Lesson 20: The Personal Statement and Other Resources
The Personal Statement is the main opportunity to tie activities and experiences together as a means of truly connecting with the people who read your application. Ultimately, you want to write an essay that makes the reader want to become your future professor or colleague. The OptomCAS application requires one 4500-character, or about 550-word, personal statement. While this length can sometimes seem long, it’s an incredibly limited amount of space to convince the admissions committee that you’re someone they want to have as future colleagues or students. The prompt is:
Please describe what inspires your decision for becoming an optometrist, including your preparation for training in this profession, your aptitude and motivation, the basis for your interest in optometry, and your future career goals.
A personal statement is not the space to rehash from the achievements and experiences sections the core responsibilities you had shadowing in an optometrist’s office. This is the time to discuss your experiences with the patient who hadn’t read a billboard in twenty years, whose outlook on life (both physically and metaphorically) completely transformed with the possibilities enabled by a pair of glasses. It’s the time to discuss how your positive energy and helping hand enabled that patient to overcome her fear of dilation, who ended up requiring cataract surgery as a result of the diagnosis of the optometrist you shadowed.
In general, you’re going to want to tell your reader why it’s inevitable that optometry school is the next step in your journey. However, you don’t tell the reader this by saying, “Optometry school is the inevitable next step in my journey.”
You show it by explaining to the reader the things you’ve done that have gotten you to the point where you’ve concluded, Hm, I think I’m ready to spend almost a decade of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a career making people’s lives better, or at least less bad.
This usually means recounting an event or a set of events that created a turning point in how you view the world and want to contribute to it. A good story comes from the deep, dark crevices of that turning point. You may not even consciously know that turning point exists, so think deeply.
Why did you decide to volunteer in that eyeglasses nonprofit? What was it about that legally blind patient that compelled you to go the extra mile for him?
The easiest way to write a compelling story is to write from a specific event. Writing a good story means starting with a vision in your head and translating that vision to the written word. However, language is an imperfect medium to express those intangible images—sometimes lingering, sometimes fleeting—that sit in your mind. Language will never truly crystallize the vision you have up there, but you must start with that vision if you’re ever going to get anything close.
The Definitive Medical School Applications Guide expands upon this attitude towards writing. For more advice on crafting a compelling application, consider reading the following sections:
· 4. “I’m not convinced he wants to be a doctor”: What Not to Write About and How Not to Write it
· 5. How to Write your Essay: Two Approaches
· 6. Cleaning Up the Mess
· 8. Activities, Activities, Activities
While these sections describe the Medical School Application, their implications reach far beyond this application. Figuring out a writing method that works well for you and determining how to group, describe, and order your experiences apply equally to the OptomCAS application.
