As part of your physician residency-application packet, the personal statement gives future doctors a chance to control the narrative. It’s not about test scores or evaluations. Instead, it’s a chance to explain who you are as a person and how you envision your career in medicine taking shape.
A personal statement won’t singlehandedly get you into your top-choice residency program. But a weak or sloppy one could keep you from landing an interview.
During an education session at the 2025 AMA Annual Meeting in Chicago, three seasoned residency program directors shared what makes a personal statement effective and where applicants go wrong. Here is a look at their dos and don’ts for writing a personal statement.
Don’t: Summarize your CV
Your CV will also be a key part of your application packet—and making sure that your CV is in shipshape is a key step to creating a well-rounded application. Still, let your CV speak for itself.
“People often write about basically regurgitating their CV into a personal statement,” said Sanjay Desai, MD, the AMA’s chief academic officer and a former internal medicine program director. “The personal part is how did that experience shape you? How did that experience somehow influence your aspiration to do X, Y, or Z? What did you learn from that experience?”
It's also important to make sure that your voice is captured in a unique way.
"If we can cut and paste your paragraph into somebody else's personal statement, it's not personal enough," Dr. Desai said.
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Don’t: Go overboard
Program directors read hundreds of personal statements. If yours runs long—keep it to a single page—or reads like an exercise in avant-garde nonfiction, you aren’t going to make the impression you were hoping for.
"I've seen personal statements where people have written a personal statement in the form of a one-act play,” said John Andrews, MD, the AMA’s vice president for graduate medical education innovations. “It distinguishes itself for being odd rather than being a compelling personal statement."
Dr. Andrews, a former family medicine program director, also highlighted that the format should be a written narrative, so avoid using bullets or any sort of list structure.
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Do: Acknowledge a change of course
Most medical students change their specialty choice at some point in medical school.
If your application shows prior research, activities or interests pointing toward one physician specialty but your personal statement and application are now focused on another, use the statement to explain that evolution
“Tell us what happened,” said Rini Ratan, MD, an ob-gyn residency program director in New York. “Say, ‘I had been thinking about doing [one specialty] … and then I had this experience, this aha moment, and I decided that I wanted to do ob-gyn.’”
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Don’t: Get the personalization wrong
The decision to tailor a personal statement to a program, in an era where students are applying to dozens of programs, is likely to create a lot of extra labor. It also introduces the possibility of a disqualifying error in your text.
“I have received personalized personal statements to the wrong program,” Dr. Desai said. “That’s not the first impression you want to leave with a selection committee.”
“If you do it, then the personalization to that program should be more than, ‘And I would love to be at this particular program.’ It needs to actually say something more specific than that—something related to why this program is a good fit for you, because of its resources, its location, its experiences, whatever it might be.”
Don’t: Keep the focus in the present
Mentions of your future plans should generally be kept to the immediate future. Too much focus on a subspecialty can serve to diminish the potency of your personal statement and downplay your interest in the residency specialty to which you apply.
That having been said, Dr. Andrews noted that if your experience with a subspecialty is a motivating factor for your career in medicine, it is worth mentioning.
“If your pursuit, for example, of fellowship in oncology is one of your primary motivations for going into medicine in the first place, it's important to talk about that,” he said.
“But the way you talk about it will also be important. You don't want to make it look like residency's just a stepping stone or something you need to get out of the way to get on with it.”
