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.

I started fresh, with a brand new introduction that fit my writing style much better, and made me super happy. I finished it last night, and I feel very good about it, and extremely happy I was able to get my theme across. I’m going to leave it for a few days before going back and doing more revising so I can look at it with a more objective head. If you look at something too long in a short period of time, it ends up looking better than it actually is. In addition, your head becomes filled with the same old ideas, such that it misses out on many mistakes you would normally have noticed with a clear head.

I finally got my OMSAS account last night. I was very happy to see that Ottawa and Queen’s no longer require any additional answers/information. So the only other school I need to prepare for is McMaster, and a few of their questions are pretty tough. They require some discussion on our experiences with a few concepts, and I honestly could not think of anything relevant right away. I’m going to have to sit back and think pretty deeply about some of them, but am looking forward to the challenge.

I was also excited to see that the Autobiographical sketch now gives you 200 (I think?) characters to describe each of the 48 items you list. I think last year you only had 48 characters, and that’s sooooo little for some items. I was worried before about how I would be able to explain some of my experiences better, but it’s good to see I’ll have more room to work with.

I think the next article I’m going to write will be about the Available Major Scholarships for Canadian students. I’m trying to balance out the types of articles I write and when I write them (e.g. provide articles for premed, life science, and high school students on a regular basis instead of just catering to one group). Not sure if I will write it tonight, maybe tomorrow.

Two more days left of my NSERC summer research, and then I head off to Muskoka with the family and some family friends for the weekend. Looking forward to it!