How to Write Your Medicine Personal Statement (Singapore): The Complete Guide

Both NUS and NTU medical schools require a personal statement as part of the application. Instructions are brief, and no suggested framework is given. This article reviews the requirements of the personal statement when applying to Medicine in Singapore, and guides you through the entire process of writing your own—from planning to proofreading.

Personal Statement Prompts from NUS and NTU Medicine

Key Aspects of Your Personal Statement

Notice that I’ve bolded the keywords in the above two excerpts:

From the above information, we can gather three key aspects to cover in your essay:

In this case, “desirable qualities” refer to personal attributes or skills that make you a good potential candidate for medical school. Importantly, they must be conveyed through concrete examples.

Indeed, overall, your personal statement should be “examples-driven”. It’s like saying “I’m compassionate”, versus telling a compelling story of a personal interaction with an autistic student. Which one is more convincing?

The admissions officers do not know you personally, and they will need proof of your leadership, teamwork, commitment, and so on.

Which Personal Statement to Write First?

(This question is only relevant if you’re applying to both NUS and NTU Medicine. Otherwise, feel free to skip to the next section.)

Note the difference in the word limit set by the two schools: 500 words for NUS versus 300 words for NTU. This means that you will have to submit a different personal statement for NUS and NTU.

There are two ways to go about doing this, and you may choose whichever one suits you:

• Write the 500-word NUS personal statement first, then shorten and edit it to 300 words for the NTU personal statement.
• Write a separate personal statement for NUS and NTU.

The “advantage” of the second option is that you can tailor each of your personal statements more to the school’s philosophy and what (you think) they are looking out for. However, the first option is an efficient and solid method.

Even if you’d like to “customise” your NTU personal statement more, you can always write that with your original 500-word essay as the foundation.

Step 1: List Out Your Activities and Achievements

Start by listing out all your activities and achievements in the past two years. This is essentially your portfolio. If you’ve already done one (most schools would ask for it close to graduation), just take that as reference.

It may be helpful to list the activities under the following categories:

1. Academic awards e.g. scholarship
2. Academic contribution e.g. academic competitions, research projects, H3 subjects
3. CCA and leadership positions e.g. CCA exco, student council
4. Community involvement e.g. volunteering, service learning project, OCIP
5. Work experience e.g. attachment or job shadowing, internship
6. Other relevant experiences e.g. long-term illness in the family, others

Next, select the most significant ones to include in your personal statement. To determine which activities to prioritise, look for those that:

• have impacted you the most (e.g. a self-initiated project you devoted yourself to > a project in which you were not in the core organising committee and did not contribute as much to)
• shows long-term commitment (e.g. weekly volunteering at a nursing home over two years > an ad hoc stint as a volunteer at an event that you did not organise)
• demonstrates a desirable quality for medical school (e.g. any leadership experience or effective teamwork, any form of volunteering or service learning, etc)
• shows your interest in medicine (e.g. work experience, volunteering, healthcare-related events or competitions, etc)

Choose at most three activities as the “keystone activities”. These are the ones you will write about in more detail.

Other activities of some significance can be “lumped” together. The five categories above can serve as a guide. For instance, all your academic awards and/or contributions could be “bundled” together in the same paragraph, without going into the details of each individually (highly unnecessary).

Note: If you have a limited number of items in your portfolio, and would like to include all of them, you may skip the selection/elimination step. However, if you do have many scattered activities, some of which may not be significant (e.g. volunteer at an ad hoc event, certificate of participation at some competition or seminar), eliminate ruthlessly. Do not attempt to cram your JC life into 500 words. Your essay will lose direction and focus.

Step 2: Create an Outline of Your Personal Statement

With the activities and accomplishments you have chosen, think about what each intends to show. Remember, your personal statement should be examples-driven. Each example and every line in your personal statement should contribute to demonstrating either one of these two points:

1. an amazing quality you have that makes you a good candidate for medicine
2. your undying motivation for pursuing medicine

You don’t have to complete the table, but at least think through this:

In the first column, “Activity or achievement”, jot down the name of the activity. If it is a “keystone activity” (i.e. one that you will write about in more detail), also note down poignant moment(s) and/or details that you wish to highlight.

Under the second column, “Significance”, answer the question: What does this activity or achievement show about a skill or quality of mine (desirable qualities for medicine) OR about my interest in the course (motivation for medicine)?

A very quick example could look something like this:

Here is a list of some key qualities that medical schools are looking out for:

Note: You can also reverse engineer the process, and fill in the second column first (taking ideas from the list of qualities above). For example, write down “leadership”. Then fill in the corresponding row in the first column with experience(s) that demonstrate your leadership capability.

Next, you can think about the flow of your essay and how you want to order the components. There is no fixed way to do this. Just make sure that it is logical and coherent.

A good idea is to have one focus paragraph dedicated to your motivation for pursuing medicine, and to place this as either the first or the last paragraph. In between, you can then bring in your various experiences and qualities.

I have seen an example in which the student opened with his many years of service in the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade (SJAB). His experiences in SJAB formed a huge part of why he decided to do medicine. (It was also one of his “keystone activities”, and thus written about in greater detail.)

For me, I chose to close with my motivation to study medicine, as a culmination of all the preceding paragraphs. There is no “right” way, and both work equally well.

Step 3: Write the First Draft of Your Personal Statement

Create a new document and start writing your essay. The first draft will always be trash, but once you have that absolutely trashy first draft out, you’ve won more than half the battle.

This is a key step. No matter how terrible the words sound, resist the urge to reread and edit every line as you are writing. Just keep on writing the next sentence, the next paragraph. Leave all the refining till later.

Step 4: Get Feedback on Your Personal Statement

Ask someone to read through your essay and give comments. This could be your parents or other family members, your teachers (they may not agree to do this for individual students), your school’s ECG (if they have such a service), your seniors, etc.

Ask specifically for areas in which you can improve. Not everyone you ask may be a “figure of authority” on the subject of personal statements, so you can choose which comments to act upon and which to ignore.

You can also act as your own critic. You might know best which parts of your essay you’d like to improve on, or where the wording doesn’t seem quite right. A personal statement should be “personal” (based on your personal experiences and insights), and therefore if you’re confident of your own writing and your own ideas, you shouldn’t feel obliged to have someone look through it for you.

Step 5: Refine Your Personal Statement

Lastly, keep on refining. As you near the end of your editing and proofreading process, the tweaks should become more and more minor. Importantly, know when to stop and just let that be the final version.

Some quick, self-explanatory pointers:

• Proofread – check for errors in spelling and grammar
• Refine sentence structure – vary sentence length and avoid starting sentences with the same word
• Cut words – look for concise expressions to fit your ideas into the word limit, and delete entire sentences or ideas if you must
• Check for key aspects – ensure that you have devoted sufficient breadth and depth to each of the three key aspects required in your personal statement
• Check for focus – every example and every line should convey either a desired quality for the course or your motivation for the course (Medicine)

Free Personal Statement Planner (PDF)

This is a very simple two-page planner to guide you in the ideating and planning process for your own personal statement (Steps 1 and 2 described in this article).

It is deliberately designed to make the planning as quick and painless as possible. All blanks are for you to jot down brief notes in point form (and not to write any full-sentence answers). An example of one section is shown in Step 2 above.

You don’t even have to write in it if you’re lazy (like me), but it could give you a good framework for thinking through and structuring your personal statement.

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Check out other articles on medical school applications, or specifically for applying to Medicine in Singapore. If there’s anything you’d like to see, or if you have any questions at all, please leave a comment below, or drop me a message anytime. I read and respond to every message and email.