Who reads personal statements? [PODCAST]

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“You received an interview invite based on ERAS filters the program set, so you already have your foot in the door. Don’t have them yawning at a two-page extravaganza of your life story that makes them wonder if you know what full stops are and cringing at thoughts that were better left unsaid. Because honestly (also don’t start a sentence with ‘because’), who even reads these personal statements?”

Maha Al-Ghafry is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “Who even reads personal statements?”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Rate and review the show at kevinmd.com/rate. Subscribe at kevinmd.com/podcast. Today on the show we have Maha Al-Ghafry. She’s a pediatric hematologist-oncologist, and her KevinMD article is a satirical one. It’s titled “Who even reads personal statements?” Maha, welcome to the show.

Maha Al-Ghafry: Hi, Kevin. Thank you for having me, and hello to your audience.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into the article in a little bit, but first off, briefly share your story and journey to where you are today.

Maha Al-Ghafry: Fellowship, June of 2021. I started thinking about some side gigs I could get into, because, you know, you’re finishing training, and all of a sudden you think that you have a lot of extra free time. At that time, I was myself applying for attending jobs, editing my own CV, and editing and writing my personal statement, or more of a letter of intent for an attending position. I thought that’s something that I could do: help others in the medical system edit their CVs and personal statements.

The thing that I thought would qualify me a little bit for that is the fact that in my residency, as a senior resident, I was part of the residency selection committee process, and then as well, I did a pediatric chief residency year. That’s a standalone year, so I was pretty involved in the application season for residents, and I got to learn a lot about that process. Then there’s my own personal love of reading. I read about 50 books last year, and I’m on course to read 25 this year so far. I thought that those two things, but without proper training in editing services, would qualify me to help those in the medical field.

So I ended up signing up to a popular website for freelance work, and I got started. My work over the last year, with mostly medical students applying for residency and also residents applying for fellowship, was the basis of the article that I wrote for your website.

Kevin Pho: So for those who aren’t familiar with the medical education system, tell us the role of personal statements. I know that when going to medical school we need one, we need one going into internship and residency, and I’m sure you need one going to fellowship as well. In general, what’s the role of personal statements as one goes through that medical training?

Maha Al-Ghafry: Yeah, definitely. So I think the personal statement is supposed to give the interviewers, or the program that you’re applying to, a sense of who you are as a person. Because let’s not forget, once you’ve already received an invite for an interview, they already think you’re appropriately qualified, and they did not ask you to interview based on your personal statement. I can almost guarantee that for residency, they definitely do not have the time to read personal statements before sending out an invite.

So the role of the personal statement really is to give people a sense of who you are and how you might fit into this program. Who are you as a person? What triggers you? What will make you a good fit for this program? And it is a way to allow the interviewer to ask you some questions, so introduce some interesting personal aspects of yourself, of your journey. You know, do you have some particular interesting struggles that you went through? Is there a family member that was ill that made you want to choose medicine? Those are all of the different things that a personal statement should include, and that’s the role of it: to help the institution that you’re interviewing for start to ask you some questions on the interview day.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned that you were on a residency selection committee, and I’m sure that you’ve read your fair share of personal statements. Give us a sense of the range of quality, the range of experiences that you’ve read over your time when you were on this selection committee.

Maha Al-Ghafry: Yeah, so I was on it several years ago, but I’ve also read a lot of personal statements, definitely a lot more over the last year doing the editing service that I have, and I think the range is very variable. One of the things to keep in mind is to always make sure that grammatical errors and spelling are completely in check. If writing is not your forte, and even if writing is your forte, always have a family member, a colleague, or a professor, somebody that you trust, read over it, just to make sure that the basics of spelling and grammar are appropriate. Because nobody’s going to invite you for an interview based on your personal statement, but if it’s absolutely terrible based on basic English, you might not get an invite for it.

A second thing is that a lot of personal statements tend to be very long, which is going to be one of the pillars of what I wrote about in my article: to keep the personal statement really short and sweet. Because don’t forget that interviewers, on an interview day, especially for residencies, are going through multiple applicants a day. So they’re really having to look at your ERAS application, they’re going to have to look at your CV, and they’re also going to skim through your personal statement, and I can guarantee you that most people do not read your personal statement in full.

So you want to keep the personal statement short and sweet. I generally like to say to keep the personal statement at about 500 words, four paragraphs, because your role is to condense down your entire life experiences into those four paragraphs. Otherwise, it becomes too lengthy. The person isn’t going to. As they’re skimming through, let’s say you gave them two pages, they’re only going to skim through a little bit of it, and it might not be the important thing that you really wanted them to know. So that’s the second part, after spelling and grammar: the length of it.

And the third part that people kind of overlook is the authenticity of their personal statements. This is not something that I realized before being on a residency selection committee, but I have had multiple people through this freelance website ask me to write personal statements from scratch, and that is a flat no from my perspective, because a personal statement is very personal. It is one thing to have somebody help you on your journey to edit a personal statement, but to have somebody else write it, it will just not sound authentic. I have had multiple clients come to me who have had a personal statement written by a different service, and I’ve actually caught a couple of them, where I’m like, “Did you write this yourself? Because it just sounds so inauthentic based on the conversation you and I are having through the chat.”

Kevin Pho: So give us an example of that. You don’t have to go into details, but just give an example. When you’re reading a personal statement and you’re chatting with that person in front of you, what kind of tip-offs in that personal statement would make you think that it isn’t authentic?

Maha Al-Ghafry: Yeah, so definitely anything in the personal statement that sounds very generic; it’s a basic template. The way that I always like to have my clients bring out the authenticity in their personal statements is to start off with a personal story. Your first initial paragraph should invite the reader to want to read a little bit more. So don’t start off with telling them, you know, that you went to medical school here, after you did undergrad here, and you were born here, etc. That’s not so important, because they can find that out from your ERAS profile.

What you really want to do in that first paragraph is give them a little bit of a banger of a story. Did you have a crazy family history of some sort of disease, and that’s what drew you into medicine? Were you in the operating room one day, and you had to deal with crazy postoperative complications that drew you into, for example, surgery? So really, your first sentence of your first paragraph should be something that draws somebody in, and I think having a personal story is the easiest way, within the first paragraph, to bring out that authenticity. But if you bring out just a generic template of “this is what I did, and this is where I came from,” it’s not going to be as authentic.

Kevin Pho: So the question, I guess, that gets asked a lot is: What if you don’t have one of those notable stories in your past? What if you didn’t have that sick family member, or you didn’t climb a mountain, or you didn’t have any one of those outstanding personal stories? Your life is relatively routine compared to some of these other personal statements. So when you say personal stories, what if there’s really nothing that notable? What would you advise students in these situations?

Maha Al-Ghafry: Definitely. So I think a lot of us in medicine do come from a pretty privileged background, so your point is very valid. We didn’t have a lot of the struggles, for example being a first-generation college student, that you can lean on. You didn’t come from a disadvantaged background, or immigrate, or so on. So if you have those stories, definitely use them; lean on them. But if you don’t, then I think the way to bring out the authenticity is: What is it about you that is unique or interesting or makes you tick that you can incorporate within your personal statement?

So I’m going to plug my own personal statement from residency, which I still think is the best personal statement that I’ve ever written. Back in medical school, I was really into baking, and going into pediatric residency, I intertwined the story of my love of baking with a story of a patient with cystic fibrosis, and just started using metaphors of the smells of baking with this child’s inability to breathe, and so on. So try to bring your passion, or something that is interesting about you, into the personal statement. I did have one client who was applying for cardiology who also had a love of music, so they intertwined the rhythm of the heart with the rhythm of music, and that was really beautiful. So think of something that makes you tick or makes you unique, and bring that into an interesting patient encounter that will make the reader want to go in a little bit more.

Now, this is definitely a little bit more of a tip for medical students going to residency, because you have a little bit more of that youthful background to lean on to be able to pull that off. Definitely don’t use that going into an attending job; that’s not going to work. But you can tone it down a little bit going into fellowship programs, and it works pretty much just as well.

Kevin Pho: So we’re talking about your KevinMD article, “Who even reads personal statements?” You took a little bit of a satirical slant on it, so tell my readers more about that article, for those who didn’t get a chance to read it.

Maha Al-Ghafry: Yeah, perfect. So I will say that the only nonsatirical part of the article is that I did keep it very short. It was only three paragraphs. But other than that, I went ahead and used a lot of the techniques of the first-draft personal statements that I would receive, which is having very long run-on sentences, so you’ll see a lot of that in there, and then starting and ending sentences and paragraphs really where you shouldn’t. So anytime you have a sentence that is three times as long as it really needs to be.

I wrote it in a way that goes back and leans into my own experience of applying for residency, thinking about all the different things that you need to do and get done within that residency application season. You’re doing your Step 2, you’re doing your sub-internship, you’re doing your ERAS application, and then all of a sudden you’re like, “I have to write this personal statement in the middle of all of it.” So how do you get it all done? Do you try to do it a little bit at a time, or do you just leave it until the end and send in a 1,000-word extravaganza that really nobody’s going to read? So that was part of the personal statement.

And I’m going to read out my favorite line that I had written from that article, which says, “The personal statement has turned into an allegiance to the ‘chosen one,’ a vow of ’til death do us part, a pre-contract-signing stream of consciousness on why this is clearly a wonderful decision.” The reason that I wrote this is that in personal statements, we always try to talk about how great the specific specialty that we’re interviewing for is going to be, to show that love that you have. I think it makes a lot of applicants feel so committed to that specialty at that point that it’s the only thing they’re ever going to do for the rest of their life, and that’s the only thing that they’ve ever thought of.

And I think it’s a way for us to also just take a step back and think about how, in the end, medicine is a calling, but it is a career. It is something that has taken you a very long time to get to, so don’t make your entire life just about this one personal statement. It’s not going to make or break your entire interview season. It really just is not. So the point of the article that I wrote was to remember this is supposed to be an interesting time for you, as you’re interviewing, as you’re figuring out where you want to go live for the next three to five to seven years, and who the people are that you want to work with. The personal statement is just a springboard to help interviewers get to know you a little bit more. Nobody’s going to keep you at your word based on every single little thing that you said. So that was the article I wrote.

Kevin Pho: She is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist, and we’re talking about her KevinMD article, “Who even reads personal statements?” Now, you run a service where you help residents and medical students edit their statements, from your experience on a residency selection committee. Now, from the other side, what kind of students should engage coaches and services? Should everyone hire someone like you? Can people do it themselves, or do most people do it themselves? What kind of student needs to hire someone to help them along with the process?

Maha Al-Ghafry: Yeah, so as a baseline, I think everybody should have somebody read their personal statement, definitely at least a partner or a family member or a fellow med student. And the second person is definitely a professor within your medical school, for example, or one of your mentor attendings; have them read it as well, just because they know you. Does this piece that you just wrote sound like you? So that’s number one.

But secondly, the people who need somebody like me to help them are going to be those people where, for example, maybe your writing skills at baseline are just not great, which is true for a lot of us in medicine. We’re just so scientifically focused that maybe we just don’t have those skills to write a personal statement. That would be one category of people. Definitely, if English is not your first language and you’re not comfortable with the writing style, having somebody help you with that. And thirdly, if you’re just really looking to get a different perspective from a professional, because sometimes friends and family are going to tell you what you want to hear.

I hope that other people like myself who are in the medical field and doing this will give their honest feedback. I know that it is a lot easier for me to just say, “Oh, yeah, this looks good,” and fix some grammar and spelling, but I generally tell my clients up front that this is going to be a little bit of a painful process, because for some people, I know that we’re going to need to cut out multiple paragraphs, and I will always ask people to write additional paragraphs if I think that those are needed, and then edit them accordingly. So those are the types of people who should reach out to an editing service, for sure.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Maha Al-Ghafry: Yeah, so just the two main things that I talked about, which are keep it short and keep it authentic. That is all.

Kevin Pho: Thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Maha Al-Ghafry: Thank you, Kevin. Thank you.

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