A good personal statement tells a complete story; it comes full circle. Sometimes the essay’s success hinges on a single experience, or even a single word. One recent pre-med account runs like this:
The student is stuck behind the pharmacy counter. She learns a given drug’s mode of action on cells, or tissue, or organs. And yet, it is like reading a fragment of a story or picking up a summer paperback whose final chapters have come unbound. She hands over the packaged medication and the customer walks away. She wonders: was the omeprazole for simple heart burn, or did the chest pain suggest something more profound?
My young writer starts her statement at this hard edge, behind the counter. She experiences the counter as a metaphor for the literal distance between the patient and her to be sure, but also as the gap in her knowledge. As the statement unfolds, we witness our student begin to answer the questions where pharmacology leaves off. She takes us through the brilliant lectures of a pathologist. She studies Cell Bio. We see her pursue questions without ready answers as she writes us through the frustrations of research and (the rarely acknowledged) slow pace of innovation. She works to understand the range of patient she might encounter. She volunteers with immigrant children and shadows in wealthy suburbs. She is a tidy young woman, verging on perfectionist, though she is no longer disgusted by the very messiness of the body. Her pursuit is shifting; the hard edge of the counter is porous.
By the final paragraph, my student has been at work full-time in an urgent care clinic. She triages patients, takes vital signs, connects IVs, monitors EKGs, and applies wound dressings. There is zero distance between the patients and student. On one occasion, the attending prescribes omeprazole for an older man. Our student pauses and later barrages the doctor with questions. With every answer and the ensuing discussion of other diseases, diagnosis and prognosis, my student feels the gap in her knowledge closing, if slightly. She re-enters that patient’s room, shakes his hand and walks with him to the check out. The physical distance closes. She has come full circle from that first pause at the word – omeprazole – transformed in the circuit, now bent on medicine.
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