Medical School Secondary Applications

Medicine is a challenging profession. Admission committees want to ensure you know how to meet challenges and handle ethical dilemmas.  For example:

1. Please describe to the Admissions Committee a challenge you have overcome and what you learned about yourself from that experience.

2. Please describe an experience or situation that you found personally challenging and discuss how it helped to shape you as a person. You may discuss a moral or ethical dilemma, situation of personal adversity, or other life-event you believe to have been important in your personal development.

3. What has been the most humbling experience in your life?

Everyone has overcome a challenge.  It is not acceptable to state that your life has been peachy keen and nothing has ever gone wrong.  In others words, you can’t leave this one blank.  You can provide an answer from any area of your life – personal, professional, extracurricular, etc.  The key is to show how you came to a decision during a challenging situation and what you learned from it.