My Essay

    I wrote my med school essay in about 10 days in early June, 2025. I submitted the essay, along with my application, almost immediately after finishing it. 

    I hadn’t planned for my writing process to be so condensed. Since high school, my performance in English classes has been better than my performance in Science or Math. As a humanities student in college (Art History and Psychology double-major), the vast majority of my course grades came from essays. I sat down to write my first draft unaware of the fact that my medical school personal statement needed to be different from any that I had written before. 

    That first version was a chronological account of my premed journey. It lacked many elements that I now see as important. It didn’t have a clear overarching theme, compelling anecdotes, and a straightforward reason for pursuing medicine. When I showed this version to my advisor a day before the essay was due, she pointed out these flaws and suggested rewriting the whole thing. I was crushed. 

    I rewrote my essay around a central theme, expressed through a story from my pre-med volunteering. Interwoven were more concrete examples of my work and specific call-outs to my purpose for applying to medical school.

    My Editing Credentials

    I’ve been editing the work of my peers since I was a college student at Wesleyan. There, I was the editor for the Arts & Culture section of the school’s newspaper. I both wrote my own articles regularly and edited ones that our writers submitted. I learned through this experience that good editing is not a one-way task, like when Grammarly edits your writing. It’s a collaboration that can bring together important ideas from the writer.  

    I continued editing at Brooklyn College, where I took my science prerequisites. There, I worked at the Writing Center, where students came to me for help with all kinds of written assignments. Editing essays, personal narratives, and theatre scripts, I honed my ability to help bring out the author’s voice and make their writing more accessible. After all, what is a personal story if not to be understood by someone else?

    My Approach (Hearing Your Story)

    I began helping my MCAT students with their personal statements around the same time I started MCAT tutoring (who would have thought, everyone who takes the MCAT also writes a personal statement!). I always interview my students first, getting a first-hand account of what their premed journey was actually like, and then help translate it into a compelling, admissions-worthy essay.