Top 10 Medical Schools that Use This Prompt:

• Are there any areas of medicine that are of particular interest to you? If so, please comment. (max 2,500 characters) (Johns Hopkins)

• The ultimate goal of our institution is to produce a population of physicians with a collective desire to improve health of all segments of our society through the outstanding patient care, research and education. In this context, where do you see your future medical career (academic medicine, research, public health, primary care, business/law, etc.) and why? Your answer need not be restricted to one category. If your plans require that you complete a dual degree program, please elaborate here. (2500 characters) (NYU)

• Choose the single answer that best describes your career goals and clinical practice setting: Academic Medicine (Clinical), Academic Medicine (Physician Scientist), Non-Academic Clinical Practice, Health Policy, Health Administration, Primary Care, Public Health/Community Health, Global Health. Why do you feel you are particularly suited for this practice scenario? What knowledge, skills and attitudes have you developed that have prepared you for this career path? (1,000 characters including spaces.) (Stanford)

• Where do you see yourself post-graduate education? What experiences have led you to this goal? (500 char) (UCLA)

While this question is oriented towards the future, it’s ultimately the past that enables you to consider your future. In this question, you’re not only discussing what your future practice looks like, but also demonstrating how you knew to come to this answer. Because of the varied post-medical school pathways, admissions officers need to understand that you’ve considered what you want your daily life to look like after graduation. 

Do you want to be running a hospital? Working in a lab? Seeing children? Planning for pandemic responses? Performing open-heart surgery? While you may not have any specific experience practicing the work you’re hoping to perform after you’ve graduated, both direct and indirect knowledge can readily inform this response.

Maybe you have leadership skills from student council. Perhaps you could be an administrator. 

Have you worked in a chemistry lab before? Did you enjoy the hours of titrations? Maybe a clinical research path would be generative.

Do you take care of your six siblings? Possibly you’d find fulfillment as a pediatrician.

Did you have to plan and manage a major event with hundreds of attendees when working a non-medical internship? Potentially global health would be of interest.

Did you take up woodworking as a hobby? You could probably enjoy being a surgeon.

When assembling a class of future doctors, admissions officers want to ensure a diversity of interests, skills, and prospects. While you don’t necessarily have to pursue the pathway you discuss in the application, crafting a clear narrative about a particular type of medicine will help the admissions committee confidently create a diverse cohort. 

Ultimately, the pathway you are arguing that you are hoping to pursue should be reflected in the experiences you have. If you hated the lab ever since you scarred your hand on a Bunsen burner in high school, then you probably don’t want to say you would prefer to pursue research. If you think you want to become a surgeon because of the pay but have no experience with the skills required to be a surgeon and actually hate working with your hands, then you likely don’t want to say you a surgeon is your preferred career.

Here’s an example from a current medical school student: 

To better understand the role of a toxic protein, tau, in Alzheimer’s disease, I worked in a lab for over two years. I focused on preclinical anti-tau antibodies and found that targeted epitope significantly affected the ability of the antibody to stop tau aggregation. Tau immunotherapy is a promising new approach at a time when disease-modifying treatments are scarce, and we need to better understand the mechanism of action.

However, while I took immense pride in the journey from preliminary experiments to publication, my work tested antibodies in cultured neurons alone. We are years away from bringing the therapy to patients. Much like a physician-scientist who researches the future while treating patients in the present, I wanted to help people losing their memories to Alzheimer’s, here and now.

This answer continues with the author discussing her interest in pursuing a medical practice that works with older patients. Here, the writer demonstrates her knowledge of the broad scope of what medical practice looks like—from research to working with patients—and it also shows the reader exactly why she’s arguing to practice medicine for elderly patients. 

Ultimately, your responses should reflect your experiences. Just because you’ve vaguely thought about global health doesn’t mean you have a good reason to work in the field. Can you convince the reader that medical school is the inevitable next step? What experiences create the narrative that, yes, med school is the inevitable next step?

The future, in the end, is written through the past.