Personal Inventory Exercise
When composing your medical school personal statement, keep in mind that you are writing a narrative essay (throwback to your freshman English class?) to tell the story of how you arrived at this point in your life. But, unlike a “story” in the creative sense, yours must also offer convincing evidence for your decision to apply to medical school.
We have found that at the start of the medical school personal statement brainstorming process, students often don’t know where to begin. We get it. Knowing how important your medical school personal statement is, we realize this feels like a lot of pressure.
This is why we created the Personal Inventory Exercise. The Personal Inventory Exercise will serve as a foundational piece for your entire medical school application so, once you complete it, keep it within reach.
To complete this exercise, we suggest taking your time, spending a day or two, or maybe even a week, thinking about your personal and “professional” milestones. This exercise will prepare you to ponder more deeply and to reflect on those experiences and life events that have been the most significant to you on your journey to this day!
Let’s get started.
Note: It is fine to complete your Personal Inventory Exercise on paper or on a computer. Choose the option that works best for you.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Step 1: On the far left side of your document, create a timeline with dates from your birth to the current day.
Step 2: If you have an idea of where you want to be in the future, include future dates as well!
Step 3: Put a line down the center of your document to make two columns. Put a horizontal line at the date of your high school graduation. If you have graduated from college, include a horizontal line at your college graduation date.
Step 4: In the left column you will write down your most valuable personal milestones and events. Think of those events that have really shaped who you are (birth, where you lived or went to school, a move, a death, a divorce, an illness, personal challenges). List these events chronologically.
Step 5: In the right column you will write down your “professional” accomplishments. This includes everything that you have listed on your CV or resume. Think of your extracurricular, scholarly, academic, and accomplishment milestones. List these events chronologically.
NOTE: Your goal should be to make a comprehensive Personal Inventory of every meaningful event, milestone, and accomplishment in your life. This means including events such as traveling, the birth of a sibling, transferring colleges, landing your dream clinical or research position, making Dean’s list for the first time; include anything and everything that was important to you at the time it happened or that you now realize is important as you reflect on your life.
Step 6: With your completed inventory, determine which personal milestones and events on the left side of your inventory you consider the most influential in your life. This step might take some time and could require several revisits. After you try this exercise, discuss your choices with someone who knows you well. See if they have any input and discuss whether or not they agree or disagree with your choices. In having this discussion, you may reevaluate what you might choose once you hear someone else’s perspective.
Step 7: Now take a look at the right side of your list, and do the same thing that you did in Step 6: decide which experiences and accomplishments were the most significant to you.
Step 8: Now, create a new timeline, including all of the most significant items from Steps 6 and 7 and write them down chronologically.
Keep in mind that what students choose as their most important events differs tremendously. For example, for some students, their personal milestones and events may comprise the majority of their most significant events while for other students, their most influential events are their accomplishments and experiences. Some students may have very few significant personal milestones while others may have a longer list.
This is where the individuality of who you are and what makes your narrative distinctive starts to take shape. There is no right or wrong in terms of what you select! Authenticity in the medical school admissions process is a key ingredient for success so always be true to yourself.
Now, keep your personal inventory handy as you start writing your medical school personal statement. What you selected should serve as the major nuggets for your writing piece.
The timeline you created in Step 8 will establish the foundation of the experiences you will discuss in your personal statement. Keep in mind that the experiences you selected from before college should not dominate your list. And, the further you are from your college graduation date, the less your early college experiences should dominate.
Step 9: Looking at the experiences you have selected from Step 8, compose what we call a “Foundational Statement.” This Foundational Statement should be a concise sentence highlighting achievements that best showcase your interest in wanting to become a physician. This Foundational Statement will help you to keep a clear idea of what your strengths, niche, and foci are. As you write your documents, keep your Foundational Statement in your mind.
Example: As an oncology researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering and M.D. Anderson, I have taken upper level classes in the field of cancer biology and cancer genetics and founded the Camp Kesem chapter at my school.
As you get writing, you may need to further refine the list you created in Step 8 depending on how many items you have as you won’t have the space to write about everything that may be significant to you. You may also find that you want to refine and revise your Foundational Statement. This is part of the process of discovery that you should embrace as you compose your medical school application materials.
JESSICA FREEDMAN, M.D., a former medical school and residency admissions officer at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is the founder and chair of MedEdits Medical Admissions and author of three top-selling books about the medical admissions process that you can find on Amazon.
