how to write your personal statement

Hi pre-healths! This article is centered towards my pre-dental friends but obviously could be reinterpreted for other health professional schools. If you are a 1st or 2nd year, I would suggest journaling about all of your important experiences! This makes it easier when you do start your personal statement later on, since it's difficult to remember every aspect of your involvement activities.

1. Before even starting your personal statement, journal! This could be anything that inspires you (ex: jobs, shadowing, assisting, extracurriculars, leadership, volunteering). Also make sure to have a resume or spreadsheet filled out with all of the activities you were involved in.

2. Know the prompt! The question is "Why Dentistry" but that includes why you want to be a dentist and why you would be a good dentist. Focus on showing and not just telling!

3. Instead of starting your first rough draft right away, start by brain dumping! Here are a couple of ideas of things to brain dump:

   1. What makes you unique

   2. What are you good at (somewhat related to dentistry)

   3. What you care about in the field of dentistry: ex: inaccessibility to dental care and information, preventative care

   4. Fun anecdotes

   5. Shadowing experience reflections

      1. This is a copy and paste from my reflection: "cool to see that dentist uses lavender to put under nose when drill has unpleasant smell, use salt for patients that gag easily during x-rays"

   6. Life altering events (could be family related, could be anything else)

   7. 3 why statements of why you are interested in the field

      1. ex: I want to address oral health care disparities in the field of dentistry; I like working with my hands

4. After brain dumping, think about a few themes you want to focus on in your personal statement.

   1. One of my main goals was to have a very unique personal statement. I emphasized key points that I knew many others would not relate to, and I focused on involvement experiences that not many others would share.

   2. In the end though, I realized some cliches are cliches because they're classics. I was so afraid of being basic, I overlooked some fundamental aspects of dentistry. One part of writing your personal statement is turning a boring event into a unique experience! Yes, a lot of pre-dentals have parents who are dentists or had a great experience with their orthodontist, but not everyone has the same reflection.

5. I interviewed a few dental students & dentists on what they thought were important skills to have as a dentist. This was super important in narrowing down topics to focus on for my personal statement, which ended up being skills that I thought would be hard to learn. For example, I talked about being an empathetic listener. Personally, I think it's a skill that's built over time and not easy to develop.

6. I had a few key experiences that I focused on, mainly the student-run clinic I was involved in at UC Davis and some shadowing experiences.

7. I wrote individual paragraphs first without connecting them. So for one paragraph I focused on a specific experience and another paragraph was a different experience.

8. I then wrote in chronological order in my personal statement. I tried to start with something eye-catching and end with something powerful.

9. After making a really ROUGH draft, I polished each paragraph. When I finished around 5 drafts, I started trying to connect each other with the theme I had. I didn't even think about the word count (4500 characters) until my last few drafts. Some ways I connected each paragraph was by making direct statements such as "I would be a good dentist because ___."

10. I got feedback along the way: first one being my english professor, second were 4 different dental students I'm close to. The last ones were 2 of my close friends who were engineering majors (people who knew me but weren't related to dentistry).

11. After reading your statement so many times, it gets so boring in your eyes. At one point I thought that no one reading it is ever going to think it's perfect. But after writing a few more drafts, it got to where I wanted to be. You're writing is better than you think it is! Some people won't like certain aspects of your personal statement but others will. It's your personal statement and you can choose what to do with it!

Misc tips:

• Look over personal statements from successful applicants! It's helpful in determining what you like and dislike in a personal statement.

• Create separate word docs for each draft! It helps ALOT when you want to go back and see what you edited or if you want to return something back to its original draft.

Helpful links:

• Link to my academic essay about writing personal statements (includes interviews of admissions officers, dental students, dentists, and my english professor)

• Book of successful applicant personal statements (highly recommend)

Good luck!!! My final piece of advice is trust yourself, and talk about what you want to talk about! Not what other people want to hear.