Lesson 12: Unique Identity Question
Top 10 Medical Schools that Use This Prompt:
If there is an important aspect of your personal background or identity, not addressed elsewhere in the application, that you would like to share with the Committee, we invite you to do so here. Many applicants will not need to answer this question. Examples might include significant challenges in access to education, unusual socioeconomic factors, identification with a minority culture, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity. Briefly explain how such factors have influenced your motivation for a career in medicine. (4000 character maximum) (Harvard)
If there is an important aspect of your personal background or identity, not addressed elsewhere in the application, that you would like to share with the Committee, we invite you to do so here. Many applicants will not need to answer this question. Examples might include significant challenges in access to education, unusual socioeconomic factors, identification with a minority culture, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity. Briefly explain how such factors have influenced your motivation for a career in medicine. (4000 character maximum) (Johns Hopkins)
Is there anything else you would like to share with the Committee on Admissions? Some applicants use this space to describe unique experiences and obstacles such as significant challenges in access to education, unusual socioeconomic factors, and/or identification with a particular culture, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity. (3000 char limit) (WashU)
We are all differentiated from or connected to one another by individual inflections that constitute our diversity. Explain how your relationship with your own diversity and to the diversities of others manifests in your personal and professional activities. (500 words)
The Committee on Admissions regards the diversity (broadly defined) of an entering class as an important factor in serving the educational mission of the school. The Committee on Admissions strongly encourages you to share unique, personally important and/or challenging factors in your background which may include such discussions as the quality of your early education, gender, sexual orientation, any physical challenges, and life or work experiences. Please describe how these factors have influenced your goals and preparation for a career in medicine and may help you to uniquely contribute to the Stanford learning environment. (2,000 characters including spaces) (Stanford)
This prompt shows up on a disproportionate number of schools’ Secondary Applications. Different types of doctors require different types of skills. A psychiatrist must have a very different set of proficiencies from a surgeon, or a family doctor. A diversity of med school students’ experiences enables not only a richer learning community—you’ll learn as much from your peers as you will your professors—but also a richer stock of potential obstetricians or anesthesiologists.
Because of the historical underrepresentation and marginalization of certain social groups—minorities, poor people, first-generation immigrants—medical schools will often explicitly highlight certain identities within these application prompts as a means of encouraging people from those groups to envision themselves as members of the medical community.
However, if you’re one of those people who feels like his identity tends toward the more normative side or is overrepresented within the medical fields, remember that there are a variety of ways to define diversity—through thought, disciplinary background, or character—that you need not worry that you fit too much within a particular “box.”
Ultimately, expressions of unique aspects of your identity come from specific experiences and events that demonstrate this distinctiveness. Here’s a great example of an applicant showing intellectual diversity when describing the experience of moving towns right before high school:
I look back on my upbringing and think it a solid foundation for medical school. Always there is room for improvement—less Jewish jokes in my new town, greater competition in my old town, and more diversity in both. However, through both the highs and lows, I think of my childhood and its communities as largely idyllic. These communities and my experiences therein molded me into someone who values kindness, education, and initiative, who is quick to seek camaraderie within a culture of academics and innovation.
I look towards medical school eager to build on these areas of focus. I will become a compassionate and capable physician. Moreover, I will be a doctor driven by a core realization: the opportunities that shaped me into the person I am today—the crafts in kindergarten, debates in high school English classes, personal records in cross country—were all predicated on my health and wellness. As a physician, I will work to promote and protect that foundation for my patients and communities, giving them the best opportunity to realize the joys life has to offer.”
The example above effectively describes a particular set of experiences that illustrate the writer’s unique perspective. Although this writer doesn’t come from an underrepresented background demographically, this background still provides a unique worldview that he describes.
Things like “crafts in kindergarten, debates in high school English classes, [and] personal records in cross country,” while not at all directly related to the health professions “were all predicated on my health and wellness.”
This understanding—the interconnectedness of body and mind, of health and comfort—illustrates that the writer has thought carefully about his upbringing and the ways this upbringing have informed a unique understanding of the world, despite that upbringing at first glance feeling banal or overrepresented in medical schools.
For those who don’t worry as much about this, make sure to begin your response with vivid descriptions, like in this example:
Honey and turmeric: from a young age, my mother would blend these ingredients into a sticky yellow paste to soothe skin or calm a cough. As Indian immigrants, my parents filled cabinets with colorful spices, ready to flavor cooking or treat common ailments. With a physician for a father, I grew up with a nuanced view of medicine, equally balanced between prescriptions and these cultural home remedies.
This example operates well because it highlights unique cultural practices and the specific ways those manifested in the author’s childhood. Rather than saying that her parents used traditional herbs, the author spices it up (pun intended) by describing the “sticky yellow paste to soothe skin or calm a cough.” One can clearly see the texture evoked by the description, enabling the reader to really dive into the essay and see, as the writer continues, the importance of viewing medicine holistically.
A relatively common and effective theme for this essay revolves around how health and care are manifested in different contexts, whether the kindergarten crafts class at the homogenous high school or the turmeric-filled childhood medicine cabinet.
Medical schools differ from the overall healthcare industry in that they’re not necessarily in the market to sell lots of prescriptions or medicine. Rather, the main aim is to produce doctors who will uphold the part of the Hippocratic oath that states, “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.”
Use this essay to show how your interests and upbringing—whether traditionally unique or not—ultimately influence how you view the practice of medicine, and the importance of incorporating a variety of worldviews into that practice.
