The secret to a great personal statement: show, don't tell. Hey BeMo Nation! Welcome
to another episode of One Question Podcast! We have absolutely nothing to sell you. If
you have never watched one of these, these are meant to be pure strategies
to one of these podcasts, let me tell you how this works. We have a maximum of 10 minutes
each week to tackle one topic in the world of admissions and once the timer is up that's it,
we're forced to end the episode. So this is going to force us to focus on the meat of
the topic at discussion, no fluff and just to let you know the way we make these, they're completely
unscripted, there's going to be no fancy music, no fancy visuals, no fancy audios, no fancy sound
effects, just pure content. And today's topic as I mentioned to you is about the personal statement
and why it's important to show but don't tell. So with that said, I'm going to start my timer. There
we go we're counting down from 10 minutes and I'm gonna start introducing myself, I should have
probably introduced myself first so we don't lose some time. My name is Behrouz Moemeni, I'm the CEO and
founder here at BeMo. I'm joined with two of our senior admission experts, Ronza Nisan, and Meng Yang. So
why is it important, guys, to show but don't tell? Everybody says show, don't tell, show, don't tell.
What the heck does that even mean? Ronza? Very important question. I think this is something you
have to carry out through your entire application. Anyone could just say meaning -meaningless words
that are just kind of thrown on an application but they have no impact and they don't resonate and
how can people believe that you've actually kind of gained that skill, gained that insight
unless you actually demonstrate it through a personal lived experience. So what I mean
by this is a lot of times people say things like, "I want to help those that are underserved,"
"I want to advocate," and they're just throwing all these nice things that anyone else can say,
right? But how could you actually demonstrate it is through an experience. So why is it important
is because this is your opportunity to actually demonstrate a lot of these interpersonal skills
that these admissions committees are looking out for and do so precisely by personalizing
it through an experience. Yeah just, just to kind of extend what Ronza was saying there's kind of
two places, two times where you want to do this for sure. One is when you're talking about your
motivations for pursuing whatever you're pursuing. So those kinds of questions like
"Why do you want to pursue medicine?", "Why do you want to pursue law?", if you just say
"I want to because" that's not as convincing as if you've actually done something to demonstrate
your commitment to that aspect of the field. Same thing with any traits or characteristics
that you claim to have that would make you a great candidate or a great professional
in that field. You definitely want to demonstrate that through an experience. Yeah, I completely agree
and as you guys mentioned this is for a personal statement for literally any profession. It
doesn't matter what it is, this could be medicine, law, pharmacy, dentistry, physician, assistant, MBA,
graduate school, and this is something that you've probably heard over and over, show, don't tell.
Now we're going to give you some examples. So here's a bad example of not following this.
"I want to become a medical doctor because I'm a great leader, I have great personal
skills, I am an advocate, and I have fantastic attention detail and, by the way, my
management skills are off the chart. Awful, rejected immediately. I think they read that first sentence
and then you go into the reject pile. Now here's another way to demonstrate this. So how do you
show all of these things you know, leadership, organization, attention detail, etc.? You actually
have to say - it's called a personal statement so first of all you got to give a personal story.
In that story, if your story highlights specific elements that show all of this.
So let's say I'm telling a story about how I did an independent research project
and I've been doing this for the last four years from my first year of undergrad
all the way to the final year and I started at first as a volunteer and this was a
laboratory where they had you know multiple graduate students and independent researchers
but when I was starting first they didn't allow me to touch anything really that was meaningful.
Instead they said "Hey we don't trust you yet," they didn't say that but this is how it was.
First they only let me wash glassware and I was there as a volunteer. Then they allowed me to start
making some buffers for the researchers. Then they allowed me to start doing some
research of for certain previously published articles. Then they gave me a chance to help
a graduate student with their project. Then they gave me my independent project. Then I had a
research topic of my own that I had to research, do a presentation at the end, write a paper and I got
published. This now if it's crafted properly it's going to show them dedication to the
field, progression over time, it's going to show organizational skills, it's going to show ability
to do independent research, it's going to show so many different things and I just gave one example.
I also do not do not necessarily recommend that you spend an entire
personal statement talking about a research project
and unless it's graduate school statement on purpose for example or something.
But this I think sets up the example but now let's say for a different professions like,
you know, you're applying to law school and you want to say you're an advocate. I'm pretty
sure you could find an example you could do that. You're applying to med school you want to say that
you care for health advancement in medicine, advocating for others,
public health, it depends on the angle you're trying to demonstrate. You could find something
to explain that. Any other thoughts Meng or Ronza? I think one one type of experience
or one type of claim that goes unsupported in a lot of statements that I read is something about
interpersonal skills, right, something about your relationship with patients, students, whoever it is
that you're working with and a lot of the times people will say you know "I was a volunteer at
this organization. There I learned to listen to the this group of people that I worked with
and sympathize and have compassion," and then - and then they move on and I always encourage
people remember that you know this is a place where you want to connect emotionally to your
audience and this is a perfect time to be able to do that. If you can actually isolate one particular
individual that you connected with and described to the reader in what way you connected with them
and what kind of profound impact - what kind of profound impact you had on that person, that is a
perfect example. You don't need to talk about every single person you ever talk to in your position.
If you can just draw on that one connection you made, I would be wowed by that paragraph.
Yeah agreed. Ronza, anything additional to add? How much time do we have we have? We have under three
minutes. Okay perfect so in addition to everything that was said and it was wonderful
and I completely agree with it, I would say that a lot of students also struggle with thinking that
they don't have impactful experiences because as we mentioned earlier they think they need that
grand experience. I need shadowing, I need articling, I need an internship, but they actually neglect
a lot of those interactions and observations that Meng was just mentioning and they
could happen anywhere. They could happen even outside of any sort of organized association.
I've had students that you know just mentioned loosely to me "Oh I put care packages together,
you know, for those that were homeless and I just decided to do this on my own
free time," and I said that is an amazing experience. What did you learn from that? What was the impact
from that? But those are just little things that, you know, they disregarded because it wasn't
institutionalized for whatever reason so they didn't think it was something that
they should note but it was impactful in their journey so I think in this entire process of
also considering to show, not tell, you should also consider things that are most impactful
that you want to demonstrate and not necessarily just focusing on you know those big moments
that I think admissions is are going to want to hear about. 100% I agree. Any final thoughts?
Perfect, you know what we're ahead of time! We still got one minute. Oh nice! And 30 seconds left.
That was it for us. Thanks so much for watching or listening to this
episode of one question podcast and I hope you now have a strategy to tackle personal statement and
understand exactly what we mean by show, don't tell. If you enjoyed this episode as much as we
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section, we'll get back to every question asked as soon as we can and with that said thanks so