I started my personal essay for U of T’s medical school late last week. Before this summer, I thought this was actually going to be a breeze for me. I have a ton of application/essay writing experience, but what I didn’t expect was how rusty I was going to be with this. In addition, writing essays for medical school is much different than scholarship/program applications. That being said, my overall approach is very much the same.
Anyways, so I started with a first draft, and I had a general idea of what type of message/theme I wanted to convey. But after two days of writing it, I was pretty frustrated, because I thought it was pretty awful. The ideas did not mesh too well and the flow was not great, in my opinion. And if the flow isn’t good, the essay isn’t good. So I took a break for one day.
After that break, I started thinking a bit more about the essay, and I realized the problem: I strayed away from the overall theme I had decided upon beforehand. I tried to include too many things, and frankly, you just can’t do that. You need to include things that make sense as part of your theme. You’re going to have to sacrifice some things, but the idea is that you’re not trying to tell your life story. You’re trying to tell that small bit of your life that relates to your path to medicine.