Is Your Med School Consultant Using AI?

I tried an experiment recently. I took a rough draft of a medical school personal statement from one of the strongest applicants we have ever worked with and fed it into two different AI tools. To make sure I would get the "best" result, I used the paid versions of these AI tools. I asked AI to produce something exceptional.

What came back after several revisions and attempts by me to prompt the AI was a med school personal statement that was polished, grammatically perfect, and well-structured. Both versions checked all the “boxes” by demonstrating the core competencies outlined by the Association of American Medical Colleges. However, the medical school personal statement, while seemingly perfect, lacked something that the one we worked on with the student possessed: personal details, authenticity, and a narrative that can only be uncovered through a discovery process that involved brainstorming, discussion, and free writing.

Why is this? The AI platform didn’t know the student; it only knew what it thought was appropriate to ask based on what exists on the world wide web. It didn’t know the details buried in the student’s background that she had never once considered relevant to her application. It didn’t know that the thing she mentioned almost apologetically in our early conversations - the thing she assumed no admissions reader would care about - was actually the most distinctive thing about her. It didn’t know that that was the center of the story.

The medical school personal statement she ultimately submitted was nothing like the final products that AI produced. The personal statement she wrote with MedEdits was written in her voice, was not formulaic, and was not a perfectly cleaned-up, smoothed-out approximation of her voice like the AI version. It was the kind of essay that makes an admissions reader motivated to meet the writer.

This premed was accepted to Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, among others.

What is important to understand about AI when using it to compose documents that will impact your future is that it produces something that reads like a strong personal statement meaning that it hits the “right” topics, uses the right language, and strikes the right tone, but it won’t know how to include those details that are the most distinctive about you, your path, your background, and your motivations. Using AI fails to identify the very details that will really make readers pause, and think, and feel. It doesn’t know how to ask about those specific memories that add the necessary texture and emotion to your documents.

AI can only work with what you give it. It cannot sit with you for 30 minutes and hear something said offhandedly and recognize it as the heart of your story. It cannot know that the experience you glossed over in two sentences is the one that should anchor your entire piece. That kind of excavation to find what is true and distinctive and worth saying, requires a human being with knowledge about med school admissions who is paying close attention.

What AI produces instead is a composite document. It scours the internet for guidance, reads thousands of generic med school personal statement examples online, and it writes toward the middle of them. The result can be something that may sound pretty amazing on the surface and AI will tell you it’s incredible, because AI is trained to be affirmative. I can tell you that when students send us documents they used AI to write, we can tell. Admissions readers will be able to sniff out AI-written documents as well and while you may not be penalized as AI is so prevalent, this surely won't help your cause in a field where integrity is so vital.

I have spent years helping applicants find the story that is actually theirs. This means drawing out the details that are distinct, personal, interesting, and compelling. That work is not about grammar or syntax; it’s about mining the nuggets that are the most powerful, that matter the most, and then structuring your med school personal statement around them.

The students who stand out in the medical school admissions process are the ones whose personal statements make an admissions reader feel like they can see and hear the person on the page. If you use a large language model to write your personal statement, it may aim to do this, but will use sources that will, in all likelihood, make you sound like everyone else.