Lesson 2: Audience
Because an undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for medical school, it’s easy to think about the application in terms of the applications you wrote five or more years ago. Because of the large number of high schoolers applying to four-year colleges and universities, a huge industry has emerged around the gatekeeping of these institutions. From the large admissions offices to the test-prep and admissions consulting programs, the audiences of these applications are a tad different from that of medical school applications.
Undergraduate admissions offices are large, complex operations. From marketing schools to providing tours to organizing daily info sessions, the undergraduate admissions office can be much more easily likened to an industrial operation. In any successful industrial operation, individuals from all knowledge bases and disciplines come together to provide valuable input on the process in order to “sell” more applications (and make more money on application fees while simultaneously making the school appear more competitive and ultimately increasing its rankings).
Despite declining enrollment in the humanistic disciplines, undergraduate admissions committees are often disproportionately comprised of members from the humanities. This means that essays must be absolutely perfect—no comma splices, or misspelled words, or banal metaphors. Given the immense competition, small errors are great reasons for undergraduate admissions counselors to disqualify you from the process. In undergraduate admissions, while content is incredibly important, form is too.
In slight contrast, the medical school admissions office is staffed mostly by practicing physicians and med students. The people whose main day-to-day writing activities include scrawling seemingly illegible prescriptions and using pre-formulated medical shorthand are the same ones reading your application. While many of these people come from disciplines as varied as art history or anthropology, many are far removed from those days.
Consequently, the form of the essays will not be scrutinized as deeply as if it were an undergraduate admissions application. The ambitious creative risks employed by overachieving prospective undergraduates—the essays about napkins in haiku form, the rap about the 1054 supernova observed by Chinese astronomers—are not going to necessarily shift the needle in the way they would for an undergraduate application.
Rather, the essays must convey two things:
1. Basic competence
2. A deep-seated desire to become a doctor
Beyond that, everything else is just embellishment.
This isn’t an excuse to be lazy, however. You still must craft a compelling narrative that convinces doctors and soon-to-be doctors that you have the enthusiasm and aptitude to become one of them. Just don’t stress too much on your inability to write a compelling couplet in iambic pentameter.
Rather, vivid personal descriptions that highlight your motivations to become a doctor will have a much greater influence on the effectiveness of your essays. Concise, cogent writing is key. What are the experiences that made you want to become a doctor? How did those experiences do that? Even the most seemingly boring experience can be the grounds for a good story, when told right.
In the following sections, we will examine what makes a good narrative. While the less conventional rhetorical strategies and forms can certainly make for interesting and exciting narrative, people tend to underestimate the power of clear, concise writing.
