Questions to Answer BEFORE You Write Your Personal Statement

Carefully reflect on your responses to these questions BEFORE you begin writing your Personal Statement. You should use these questions, in addition to materials from premed meetings, to help develop your personal statement.

NOTE: These questions are NOTdesigned to serve as an outline for your personal statement; rather, you should use your responses to these questions to assist you in generating relevant ideas about your interest in your intended career and who you are as a person that would make you an asset to the profession. Use your responses to help guide your personal statement in a direction that creatively and clearly captures the characteristics that admission committees look for. Another tool that students may use to reflect upon who they are and who they hope to be is Mind Mapping. Watch the Student Doctor Network instructional video “Mapping Your Life: Personal Statement Brainstorming Workshop” at .

  1. Is there anything unique about your background, family situation, or area in which you were reared?
  • Have you moved around a lot?
  • Who was the person(s) who mainly responsible for rearing you?
  • Describe the area(s) in which you were reared.
  • Describe the high school from which you graduated.
  • Is going to a four-year college common in your family? Give detail.
  • Other:
  1. List 3-5 words which describe your core values.

3. Why do you want to be a doctor?

4. Why do you think you will be a good doctor?

5. What have you done (if anything) to demonstrate your interest in medicine?

6. What were the turning points in your life?

7. What has been your biggest challenge and how did you handle it?

  1. What person most influenced your life?
  1. List at least one major decision in your life and explain your reasons for that decision.
  1. Do your current grades reflect your true potential? If not, what factors/circumstances of your life made it difficult for you to achieve to your true potential?
  1. What is your primary motivation for entering the health profession to which you intend to apply?
  1. There are more applicants than positions available in all health professions schools. Why should a health profession school accept you rather than another person?
  1. Have you considered what field of medicine (or dentistry or whatever) you would like to go into? If so, what field are you considering? NOTE: If you are undecided, that is okay (you SHOULD be undecided because as an undergraduate student, you haven’t seen enough “medicine” to know for sure what field you’d like to specialize in). You definitely should not focus on a particular specialty in your personal statement because you’ll have time to do that in residency and fellowship applications.
  1. If everything goes as you hope it will, what do you envision your life will be like ten years from now?

Again, your personal statement should NOT be a compilation of the above responses. For each response, write everything and anything that comes to your mind and then decide which pieces of your story are most relevant for the purpose of the medical, dental, etc. school personal statement. You are encouraged to use Mind Mapping as a tool for developing your personal statement.

Premedical Office, Xavier University of Louisiana (updated 6/2017)