my personal statement for my failed application to medical school

date initiated: 2016 June 9

Use the space provided to explain why you want to go to medical school. The available space for your response is 5300 characters, or approximately one full page.

Freshman year of university marked my first informal forays into philosophy and religion. I interrogated my friends to get a glimpse of the full spectrum of worldviews and beliefs. And by the end of the year, I came to appreciate that there might be many alternative perspectives for a viewpoint I had felt was incontrovertible. So when sophomore year began with the attempted suicide of a close friend, I wanted to blame religion - he was gay, and he came from a family of devout Catholics - but I also knew that my strong feelings could be the result of ignorance. It was no longer enough to only understand my friends and their similar worldviews.

This started a casual investigation of differing worldviews, which developed into an obsessive interest in mental processes. (I would later discover that this interest has the same root as my similarly strong interest in medicine.) The patterns of other people’s thoughts eluded and perplexed me. I thought that if I invested enough time and effort, things would eventually start to ‘click’, as was the case with my prior obsession with evolution. But it was as effective as trying to visualize a fourth spatial dimension. Still, my efforts were not in vain, because through exploring cognitive function, I stumbled upon cognitive biases.

I had a mild existential crisis when I realized that cognitive biases were much more pervasive than I had thought. I privately despaired at the prospect of having to regard my thoughts with suspicion for the rest of my life. But it was needless worry. Because this knowledge lacked impact on my daily life, it was difficult to internalize the idea that my mind was deeply erroneous. Still, I was relieved to discover the concept of explanatory power in the spring of my junior year: Instead of attempting to evaluate the validity of a concept through meticulous examination, I could evaluate the value of a concept by whether it improves upon the old framework’s ability to explain various phenomena.

One bias is called ‘What You See Is All There Is’, or the endearingly clunky WYSIATI for short. It refers to our tendency to consider only the “known knowns” in our decision making, while omitting the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”. It is one of the few themes to coherently describe my interests, including the aforementioned lack of consideration for other perspectives. It also describes how I first became attracted to medical science. In high school, I stumbled upon the book ‘Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body’, by Armand Leroi. It mentioned a specimen found in the Vrolik Museum in Amsterdam labelled ‘acardia amorphus’: “a skin-covered sphere with nothing to hint at the child it almost became except for a small umbilical cord, a bit of intestine, and the rudiments of a vertebral column”. I stared at this description in amazement. In the years that I had known about fetal development (I was in second grade when I approached my parents and proudly informed them that I knew how babies were made), I had never considered the possibility of fertilization resulting in anything but a baby. I had never considered the relative prevalence of failures, the proportion of inviable fertilizations, because in society, we only see the successes.

Another memorable bias refers to how people don’t decide how they feel about something based on reasoning. Rather, they have a gut reaction first, and only then do they generate reasons to explain their reaction. I was dubious, because, of course not, there are always reasons for things. But I considered it, and as I was in the dining hall, I considered bananas: I dislike ripe bananas. When people ask why, I say that it’s because of its cloying pungence and grossly mushy texture. But when reevaluating my answer, I realized that I’ve never found something overly sweet, and hummus has a weird, mushy texture too, but I like hummus. My answer was an excuse. I sat there, vaguely horrified, mulling over the realization that there was no logic to my dislike of bananas.

Likewise, I could not logically tell you why I like medicine over, say, linguistics. There is only evidence that I do, through my thoughts and actions. I gravitate towards medically-related books, and even in unrelated pursuits, I wonder about their potential applications to medicine. And I seem to have more energy to pursue it. For instance, traveling seven hours to visit a city for less than a day is something I’d consider a questionable use of time, and I imagine a lot of people would agree. But I did not give it a second thought when I did just that in order to visit the Vrolik Museum to see the specimens described in ‘Mutants’. I only learned it was an unusual choice when my friends reacted with bafflement.

The level at which I want to be immersed in medicine can be most feasibly achieved by pursuing it professionally. There is much I am undoubtedly ignorant of, but that’s how it’ll always be. The allure of medicine is that what I see is never all there is. There will always be more to explore and understand.


Many thanks to BO for their tired but continued support. While it was a failed application, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out (I was a more terrible writer), and their efforts shall be printed here for posterity.

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