Picture, if you will, a residency admissions committee member beneath a halo of light reading applicant essays in her office at midnight. Caffeine on her breath, crumpled white coat next to her desk chair, she is making steady progress on the never-ending stack of applicant files until she picks up a residency personal statement that begins, “I first became interested in internal medicine when Grandma was diagnosed with cancer…” Pulling out her hair by the fistful, she tosses the file into the trash. That cancer may not have killed your grandma, but it just might have killed your application.
Many students devote a significant portion of their ERAS essays to describing a universal experience that may have piqued their initial interest in a specialty. A residency admissions committee member does look for evidence of how your fundamental connection to humanity will make you an empathetic and skilled physician. The problem comes when an applicant starts to make the reader feel like s/he is providing counseling to the applicant, that is, when the candidate uses language that could strike the wrong reader as inappropriate for a professional application. The admissions committee can handle empathetic writing; however, if they suspect you mistook your essay for the journal under your pillow, they may not be forgiving.
Think carefully about the topics you choose. With all due respect to each of us who has had a family medical catastrophe, you can estimate the prevalence of cancer among the elderly and conclude that starting an essay with the description of a grandparent’s battle with cancer is not going to catch the reader’s attention. Unfortunately, just because it is genuine, it may not be compelling reading or a useful means to distinguish you from the hundreds of residency applicants whose essays share similar themes.
There are exceptions. You can be forgiven for including a common topic if it directly ties into highlighting a unique personal accomplishment. Perhaps grandpa’s prostate cancer diagnosis led you to seek out a research position with a faculty member at your local university lab where you were directly involved in sequencing a promising new molecular marker for prostate cancer. Give the generic topic a brief mention and transition rapidly into how it demonstrated that you are a mover and shaker who took a universal experience and, by virtue of your work ethic and intellectual curiosity, turned it into a contribution to science.
You get a pass on writing about universal experiences if you can pull off a convincing reason to keep the midnight reader going; otherwise, keep your essay distinctive and befitting the professional you hope to become.
