As I’ve said before, writing medical school application essays is no easy task. That is why it is important to be good to yourself during the process. Unfortunately, too many med school applicants make the mistake of powering through their application essays in the hopes of getting the process over with. And while wanting to do this is certainly understandable, it doesn’t usually yield good results.
When writing your application essay, I can guarantee you are going to get frustrated (Lord knows that I did!). That being said, I recommend that you be kind to yourself. One trick that I found particularly interesting was writing whatever I felt like when I started to get frustrated. The following sentence, for instance, could have easily appeared in one of my initial drafts:
For me, my desire to heal others through knowledge of medicine was a result of one particular incident as a child. I could elaborate on this experience but why bother? My head hurts, I’m sick of writing, and if I have to write one more medical school application composition, I am going to use what little I do know about medicine to overdose on Tylenol.”
Clearly, the above example is not something anyone would want in their final draft. At the time, however, the humor helped me clear some of my writer’s block and got me back on track. So don’t be so hard on yourself! The more fun you can have composing your medical school application essays, the easier they will be to write!