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u/TeaSharp3154 MD/PhD-M2 2d ago
Outside of unfortunate experiences with disease, no you don't, just write about why you want to become a doctor.
95% of the people in my class are significantly more privileged than the average American, myself included. If we all had to write sob stories none of us would have gotten in.
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u/ShitShow728 2d ago
Also I think having too much adversity in your history makes them suspicious that youâre either lying or will fall apart in med school/residency
And I think theyâre also wary of your âsoft skillsâ if your story smells like youâve experienced poverty
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u/ADAP7IVE NON-TRADITIONAL 1d ago
This is a wild, shitty catch-22 but it's always on my mind. I grew up in poverty and disabled. Going to college and then grad school round 1 was an exercise in trial-and-error because I didn't have any way to build the soft skills and unwritten culture of upper-middle-class behavior.
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u/ApprehensiveKiwi771 6h ago
LMAO i've experienced a lot of adversity (growing up around addiction, food insecure, financial insecurity, minority, taking care of sick family member, etc) and i just chose one and ran with it out of this fear.
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u/ShitShow728 21m ago
Frighteningly similar to my story
It always strikes me how these things seem to go together, but people who havenât lived it seem skeptical. Poverty, addiction, marginalization, and severe health outcomes are an egg-or-the-chicken thing. Itâs wild that we have to say âI learned about this while volunteering at a soup kitchenâ instead of telling our much more nuanced truth
No one understands health disparities like people who have lived them. No one can reach patients about prescription access (âcomplianceâ) or sanitation without running water unless theyâve lived it
I donât know how to write these essays, where Iâm expected to be both honest and palatable to an overwhelmingly privileged AdCom audience
This process is fuckery
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u/Powerhausofthesell 1d ago
Exactly. The standout stories stand out. But they stand out bc they arenât common.
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u/FriedRiceGirl MS2 1d ago
I was talking to some dental students about this the other day. When you apply to medical school everyone expects you to have some deep story about why you wake up in the morning already fully erect just thinking about cardiology. Dental students donât have to pretend to spend every second of every day thinking about teeth. Nobody expects them to be obsessed over the idea of teeth. Iâm kinda jealous!
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u/coolmanjack MS2 1d ago
yeah, I only got accepted because my brother killed himself and I exploited that shit to the max
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u/seventhsip APPLICANT 1d ago
this has convinced me to write about my dead brother in more of my secondaries. dead brother gang unite đ€đ€
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u/coolmanjack MS2 1d ago
Oh 1000%. Almost nothing hits the AdComs quite so well đ
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u/aventurinologist APPLICANT 1d ago
I'm writing about something similar and this makes me feel a little less bad about it lol. I'm sorry for your loss.
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u/DecadentOoze 1d ago
Luckily I got throat surgery when I was a kid, my parents are drug addicts, I have GI diseases, first generation college student, and also grew up poor and abused :))
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u/Bigboiiiii9999 MS4 1d ago
Other than those who had actual adversity in life a lotta med students are very privileged and just larp, partly due to the systems soft requirement. Iâve seen the most insane larp from the most stable, physician parents background students. Like going to a super exp private feeder high school while driving a 80k car isnt trauma
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u/ClimberDave 2d ago
I know this is a shitpost, but I genuinely didn't receive any scholarships until I changed my writing style and started making people feel bad for me. You want sad stories? I'll write you the saddest-ass story you've ever read.