Graduate School Personal
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Graduate School Statement Strategies
Sample Essays
- Sample Essay: English Major
- Sample Essay: Harvard Medical School
Essay
- Sample Essay: Duke School of Medicine
1. Sample Essay: English Major
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"That's not fair." Even as the smallest of children,
I remember making such a proclamation: in kindergarten it was
"not fair" when I had to share my birthday with another
little girl and didn't get to sit on the "birthday chair."
When General Mills changed my favorite childhood breakfast cereal,
"Kix," I, of course, thought this was "not fair."
Unlike many kids (like my brother) who would probably have shut
up and enjoyed the "great new taste" or switched to
Cheerios, this kid sat her bottom down in a chair (boosted by
the phone book) and typed a letter to the company expressing her
preference for the "classic" Kix over the "great
new taste" Kix.
Through the plenty of "not fair" incidents that followed,
my mother tried to explain that unfair things happen sometimes,
but I never accepted the idea of an unfair world and began to
realize that there were a great many situations and conditions
that were "not fair" to women.
At age ten, I was mortified that all the boys in my Catechism
class were signing up to be altar servers, but girls could not.
When my grandmother told me that, at one time, because she was
a woman, she was only allowed to touch the altar when she was
cleaning it-the fight against the Catholic Church was on. Once
again, I sat my bottom down in the chair (still with the phone
book) and typed a letter to the Monsignor requesting to be trained
as an altar server. With no immediate response, I respectfully
but persistently harassed the Monsignor and the other priests
every Sunday when I saw them in church, until, nearly two years
later, I became an altar server. At age twelve I was almost too
old to appreciate the new privilege, but there are girls becoming
altar servers in that church to this day.
Fighting against things "not fair" for women has been
my goal throughout my education, just as it will be in my future,
and I have had several unique opportunities toward this end.
I have worked two summers in a Sacramento, California, law firm
for the managing partner, a brilliant litigator and a woman who
really cares about justice, on two of the biggest cases of her
career. I performed legal research relevant to the issues of spoliation
and antitrust, and I directly assisted Ms. F with trial preparation,
accompanying her to court during the trials. Under her guidance
I have learned the inner workings of litigation, and I have seen
that unfairness pervades all types of law. Having experienced
litigation, I know the heavy work load that characterizes trial
preparation and can safely say that I approach a legal career
aware of its realities.
I have also participated in the [school] Center for American
Politics and Public Policy (CAPPP) Quarter in Washington program,
which allowed me to take classes at the [school] Center and intern
at the National Women's Law Center in D.C. The Law Center showed
me the public interest side of law, the area of law that I hope
to enter in order to address the women's issues that are so important
to me. Public interest offers the opportunity to help women who
need it the most, those who could not otherwise afford legal assistance
and who are often victims of the "not fair," of violations
of their civil rights.
My classes at [school] and through CAPPP, as well as my participation
in the volunteer program at the [school] Women's Resource Center,
have afforded me the chance to research issues of the "not
fair" for women. Violence against women, an unfairness that
maims and rapes and kills, has evolved into a special interest
of mine that I hope to pursue through future work in a sex crimes
division in criminal prosecution. For two classes at [school]
I have researched domestic violence and battered women who kill
their abusers. While in Washington, D.C., I studied acquaintance
rape among adolescents: after making an extensive review of the
existing literature, I tried to conduct original research interviewing
teenagers at a recreation center in Alexandria, Virginia.
Though at the last moment the recreation center directors did
not authorize my project, I did discover a class called "Self-Defense
is More than Karate" that was developed by the Office on
Women in Alexandria to instruct high school students on relationships,HIV/AIDS,
dating violence, and sexual assault. After I observed one week
of the program, the Community Education Coordinator asked me to
research how such education influences teens, interviewing students
before and after they take the class, for the Office on Women.
Currently, I seek a research grant from the [school] College Honors
Program that would allow me to go back to D.C. in the spring to
carry out this project.
Fighting the "not fair" is certainly a driving force
for me; however, I have chosen to pursue law not only because
I consider it to be a weapon against injustice, but also because
it fascinates me. My love for the law echoes my love for literature.
I participated in theater in high school and majored in English
in college because I enjoy analyzing the subtleties, innuendos,
and themes that serve as the foundation of a literary work or
a dramatic performance. I strive to understand the stories behind
the characters involved. I am awed by the power of language and
the influence art and literature can have on the values, thoughts,
and actions of the audience. So goes the influence on the law:
they call it "courtroom drama" for a reason. Just as
literature tells a story, so does each legal case, be it criminal
or civil; the way in which the law applies to each case must be
analyzed and, in some instances, constructed.Law reflects as much
as it influences the beliefs of the people it governs.
Both law and literature are instruments of change. Furthermore,
literature and law can give voice to people who have been traditionally
silenced. Just as I love so much to hear the voices of others
through literature, I want to use my voice in the realm of the
law, calling out "not fair" for those who have not been
heard. I want to have a positive influence on the lives of women
and all people, be it in the civil or criminal realm, and in law
school I hope to gain the tools to do just that.
2. Sample Essay: Harvard Medical School
Essay
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High School Teacher with AIDS; SCID/Genetics Research Experience;
HIV Counselor
Before I found out that my high school Spanish teacher was HIV-positive,
AIDS was not much more than a bunch of statistics to me. The disease,
its course, and the people afflicted with it seemed alien to my
life-as distant as the continent from which the virus was supposed
to have sprung. Then Mr. T. stopped coming to school. When he
reappeared a few months later to wish us well on the advanced
placement exam, his face looked sallow. His voice, once a thunderous
bass that rumbled in class and reverberated down the hallway,
was weak and thin. Seeing my teacher looking so unfamiliar was
my shocking introduction to AIDS. I felt as if I were in the presence
of a stranger, this mysterious disease, who was insulting Mr.
T. right in front of my eyes. I wanted to know who this stranger
was.
I entered college, believing that biology could explain to me
why life's processes went awry. I learned that the body is exquisitely
complex, but I was reassured by the underlying theme of systems.
Even if I didn't know all the molecules and connections, there
seemed no denying that a fundamental order existed.
From physiology to cell biology to molecular genetics, my classes
presented smaller and smaller systems to explain the origins of
diseases. Finally, in genes, with their innocuous four letter
alphabet, I felt I was learning the foundation of it all. If biology
provided the keys to understanding life, then genetics must be
the master key (if only we could see some of the doors we were
trying to open). During two summers in a research laboratory at
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, I helped track down the
gene causing X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID).
Even though AIDS and SCID are very different diseases (SCID is
exclusively hereditary), each compromises the body's defense mechanisms
against foreign pathogens. I felt this was a significant connection.
In SCID, I was meeting a distant cousin of AIDS. Learning about
common themes of immunodeficiency disorders, such as the perils
of opportunistic infections, helped me to begin to understand
what had happened to Mr. T. In the SCID laboratory, and in classroom
seminars on infectious diseases, science was helping me demystify
disease.
In the same year that Mr. T. became ill, my grandfather died
during bypass surgery and my father underwent chemotherapy and
radiation treatment for colon cancer. Since then, disease has
had a human face for me. To better understand how people deal
with disease or the fear of disease, I've become a volunteer counselor
in an HIV clinic.
Speaking to people who come in for free testing, I've found that
discussing HIV, getting the scary words (and acronyms) out in
the open, is a way for many people to release their anxiety. Through
expression in their own words, they make the disease real, which
helps them to see that it is also preventable. Then, they often
take the next step, making specific goals to maintain their health,
whether they are HIV-negative or positive. What science in class
and lab did for me in confronting the difficult issues of AIDS,
talk does for my clients.
As an HIV counselor in an anonymous clinic, I feel both the potential
of my role and its limits. I can't go home with my clients to
remind them to keep condoms under the bed, but I can help them
make a plan-something that could stay with them much longer than
the information I offer. At the end of one session, one client
surprised me with his response to a question I had asked: "What
do you think you'll do with the HIV information?" There was
a silence in the counseling room as the client pondered, but I
recall sensing the comfort of the silence. This was a session
that seemed to be producing the potential for a breakthrough (not
every session does), and I waited patiently. He responded, "I
think I'll ask my girlfriend to use her own needles." Then,
the client thanked me for having asked the question.
I was thrown. My client proposed a strategy for reducing his
HIV risk, but he didn't address what was likely his main issue-heroin
use. Should I validate his plan? In effect, that's what I did,
because I didn't challenge the drug issue. When he left the clinic,
I practically wanted to follow him out the door. I wondered if
I would ever see him again and be able to ask him how his plan
was going. I wondered if he would ultimately seek help for his
drug use. My supervisor reminded me that I had done my job as
an HIV counselor. I had helped the client make a plan; he had
even thanked me for it.
And I can thank him in return. He reminded me that although I
have worked to understand disease in the classroom, the laboratory,
and the clinic, I still have much to learn about caring for all
aspects of a patient's health. I am eager to continue the learning
process in the New Pathway Program at Harvard Medical School.
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Sample Essay: Harvard Medical School Essay
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Radiation Oncology Volunteer; Biochemical Lab Experience; Neurosurgery
Research; ER Volunteer; English Language Tutor; Student Advisor;
Community Service
"Carl, the woman we're about to meet will receive her first
palliative treatment today," said Dr. A., an Attending in
Radiation Oncology. He continued to explain her case as we walked
briskly down the hallways of the hospital. I followed him into
the radiation treatment room to meet the patient and learn about
the procedure which, sadly, would not eradicate her disease. Since
then, I have met with him weekly throughout this summer to learn
about radiation oncology and medicine in general. Through experiences
such as these, I have learned much about the profession of medicine.
I want to become a physician for the intellectual challenges and
rewards that come from helping others.
I first became interested in medical research by working in a
biochemical engineering laboratory at MIT. For over two years
I explored the medically related field, biotechnology. I have
led experiments involving fermentation bioreactors and trained
two inexperienced undergraduates. Recently, I presented a poster
entitled "Effect of Antifoam during Filtration of Recombinant
Bacterial Broth" at a New England Society for Industrial
Microbiology colloquium. Enjoying the biomedical rather than engineering
aspects of the work, I have shifted my career interests to medicine.
Last summer, I expanded my interest in medicine by working for
the Neurosurgery Department at Brigham and Women's Hospital. After
a short training period, I worked independently on three research
projects: Clonality analysis of schwannomas, clonality analysis
of a multiple meningioma, and the loss of heterozygosity (LOH)
screening of pituitary adenomas. I developed a strong interest
in my work when I observed my mentor, Dr. Peter Black, remove
brain tumors in the operating room. After the initial shock and
amazement of seeing the exposed brain of a conscious patient,
I thought more about the connections between this clinical work
and my research. While my projects' objective was to gain a better
understanding of tumors, the ultimate goal is to prevent and cure
tumors to save human lives-the very people whom I had seen on
the operating table! With this thought in mind, I found the motivation
to complete the short-term objectives of my projects. I will be
the second author of a paper, entitled "Clonality Analysis
of Schwannomas," which will be submitted to Neurosurgery.
This summer, as a participant in NYU Medical Center's Summer
Undergraduate Research Program (S.U.R.P.), I am learning even
more about research and clinical medicine. In my work, I am determining
the effect of the absence of the N-ras protooncogene on induced
tumorigenesis. By conducting molecular oncology research for another
summer, I have greatly expanded my knowledge and interest in the
field. In addition, through my experiences in the Radiation Oncology
Department with Dr. S., I clearly see the greater purpose of medical
research beyond personal intellectual gratification. In the case
of cancer and many other diseases, research is the only way to
overcome the limitations of current clinical treatments.
I believe that one of the greatest joys and privileges of physicians
are their abilities to directly aid and affect a community. While
becoming interested in the science of medicine through research,
I have explored human service to understand the art of medicine.
When I volunteered in the Emergency Room of New England Medical
Center during my sophomore year, many physicians impressed me
with their sensitivity and compassion. When not assisting the
hospital staff, I took every opportunity to comfort patients who
felt scared and vulnerable. During that same year, I also tutored
a middle-aged woman in English as a Second Language. It was challenging
to teach her vocabulary and sentence structure since, initially,
simple communication with her had been difficult. Helping her
pass the high school equivalency exam made all of my efforts worthwhile.
In addition, I have been an Associate Advisor for freshmen for
the past two years. In this role, I have helped first year students
adjust to college life. Not only have I played the role of academic
mentor, but I have also become an intimate friend and personal
tutor to my advisees. For my efforts, I won the annual Outstanding
Associate Advisor Award.
Besides individual volunteering, I have taken the initiative
to help the local community on a greater scale. As Community Service
Chair for the Chinese Student's Club for the past two years, I
established a new program to promote the interaction between MIT
students and underprivileged teenagers. College students and children
affiliated with a local community organization, Boston Asian:
Youth Essential Service, have become acquainted through regular
activities. Through events such as a scavenger hunt and a hands-on
introduction to the World Wide Web, MIT volunteers help teenagers
learn about the opportunities available at college. Along with
several other undergraduates, I have become further acquainted
with the teens through individual tutoring. To establish this
new service program, I have done intensive planning and budget
management. I have refined rough, creative ideas into organized
activities involving over twenty people. During the planning stages,
I have worked closely with professional youth counselors, other
MIT participants, and the teens. While my involvement in this
program has been very demanding at times, seeing these teens learn
and develop their interests has definitely made it worthwhile.
During college I have learned many things outside of lecture
halls and libraries. In research labs, I have refined my intellectual
curiosity and scientific thought processes. In the local community,
I have developed my interpersonal skills and a greater understanding
of others. Through it all, I have learned to treasure the simple
pleasures of helping others. By becoming a physician, I will continue
to develop and apply these personal attributes.
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3. Sample Essay: Duke School of Medicine
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Survivor of Anorexia; Emergency Medical Technician Training;
Clinic Experience; Medical Volunteer in Honduras; HIV Test Counselor
I decided that I wanted to be a doctor sometime after my four
month incarceration in Columbia Presbyterian Children's Hospital
in the winter of 1986-87, as I struggled with anorexia nervosa.
Through the maturation process that marked my recovery, I slowly
came to realize that my pediatrician had saved my life-despite
my valiant efforts to the contrary. Out of our individual stubborn
wills was born a kind of mutual respect, and he is one of the
people who make up my small collection of heroes.
I admire doctors who understand both what is said and what is
held back, who move comfortably around the world of the body,
and who treat all patients with respect. I am lucky because a
few of them have become my impromptu teachers, taking a little
extra time to instruct me in anatomy, disease or courtesy. During
my Emergency Medical Technician training, one of the emergency
room doctors took me to radiology to point out the shadow of a
fracture in a CT-scan and trusted me to hold a little girl's lip
while he inserted sutures. The physicians in the Hospital 12 de
Octubre in Madrid, Spain taught me to hear lung sounds and to
feel an enlarged liver and spleen. They explained the social and
medical difficulties associated with the management of pediatric
AIDS until I understood the Spanish well enough to begin asking
questions; then they answered them.
I work now in the Mayfield Community Clinic, which provides primary
care to members of the Spanish-speaking community near Stanford
University. My job as a patient advocate involves taking histories,
performing simple procedures and providing family planning and
HIV counseling. I try to use the knowledge I have gained from
class and practice to formulate the right set of questions to
ask each patient, but I am constantly reminded of how much I have
to learn. I look at a baby and notice its cute, pudgy toes. Dr.
V. plays with it while conversing with its mother, and in less
than a minute has noted its responsiveness, strength, and attachment
to its parent, and checked its reflexes, color and hydration.
Gingerly, I search for the tympanic membrane in the ears of a
cooperative child and touch an infant's warm, soft belly, willing
my hands to have a measure of Dr. V.'s competence.
I first felt the need to be competent regarding the human body
when I volunteered with the Amigos de Las Americas program in
the town of T. in Lempira, Honduras. The hospital available to
the people of T. (at a day's ride in the bed of a truck) was "where
one went to die," so my partner and I, with our basic first
aid certifications and our $15 Johnson & Johnson kits, quickly
became makeshift "doctors". The responsibility initially
created a heady feeling; a distressed mother called on us to bandage
the toe her eight-year-old son had accidentally sliced to the
bone with his machete. I told him the story of Beauty and the
Beast in broken Spanish while my partner and I soaked the dirt
from his toe, and during the following week we watched him heal.
Then our foster-mother, who normally tended to the sick, told
my partner and me to "check on the foot" of D. The gentle-eyed,
sixty-five year old man lay on his bed, his leg encased in bloody
bandages from mid-calf to toe. After performing surgery, the hospital
had given him a bottle of injectable antibiotics and some clean
needles and sent him home without bandages or further instructions.
My partner and I had not been trained to handle so serious a situation.
We did not know what had happened; we did not know what the antibiotics
were (or if they were actually antibiotics); we did not know if
handling D.'s blood put us at risk for disease. We wanted to leave,
but leaving the house meant leaving D. and betraying our foster-mother's
trust. So we injected the antibiotics and cleaned and bandaged
the wound every day for our remaining two weeks in Honduras although
we felt ill-equipped for the responsibility, crippled by our ignorance
and lack of supplies.
In T., I did not feel qualified to receive the trust the townspeople
gave so willingly. As an HIV-antibody test counselor in California,
I struggle everyday to win my clients' confidence. Somehow a twenty-one-year-old,
Caucasian female must be sincere, knowledgeable and open enough
to earn the respect of a fifty-five-year-old man who could be
her father, a high school sophomore, an ex-drug addict, and a
pregnant Latina woman. My clients are black, white, straight,
gay, Ph.D. candidates and illiterate; some choose to come to me
while others have court-orders. Yet to communicate effectively,
each client must have enough confidence in me to engage in dialogue
about his drug or sex life and to believe what I tell him, whether
or not he chooses to act on our discussion.
Speaking with patients, doctors and community members has opened
my eyes to some of the difficulties involved with healthcare provision,
and I hope I have given some inspiration or comfort in exchange
for the knowledge I have received. I want these lessons in openness
and compassion to shape my understanding of medicine and allow
me to become the type of doctor I admire.
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Sample Essay: ACLU Volunteer
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When I began volunteering at the American Civil Liberties Union
of Michigan, I was a doctoral candidate in English literature,
a budding scholar of the early novel. By the time I stopped volunteering
ten months later, I had learned that I wanted to become a litigator,
a lawyer who brought his political beliefs and persuasive writing
to bear on some of the most important social issues of the day.
My experiences at the A.C.L.U. opened my eyes not only to the
complexity and urgency of impassioned legal work but also to my
own professional aspirations.
Under the supervision of the A.C.L.U.'s generous and busy legal
director, I was quickly exposed to many aspects of practical lawyering.
My first job-assessing and responding to the organization's voluminous
mail-required me to analyze the fact patterns that various correspondents
presented. The many incoming accounts of police brutality, judicial
indifference, and prison rape were often moving and frequently
suspect. They forced me to temper my emotional responses and determine
whether the complaints seemed both factually plausible and within
the A.C.L.U.'s limited purview. After this challenging introduction,
I was then asked to assist in the discovery phase of a prisoner's
rights case. This work was detailed and intricate: my job was
to reconstruct the specific events of a day in 1991 while searching
for conflicts between the prison's official regulations and the
actual conduct of its guards. As I called Michigan prisons for
information, sifted through ten years of our client's prison records,
and helped endlessly revise our pleadings, I learned a good deal
about the small chores and thankless legal persistence that go
into building cases.
At the same time, I found considerable overlap between my new
legal tasks and my ongoing academic work. In an A.C.L.U. case
I assisted in, for example, a judge overturned a state ban on
partial birth abortion because the procedure had no precise meaning
in the graduate lexicon, and the legislation might thus chill
a wide variety of graduate practices. What fascinated me was that
when confronted with the task of interpreting a knotty and important
text, the twentieth-century legal system made many of the same
interpretive moves as the eighteenth-century novel readers I had
studied in my English graduate work. As the case unfolded, the
pleadings debated the legislators' authorial intentions; the relevant
Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedents; the contradictory
testimony of various graduate experts; and, finally, the language
of the statute itself. Like my eighteenth-century readers, modern
textual interpreters were attempting to make sense of a silent,
ambiguous document by finding ways to situate it within different
historical, intertextual, and linguistic contexts. While particular
interpretive conventions have changed over the centuries-modern
lawyers cite prior cases and not Biblical parables to bolster
their arguments-I came to realize that the broader task of comprehending
texts (whether artistic expression or legislation) has not. Moreover,
as I roamed through the stacks of Michigan's graduate and law
libraries, I increasingly began to believe that it is precisely
through interpretation, through embracing particular readings
of Robinson Crusoe over others or through fighting over the legal
standing of terms such as "partial birth abortion" that
a society obliquely expresses its priorities and values as well
as its blind spots.
I began making these connections partly because my work on the
prisoner's rights case had forced me to question my own values
and unspoken assumptions. Was I being co-opted by working on behalf
of an unrepentant racist and murderer who complained at having
some writings and a swastika confiscated by prison officials?
Or was I defending the rights of future prisoners who might be
writing less like our client and more like John Bunyan, Henry
David Thoreau, or Martin Luther King, Jr.? Had I succumbed to
the knee-jerk First Amendment absolutism that the A.C.L.U. is
sometimes accused of? I thought I knew what public policy I supported
but I became sorely aware of my legal ignorance: much as I needed
to do so, I felt ill-equipped to objectively assess and synthesize
the various judicial precedents that pertained to the case. Although
I was frustrated by my uncertainties and limited knowledge, I
found myself increasingly excited by the questions I was trying
to ask. By the time I finally threw myself into the bittersweet
task of assisting a murderer, I had learned both how little I
knew of the law and how much I valued the nuanced, committed defense
of civil liberties.
My volunteer work left me wanting to do more in the legal sphere.
While the law may be too ungainly and inefficient a vehicle to
directly change the world, it offers a unique opportunity to help
influence people's interpretation of their world. With the knowledge
and skills imparted by a legal education, I hope to get back to
crafting public arguments over abortion, prisoners' rights, Internet
expression, and other defining issues of our day.
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From ESSAYS THAT WILL GET YOU INTO GRADUATE SCHOOL,
by Amy Burnham, Daniel Kaufman, and Chris Dowhan. Copyright 1998
by Dan Kaufman. Reprinted by arrangement with Barron's Educational
Series, Inc.
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