Consider and write your Personal Comments Essay carefully, as many admissions committees place significant weight on the essay. Here are some questions you may want to consider while writing the essay:
- Why have you selected the field of medicine?
- What motivates you to learn more about medicine?
- What do you want medical schools to know about you that has not been disclosed in other sections of the application?
In addition, you may wish to include:
- Unique hardships, challenges, and obstacles that may have influenced your educational pursuits.
- Insight into significant fluctuations in your academic record that are not explained elsewhere in your application.
Formatting Your Essay: Medical schools receive all text-entry responses as plain text. This means that formatting options such as bulleted lists, indented paragraphs, and bold and italic fonts do not appear for reviewers and are not available in the AMCAS application. You may want to include an extra space between paragraphs because the essay does not permit indentation.
To avoid formatting issues, we recommend typing your essay directly into your AMCAS application; copying formatted text into the application may result in formatting problems that can’t be edited after your application is submitted. If you do cut and paste your essay(s) into the application, you should draft them in a plain text format, such as Microsoft Notepad or Mac TextEdit.
Please keep the following in mind:
- Proofread carefully! No changes (including corrections to grammatical or typographical errors) may be made to your essay after you submit your application to the AMCAS program.
- You can’t run a spell check in the AMCAS application, but most browsers have built-in spell checking that you can enable. Use English (United States) characters; other characters may not be accurately recognized.
- Medical schools prefer to receive applications that follow normal writing practices regarding the case of letters; avoid using all uppercase or all lowercase letters for your text responses.
- Plagiarism or misrepresentations may result in an investigation. You may use artificial intelligence tools for brainstorming, proofreading, or editing your essays; however, it is essential that the final submission accurately reflects your own work and experiences.
- It isn’t necessary to repeat information reported elsewhere on your application.
- The essay will be sent to all the medical schools you apply to.
- The space allotted for the essay is 5,300 characters (including spaces), or about one page. You will receive an error message if you exceed the character limit.