you seek input and advice. My personal preference is to explain why the red flag happened if you have a reasonable explanation and story. The introduction and the end of your personal statement should be the most engaging parts to read.
The introduction and conclusion paragraphs are the hardest to write but can also serve to make your personal statement stand out. If you are an international medical graduate IMG , you might consider adding a few lines talking about why you chose to train in the US. One of the biggest mistakes that applicants make when writing the personal statement is that they start a week or two before the application deadline.
I personally started mine two months before the application deadline. This timeline allowed me to write multiple drafts before sending it to my mentors and residents for review and feedback.
I recommend that you do multiple revisions before you submit your personal statement. Before I submitted my final personal statement, it had gone through over 20 drafts. This number is just to give you an idea of the lengthy transformation process between the initial draft and the final product.
Your personal statement should be the best version of your story summarized in words. Your goal is to convince programs to invite you for an interview so they can get to know you better! I highly recommend you have your personal statement reviewed by an individual or individuals with experience in personal statement editing.
Try to seek out people who will provide you with structural edits, if needed, and not just superficial grammatical edits. I helped many students with personal statement editing by suggesting a complete overhaul of their original structure so that their story would shine through more effectively.
I am happy to help students with significant editing and re-writing. You can check our website to learn more about our personal statement editing. Keep in mind that the more you show your personal statement to others, the more revisions you will receive. Stay away from using online templates because you want your personal statement to be as personal as possible.
You must spend significant time and effort so your personal statement does not look like the hundreds of other applications each program receives. The purpose of the templates in this blog is to provide examples rather than for you to copy these in your own personal statement. This would constitute plagiarism and could get you into serious trouble. If you are applying for residency, focus on why you want to enter a certain specialty rather than why you got into medical school.
You are past the medical school experience at this point and you should not take a significant portion of your personal statement talking about what influenced you to choose medicine in the first place. You can definitely discuss that in a couple of sentences, but no more than that. Focus primarily on the specialty to which you are applying. Try to keep your personal statement around words and discuss the points that have been mentioned above. Do not make it so short that people cannot understand your story or so long that it becomes boring to read.
Many students think that the main issue with their personal statement are problems with the English language, whether in regard to grammar or word choice. However, this is an easily fixable problem.
The major mistake I find in most personal statements is a lack of flow in the content jumping from one idea to another which makes it difficult for the reader to follow. That is why a structural edit of a personal statement takes significantly more time.
I recommend you stay away from services that only change a few words here and there to make the language correct. Seek structural edits if needed. However, what is most important is having nice flow and structure that makes your story enjoyable to read. Yes, you can assign different personal statements for different programs and different specialties. You should write at least one personal statement for your ERAS application. However, you can write as many as you like. You can assign different personal statements for different programs and different specialties.
You can only submit one personal statement for each program. I would not recommend having your personal statement edited by a non-medical professional only, as they often will not understand the nuances of the residency Match process. Having good command of the English language is completely different from having a good sense of structure, flow, and content needed to successfully be accepted into a residency program.
Personal statements may also be required when applying to scholarships, away rotations, programs, or research opportunities. The essay:. Engage the reader early. Make the reader curious about you, your choice of specialty, and what attributes and skills you have to offer to their program.
It is common that students feel pressure to show some impressive award, activity or unique background, but residency directors also want to get a sense of who you are and if you are a fit with their program. Focus on writing a statement that reflects your voice, without being too informal, and demonstrates you are a great fit. Personal statements created outside of the MyERAS system should be converted to a plain text document e.
Notepad or SimpleText. You may upload an unlimited number of personal statements in ERAS for purposes of customizing statements for particular residency programs.
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