UCAS personal statement for Graduate Entry to medicine

UCAS personal statements are used differently by each medical school. Some medical schools use personal statements after looking at pre-entry test results, others include them in their initial short-listing, either way, it is an important part of your application.

Key elements to include:

  • Motivation for medicine – what makes medicine right for you?
  • Approach to academic learning – what has helped you be successful during your first/previous degree/s?
  • Relevant skills – how have you developed these, what do they say about you as a potential clinician? The skills can come from any aspect of your experience – they don’t have to be based on clinically-related experience
  • Career aspirations – how does medicine fit with how you see your future?

How to write your personal statement

  1. Ensure you spend time reflecting on your skills and experiences. Learning from what has gone before and how you have done things is central to both learning on a medicine degree and continuing professional development as a clinician. You may want to ask other people what they feel are your strengths and when they have seen you using these strengths. Feedback from others can be useful to capture things we don’t yet know about ourselves.
  2. Always use examples from your own experience. If you are saying that you wish to study medicine to provide a service to humankind – explain where this motivation has come from, what other experiences have you had of ‘service’, how did you decide that medicine would be the right sort of ‘service’?
  3. Check your writing. If a sentence does not include something about your own experience, consider if it is really needed (or whether you can rewrite it to include experience).
  4. Check your writing for typing errors, spelling, and making sense. Get someone else to proof-read your personal statement for you (the Careers Service does not offer this service, ask a friend or relative who writes well).

Resources

The Medical Schools Council has devised skills and attributes of an ideal medical school candidate. You could use this list as a starting point to reflect on what examples highlight these skills for you.

Top tips: Medicmind personal statement

Examples of successful statements: