Hi so I was just drafting my essay and I was wondering what I should do. I know you’re supposed to do things that set you apart. So I can either write about my adoption story (adopted from china when i was one, fitting in, and the one child policy stuff) or my dads death (i was only one but i would write about how it affected my family and how that affected me and how it got me interested in medicine). I know people say dont write about a death and adoption essays really don’t make you stand out but i don’t have anything else! Please help
It’s not as important to stand out as it is to convey everything that you want to about yourself. What are you trying to show adcoms through your essay about your personality, values, passions, etc., and which prompt will help you do that better?
Here’s what I did with my son yesterday:
We took each of the 5 prompts, and spent 2 or 3 minutes brainstorming about each one. (He kept insisting that we write about how his birth family were spies in Korea… total fiction, but he loved thinking of the look on the face of whoever read it.)
At the end of half an hour, we had an idea of the possibilities, and he went upstairs and wrote his first draft-- for #5, as it turns out.
Here’s what I would suggest: you want to write less about things that have happened to you than about things you have DONE, or DECIDED. It should be active, not passive. So I would write less about China’s one child policy and more about what the UN or the world community should be doing about it, or about overpopulation as a problem. Talk about how, if you were King/Queen of the world-- or running China-- you would solve this problem differently. (prompt #4).
As far as the adoption thing, we pretty much discounted it after our brainstorming session. My son feels and lives American. He was adopted at 7 months, and doesn’t remember a thing about Korea. The only things that separate him from his sisters is that he gets a “Gotcha Day” every January, and that we can laugh when someone says his sisters have his eyes. (They don’t. They reflect our Irish/Italian background.) So, in his case at least, that background doesn’t really fit the qualifications for prompt #1-- it’s not so important to his application that he felt the adcoms really needed to know about it. Your story, of course, may very well be different.
You say you’re interested in medicine: is there a disease you’re particularly interested in curing? Would you like to change the way research is funded, so that the diseases that aren’t prominent in the public eye receive more funding? How will your bedside manner look? How will you break the news to a patient that what they have is presently incurable? How will you deal with a patient who has lost hope?
At the end of the day, let’s talk about the purposes of this essay:
- To find out how well you write. Yeah, but so many kids receive serious help with their essays that this is pretty much a lost cause.
- To give the adcoms a bit of an idea of who you are, and of your potential to affect change. But you’re limited to only a few hundred words. So make those words count. Give them a reason to say yes. Let them know that you’re a person with aspirations-- not just to be a doctor, but to make a real difference to someone somewhere. (But individuals, not masses of people. Could you write about one person you’ll make a difference to 10 years from today? Maybe the parents of the child you’ll be operating on? )
If it would help, why not do the brainstorming exercise: set a timer for 3 minutes, and write down everything that occurs to you on the topic-- you can ask mom or some of your friends to do the same thing at the same time. At the end of those 15 minutes, look at what you have and write a one paragraph summary of each prompt. Email me or someone else, and we’ll give you our input.