How to Write Georgetown’s School of Health Essay

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Vinay Bhaskara and Alexander Oddo in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

 

What’s Covered:

• Determine Your Intended Major
• Choose a Topic That Aligns With Georgetown’s Values
• Writing About COVID

 

 

If you are applying to Georgetown University, you are required to write two supplemental essays that are meant for all applicants. Additionally, if you are applying to the School of Health, there is one more prompt you must write an essay for: 

 

Describe the factors that have influenced your interest in studying health care. Please specifically address your intended major (Global Health, Health Care Management & Policy, Human Science, or Nursing) – 1 page, single-spaced

 

In this article, we will discuss how to approach this essay and choose a topic that appeals to the Georgetown admissions committee. If you are applying to a different school, check out this article for a guide on how to write the two main supplements as well as all of the school-specific essays.

 

Determine Your Intended Major

 

This essay prompt is quite similar to the other essay topics in the Georgetown application. It is important to state early your intended major since the prompt asks for this explicitly. 

 

While all of the majors are focused on healthcare, each one has a specific focus. Global Health majors will lead you more to NIH and UN organizations. The Health Care Management & Policy major has a business focus. Majors in Human Science will focus more on academics and sciences or labs. These are a couple examples, but there are many different areas to the school and you want to choose a specific one to discuss in your essay. 

 

Essays that ask a specific question about your academics are important. Georgetown is trying to figure out what kind of student you will be on their campus. The majors are all different, so they will choose specific students to fill each one. 

 

Choose a Topic That Aligns With Georgetown’s Values

 

Make sure your reasons for studying healthcare are altruistic. Georgetown in particular doesn’t want applicants applying to Georgetown simply because of the prestigiousness of the school or because they believe they’ll make a lot of money. The school wants someone who is motivated due to their interest in a subject. The desire to help people is a lot more meaningful than the desire for a paycheck at the end of the day. Georgetown has Jesuit values and part of those are rooted in altruism. 

 

You ultimately want to portray yourself as a compassionate and service-oriented student, so it can definitely help to reference any patient care, volunteering, or service trip experiences. A shadowing experience is also a great topic to write about if it inspired you to pursue medicine. 

 

Keep in mind that when talking about any of these experiences, it’s important to talk about your values too. Specificity is key in this essay because most students who want to study healthcare ultimately want to help people, so delve deeper than the sense of altruism and describe how it aligns with your values. Ideally, these values will relate to Georgetown’s values. Georgetown as a community cares for people medically and on a social level, which is why talking about patient experience and human connection is so important.

 

Writing About COVID

 

Using COVID as your driving factor for studying healthcare is a bit cliche. A lot of people wrote about COVID during the pandemic and continue to talk about COVID in their essays. Therefore, it isn’t a topic that will help you stand out. If you do choose to talk about COVID it should be more of a footnote. The one exception to this is for global health majors, who many want to talk about the NIH and their desires to work there; in this case, bringing up COVID makes sense.

 

If you want your essay to stand out, put COVID more on the back burner and talk about a more niche interest you have in these fields. If you can bring your essay back to the human element of treating individual patients and supporting them, think more broadly about systematic aspects of healthcare, and tie everything back to why Georgetown, you have a much better chance of writing a unique essay.