Personal Statement Pitfalls (An Encore)

Hi everyone,

So far this year, I have read and edited 35 fellowship personal statements. Many essays are great—and some nearly publishable—but several have, let’s say, “opportunities for improvement.”

Effective personal statements hit the high points, describing what attracts you to the field, your relevant accomplishments, your training goals, and your vision. In a world replete with talented applicants, a well-crafted personal statement helps you stand out.

No matter how earnest you may be, and no matter how qualified, a poorly constructed personal statement conveys muddled motivations and dubious potential. So, in an encore from last July, let me highlight pitfalls to avoid:

1. Burying the Lede: Don’t delay getting to the point. Don’t regale readers with tales about grandparents, summer camp, bike trips, heroic pediatricians, soccer, and band practice. Impatient readers will skim this material, if they read it at all, and wonder why it matters. Name your specialty immediately, no later than the first paragraph.
2. Generic Specialty: “I like (fill in specialty) because it is the only field that offers opportunities for clinical innovation, procedures, and long term patient relationships. Please... Really??? Seek specialty specificity.
3. Specialty Love: You can reveal your love for a specialty once, but don’t consume precious space with paeans to pulmonary (or whatever), why you enjoy the field, what you find gratifying, and how fulfilling your life will be if you spend it in the bronchoscopy suite, rounding in the MICU, or reading PFTs. Your level of enthusiasm doesn’t lift you up the rank list. Fellowship directors already know you love the specialty or you wouldn’t have applied. Instead, to paraphrase President Kennedy: “Ask not what your specialty can do for you, ask what you can do for your specialty.”
4. Hiding What You’re Looking For: Readers will search for a sentence beginning with “I seek a program that…” Tell readers what you’re looking for: A large immigrant population? Basic science opportunities? Advanced procedural experience? A chance to learn how to lead clinical trials? Make it easy for programs to think, “We have what she’s looking for.”
5. Leaving Out Your Plans: Readers will search for a sentence beginning with “After training, I hope to…” Your job is to fill in the blank with “run my own immunology lab,” “bring critical care to under-resourced countries,” “develop new treatments for scleroderma,” or whatever your dreams may be. Even if your plans are unformed, you should still think big and show your ambition so fellowships know you’ll make the most of your opportunity.
6. Tangential Plans: Maybe you hope to be a Dean of Students, a hospital CEO, or even a residency program director one day, but these plans don’t belong in a fellowship personal statement. Specialty programs want to hear about your specialty dreams. The last thing they want to discover is that you don’t plan to practice in their field. Save your secret ambitions for another day.
7. Reductive Thinking: “I want to be a hepatologist because I excel at paracenteses.” “I want to be an electrophysiologist because I dream about EKGs.” “I want to spend my life giving allergy shots (placing a-lines, tapping joints, adjusting insulin orders, etc.).” Every field, even the most specialized, requires broad expertise across populations, procedures, and pathologies. Show your sophistication.
8. Bad Grammar: Not much to say here except: align your tenses, break up the run-ons, place commas where they belong, read your essay out loud, and run a grammar check.
9. Gratuitous Stories: It’s fine to tell patient stories but only to make an essential point. “I heard the patient wheezing and felt the relief she must have experienced as the albuterol kicked in” isn’t as persuasive as you might think. On the other hand, “I saw one patient after another from that neighborhood present with uncontrolled asthma, which made me want to explore how air pollution and poverty contribute to airways disease” shows you are on a worthy mission.
10. Underestimating Your Potential: “I want to be an oncologist patients can count on,” “I plan to show up every day and work hard,” and “I plan to acquire clinical competency” are all fine and to be expected but not unique, let alone compelling. Aim higher. Why not dedicate your one wild and precious career to becoming a leader in your field—finding cures, developing new care paradigms, or creating novel approaches to education? Fellowships seek candidates with ambition and transformative potential. Show your vision, and, whatever you do, don’t sell yourself short.

Every sentence you put into your personal statement should aim to make yourself the most compelling candidate possible. Nothing else matters.

Enjoy your Sunday, everyone. I will be heading out to the Farmington Canal for a long bike ride before returning to enter your milestones on the ACGME website and then updating an UpToDate chapter. Tomorrow, I start three weeks in the SDU.

Yours,

Mark

P.S. Congratulations to the New York Knicks, who won the NBA Championship for the first time since 1973, when I was 10 years old!

P.P.S. What I’m reading:

• New Yorkers Waited 53 Years for This. Time to Celebrate. Text by Caitlyn Freeman
• He Gave It All to Help the Knicks Win in 1973. He’s Still in Pain Today. By David Waldstein
• Jalen Brunson, NBA champion and finals MVP, is officially the greatest Knick ever. By James L. Edwards III
• Knicks Give Their City Something New: Impossible Joy. By Matt Flegenheimer.
• On Being a Knicks Fan and the Meaning of Everything. By Ben Rhodes.
• Rename the Williamsburg Bridge After Sonny Rollins. By Ned Rothenberg.
• Doctors, This Is Why Our Patients Are Using ChatGPT. By Helen Ouyang.
• The end isn't nigh. By Oliver Burkeman.
• Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All. By Idrees Kahloon.
• Patient Preferences for Plain-Language Alternatives to Medical Jargon in Clinical Notes. By Katherine A. Allen et al.
• Things We Do for No Reason™: Standing at the bedside. By Adam Gray, Alan M. Hall, and Leonard S. Feldman.
• Heart, Lung, Abdomen, Ankles. By Paul E. Sax.
• This Could Be the Worst Ebola Outbreak in History. By Jeremy Konyndyk. Graphics by Taylor Maggiacomo.
• Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. By Clay Risen.