What is included in the personal statement course?

• ½ day (3 hours) live online teaching
• Taught by Dr Dibah Jiva exclusively
• Review of university marking schemes
• What differentiates excellent vs. good statement
• Brainstorming what to include/exclude
• Review of different structures and their impact
• Structuring of your own activities and how to reflect
• Review of successful Personal statements
• Continued support via email after the course

Who is it for?

The course is specifically for students writing a personal statement for Medicine application. However, most of the principles learned can be applied for other courses such as Dentistry, Law, etc. If you are applying for a course other than medicine and are wondering if this will be beneficial to you, drop us an email at hello@themsag.com and we will be able to advise you more specifically.

By the end of the class, you should expect to have a very good understanding of what universities are looking for, what differentiates very good personal statements from average ones, a good list of content brainstormed from your own activities (what to include, what not to and how to discuss it), a clear understanding and method on how to reflect on your personal statement as well as one paragraph written at a good standard. 

You will not have your full PS written by the end of the course. This is a session that is best taken early, as you start to write your personal statement.  The expectation is that you are then very well equipped to write a competitive and comprehensive personal statement. We recommend sending your PS for a full review after it is written. If you have already written a draft, then you may not want to take this course and instead, you can send your personal statement for a full review first.

What to expect?

Marking Schemes

• The course is tailored to the attendees. We ask you in advance about the universities you are targetting in and will have the marking schemes for these universities reviewed
• We will discuss how to use the marking criteria to plan your Medicine personal statement

Good vs. Excellent Personal Statement

• We generate a list of all the elements that differentiate a good and an excellent personal statement. For each, we read real examples and discuss how you can do this yourself. We also create a checklist of the most common mistakes made in medicine personal statement for you to use. 

Brainstorming & Structuring with reflections

• We learn how to move from the brainstorming to a structured plan for your personal statement and create that plan
• We then discuss in detail how to discuss an experience, which elements matter to highlight and how to reflect about it. 
• We also discuss how to ling various experiences together to optimise your character count. 

Review of excellent personal statement and Q&A

• We review together some excellent personal statements discussing what we like and why, highlighting what we have seen in the course applied.
• The Q&A allows you to test with your own examples and experiences how you could apply some of these techniques into your personal statement. 

Reviews