Lesson 24: The PTCAS Essay
The Essay is the main opportunity to tie activities and experiences together and connect 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 PTCAS application requires one 4500-character, or about 550-word, essay. 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.
For the 2020 application cycle (and likely future application cycles) the essay prompt is:
Every person has a story that has led them to a career. Since there are a variety of health professions that “help” others, please go beyond your initial interaction or experiences with physical therapy, and share the deeper story that has confirmed your decision to specifically pursue physical therapy as your career.
This prompt allows you to really get into your core motivations for becoming a physical therapist. A personal statement is not the space to rehash from the activities and experiences sections the core responsibilities you had shadowing in a physical therapist’s office. This is the time to discuss your experiences with the patient complaining of back spasms, whose grandmother had the same name as yours, whose anxieties were eased by this mere fact along with your calm grips carefully putting his exercise bands on his ankles. It’s the time to discuss why your lacrosse injury freshman year that left doctors saying “you’ll never play again” reinforced your confidence in physical therapy, allowing you to, in fact, play again.
In general, you’re going to want to tell your reader why it’s inevitable that physical therapy school is the next step in your journey. However, you don’t tell the reader this by saying, “A DPT program 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 at the pediatric PT office? What was it about the Parkinson’s patient with trouble walking that made you feel so confident?
The easiest way to write a compelling story is to write from a specific event. Now, this doesn’t mean just writing broadly about your volunteer work at a PT office. It means writing about a patient whose terror at the thought of standing up required you to gently help him make small motions as if he were getting up for days on end until he finally made it halfway up. It means writing about the intense jubilation even a halfway stand evokes.
A specific example is compelling not for the content itself, but for the specificity that drives the narrative forward.
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 PTCAS application.
