Ace the AMCAS Essay: Who Should Write Your Essays?

In this blog series, you’ll get succinct, practical tips on how you can optimize your AMCAS essay for acceptance to top medical schools.

Who Should Write Your AMCAS Essay?

The obvious answer here is that YOU should (and if anyone else does for you, then you can expect to be found out and rejected). But there’s a bigger question here – Which YOU will be writing your essay?

I’d like to present two important principles here:

Principle #1: To Thine Own Self Be True

One of the purposes of the AMCAS essay is to provide a snapshot – a quick and accurate introduction – of yourself to the med school admissions board. If the application were to ask you to attach a photo, you wouldn’t include a picture of someone else, and I hope that you wouldn’t Photoshop or alter your photo to create an image of who you WISH you were, rather than of who you actually ARE.

Your essays should serve that same purpose. The stories that you tell in your AMCAS essay should be authentic and honest so that the YOU in your essay would be recognizable to anyone who actually knows you.

Principle #2: Put Your Best Foot Forward

While you want to be as authentic as possible, you also want to be sure that you’re not:

a) offering too much personal or private information

b) dwelling on your weaknesses.

Yes, you want to portray your true self (Principle #1), but you don’t want to needlessly air your dirty laundry. Nobody wants to read about your most recent breakup or how devastated you were when you woke up with a huge zit on the day of your high school prom. Furthermore, if you have difficulty juggling tasks or following directions, don’t be “too honest” and rant and complain about how you have so much trouble getting things done. Of course you should never ever EVER lie, but you also don’t need to volunteer irrelevant or inappropriate information or details that will make you look unqualified.

“Who Should Write Your AMCAS Essays?” is taken from the Accepted guide, Ace the AMCAS Essay. To download the complete guide, click here.

Learn more about writing a strong, memorable medical school application when you join us live for our upcoming Create a Winning AMCAS Application webinar on Tuesday, April 10, 2018.

For individualized assistance, check out Accepted’s AMCAS Application Advising and Editing Packages – get matched with an expert med school advisor who will help you highlight your competitive advantage and get ACCEPTED!

By Linda Abraham, president and founder of Accepted. Linda earned her bachelors and MBA at UCLA, and has been advising applicants since 1994 when she founded Accepted. Linda is the co-founder and first president of AIGAC. She has written or co-authored 13 e-books on the admissions process, and has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News, Poets & Quants, Bloomberg Businessweek, CBS News, and others. Linda is the host of Admissions Straight Talk, a podcast for graduate school applicants. Want an admissions expert help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!

Related Resources:

• From Example to Exemplary, a free guide
• How Personal is Too Personal?
• 5 Pointers for a Stand-Out Med School Personal Statement

Last updated on March 14, 2018.