Personal Statement Pt 1 – Dos and Donts

EM Clerkship

Zack Olson, MD and Michael Estephan, MD

Education, Courses, Health & Fitness, Medicine

5 • 795 Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2022

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to EM Clerkship Maddie Watts! The personal statement should be *personal* and should *make a statement*. Start early Use solid organizational structure Address the big three questions – who? what? why? Check for grammar mistakes Explain any red flags Further Reading: EMRA / CORD Advising Guide NRMP Program Director Survey ALiEM Match Advice Series

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and thank you for downloading this episode of the EM Clerkship podcast. My name is Maddie Watts and I'm a graduating fourth year medical student going into emergency medicine. I'm the new kid on the block at EM Clerkship and I'm excited to have y'all learn and grow with me during my time here. This is a new series about everything you need
0:22.0	to know for residency application and interview season. I just went through this process so I know
0:28.0	how incredibly stressful it is. It feels like you have the pressure of your entire career, where you'll
0:33.5	live, what opportunities you'll have, and who will be your support system, writing
0:38.1	on the back of one application. In short, I get it. Also, I did the research so that you don't have
0:45.0	to. I read the entire Emrah and Cord advising guide. I listened to the EM Match Series podcast
0:51.3	on academic life in emergency medicine, read as many published personal
0:56.0	statements as I could find, and pulled from the advice I got from faculty at my own program.
1:02.7	Today's episode will be about the do's and don'ts of the personal statement. So to start off,
1:08.7	how important is the personal statement?
1:11.6	Every year, NRMP, or the people who run the match, survey all of the program directors
1:17.1	in each specialty about the most and least important things that they considered when
1:21.8	interviewing and ranking applicants.
1:24.5	It's a helpful document that I suggest you take a look at, and we'll link it in the show notes.
1:29.0	I looked at the 2021 data collected from 74 EM program directors.
1:34.1	On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being not at all important and 5 being very important,
1:39.5	the personal statement got a score of 3.6.
1:42.1	It was the fourth lowest out of 19 personal characteristics and
1:46.8	experiences that program directors consider when interviewing and ranking applicants. So this is not
1:52.9	to say blow off your personal statement, but it is to say don't let it stress you out too much.
1:58.1	So how do you get started? It sounds simple, but the personal statement should be
2:02.9	number one, personal, and number two, make a statement. If it does these two things, is grammatically
	...

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