Despite the insistence by most admissions departments to the contrary, the dirty secret to getting into medical school is that there is actually a “right answer” to medical school personal statements, one that most admissions consultants will not tell you, for they may well not have realized it themselves. Failing to provide it will almost certainly bar you from admission. Have I got your attention yet?

Here it is:

When you are asked in your personal statement why you want to pursue a rigorous medical education, you respond that it is because you want to help people.

That’s it. That’s the dirty little secret. Ignore it at your peril.*

To the medical school applicant reading this and wondering how s/he can stand out from the crowd if there is only one “right answer” to the question, I would draw an analogy to other art forms with ostensibly restrictive requirements. Consider, for example, the haiku. With such strict requirements of a format consisting of three lines with five, seven, and five syllables, respectively, we would likely presume the haiku a dead genre, one whose full potential had been completely explored and which offered no further opportunity for self-expression. Instead, we find quite the opposite; it is the very structural restrictions that inspire creativity among writers of haikus. One could say the same of sonnets, or limericks, or for that matter, the medical school personal statement, for it is precisely this restriction – the fact that your motivation for pursuing a career in medicine must be your desire to help your fellow man – that allows for your creativity in telling your story. To an admissions committee reader, it is not enough that you answer the question correctly, but rather, how convincingly you tell your story while staying within those boundaries.

As a result, the medical school personal statement is actually a rich canvas for personal expression; it is simply one that comes with its own set of rules. Your personal statement is therefore only nominally about your desire to help others, the same way Hamlet is only nominally about a Danish prince. Just as Hamlet is in fact about far more complex themes like treachery and man’s relationship with his own mortality, your personal statement must answer that you are interested in medicine in order to help others while answering deeper, more difficult questions like why you will succeed in the field, and how you will remain inspired throughout a career in such a challenging environment.

Therefore, using the “right answer” to your medical school personal statements isn’t the secret to gaining admission to medical school, anymore than “wash your hands first” is the secret to performing a successful appendectomy; it’s simply the necessary starting point, which, if missed, makes all of your subsequent efforts moot.

*Naturally, here come the disclaimers. First off, I will allow that it is possible – albeit unlikely – that someone, somewhere, has written a personal statement that claimed some other motivation for pursuing a career in medicine, and actually earned admission. However, I can honestly say that in six years of helping applicants to medical school craft their personal statements, I cannot recall a single one that worked. (Generally, anyone who wanted to pursue such a high-risk application strategy generally didn’t have the grades or test scores to support their application in the first place, and so they were willing to throw a “Hail Mary” in the hopes that a wacky personal statement would help them stand out from the crowd.)