CollegeVine College Essay Team November 14, 2024 30 Essay Guides 2024-25

How to Write the Penn State Supplemental Essays 2024-2025

Penn State has one, optional supplemental essay prompt for all applicants, which is essentially a personal statement. Applicants to Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College, or Accelerated Pre-Med program, will also have to respond to a fairly extensive list of supplemental prompts—2 essays and 7 short answers for the Honors College, and 5 essays for the BS/MD program.

Regardless of whether you are just applying to Penn State as a whole, or to one of these more specialized programs, you want your essays to shine. In this post, we’ll break down each prompt, so you’re prepared to write a strong, engaging response to each one.

Read these Penn State essay examples written by real students to inspire your own writing!

Penn State Supplemental Essay Prompts

While this essay is technically optional, we still strongly encourage all applicants to complete it. Writing an optional essay provides admissions officers with more information about you, helps your application stand out, and further expresses your interest in the college you are applying to. 

One of your main objectives in all college essays should be to depict yourself as a strong addition to a specific college’s community. A good response will contain a reflection on your experiences to demonstrate a specific personal quality that you think will set you up for success at Penn State. To brainstorm, ask yourself: What do I need to succeed at Penn State? What are my strengths? 

You’ll need to think of examples that demonstrate the traits that will set you up for college success. Though the prompt says that you can pick “something about yourself, your experiences, or activities,” your choice should be something that you can show through a story or anecdote.

Almost any poor topic can be strengthened if you make it more specific:

Don’t pick something too broad, like “I have formed many friendships in different settings.” However, you could write a detailed account of a specific friendship or friend group you formed after switching high schools, explaining how you developed the skills to not only survive, but thrive in a new social community. Then, you can discuss how, at any college, but especially a big school like Penn State, forming a social network is crucial for academics (study groups, peers to help with homework, collaborators for group projects, etc.) and for making the most of your college experience.

Avoid focusing on an experience that virtually all applicants will share. “I made it through high school” is not a strong response. However, you could write about an illness you faced that almost jeopardized your ability to succeed in school. Through detailed storytelling, you could show the reader that you developed time-management skills and perseverance, which, as you can guess, are absolutely crucial for college success.

Great responses to this prompt can be quite personal since more formal academic and extracurricular activities might already be covered in your application. For example, you could relate difficult family or friendship situations you’ve negotiated to your ability to navigate a diverse and complex college community.

Regardless of which aspect of your identity, experience, or activity you pick, be absolutely sure to avoid generalizing. Many students write a 500 word essay that never uses specific examples. While these essays might sound smooth, they are almost entirely composed of clichés and generalizations. Here’s an example so you can get a better idea of what we’re talking about.

A student could write something like: 

Note that these sentences do not refer to a specific instance or give concrete examples. They give a general description of one activity and then make generic, high-level assertions about the results of that activity.

A strong essay will push beyond this level of resolution:

• Describe what you did at the food pantry.
• Show the perspective this has given you by giving an example of how you changed your daily activities or interactions with others as a result of this experience.
• Link these changes to success in college by discussing how you’ll dive into volunteer opportunities and community organizations. Use specific examples of clubs or organizations at Penn State, such as the Lion’s Pantry, which is dedicated to addressing student hunger.

A few words of caution: Some students will have too many things they want to squeeze into this essay. While you may feel like you’ve just left so many crucial details out of your application, you should resist the temptation to use this essay as a “catch-all” for everything “not already reflected in your application.” Note that the prompt asks you to share “something” not already included—not everything! This essay should be focused and cohesive, telling a story that proves you can succeed in college.

If you truly feel that important information has been left out of your application, try to incorporate it into your Activities Section, other essays, or, if all else fails, the Additional Information section of the Common App.

Brainstorming Your Topic:

Given the length and nature of this prompt, taking the time to select a strong topic is especially important. You need to pick a topic that is nuanced enough to sustain 800 words, but also personal enough that you can answer each part of the prompt while also highlighting aspects of your personality that make you a strong fit for the Honors College.

Fortunately, the prompt’s criteria are pretty open-ended, and admissions officers go out of their way to say the scale of the issue doesn’t matter. So, to brainstorm, we recommend asking yourself open-ended questions, like:

• Which societal issues are particularly important to you?
• Are there any more local issues (at your high school or in your city, for example) that have a big impact on your life?
• Is there a problem you’ve already taken steps to solve?

Once you’ve identified a topic, you want to take a moment to think about your personal connection to it, to make sure it’s a good match for this prompt. 

For example, if you want to write about your weekly beach cleanups, but you only do them because your dad makes you, you should probably keep brainstorming. However, if you started doing them after completing a research project in your junior year chemistry class on how microplastics have impacted the local fish population, this topic would be perfect!

Tips for Writing Your Essay:

Seeing as you have plenty of words at your disposal, you want to make sure you’re thorough in describing the problem, its significance to you, and your ideas about how to solve it. To do so, you want to make sure that, like any college essay, your points are grounded in specific, personal anecdotes, as otherwise the essay may read as preachy or generic.

For example, compare the following excerpts from a hypothetical essay:

At their cores, these two examples are making the same point. But the first one lacks the personal details that show how the writer arrived at these realizations, and thus the takeaways read as generic, and won’t do anything to distinguish them from other qualified applicants.

The second one, on the other hand, tells us exactly what happened in the writer’s past that changed their mindset about the importance of individual action. Remember that, like with any college essay, the point of this essay is to teach your readers about who you are. So, your discussion of the problem you choose should be grounded not in scientific studies or big-picture ideas, but in the experiences you have had that have shaped not only your thoughts on this issue, but your personality as a whole.

Obviously, the second example is much longer, but, as noted above, this is one of the rare supplemental essays where space likely won’t be an issue. You have the room to provide the personal details admissions officers are looking for, so take advantage of it!

Mistakes to Avoid:

The most important pitfall to avoid has already been outlined above: make sure your essay doesn’t become too much about the problem, at the expense of teaching your readers about important aspects of your personality. You probably have much more experience with academic writing than reflective writing, so as you write and revise your first draft, make sure there aren’t any points where you instinctively slip into research-based, argumentative mode.

This open-ended essay is an opportunity to showcase your self-awareness and introspection, in describing how your life experiences have shaped your identity and aspirations.

Understanding the Prompt

The focus here is on Empowered Growth, which Schreyer defines as certain aspects of your life enabling you to get outside your comfort zone, intellectually or personally, and grow. You’ll want to reflect on transformative times that made you stronger, more capable, more confident, and so on. Keep in mind those times may have been uncomfortable in the moment–admissions officers always love to see perseverance!

Brainstorming Questions

To get started, consider the following:

• Values: What are the fundamental principles that guide your life? (e.g., integrity, curiosity, perseverance)
• Beliefs: How do your beliefs influence your actions and decisions? (e.g., belief in the power of education inspiring you to seek out additional learning opportunities, the importance of empathy reminding you to always check in on your friends)
• Experiences: What life events or challenges have you faced that led to significant personal or intellectual growth? (e.g., an especially rainy soccer game, getting lost on a hiking trip, struggling to find a friend group when you transferred high schools)

What Makes a Good Response

To craft a strong essay, you’ll want to incorporate the following:

• Deep Reflection: Go beyond surface-level descriptions of what happened, and discuss in depth what you were thinking and feeling as you were growing.
• Specific Examples: Use concrete examples to illustrate your points. Instead of saying, “I value perseverance,” tell a story about a time when you demonstrated perseverance.
• Growth Narrative: Clearly articulate how your values, beliefs, or experiences have empowered you to grow. The direct before-and-after in your journey should be evident, so that admissions officers can easily see the evolution of your thinking or abilities.
• Connection to Future: Tie your growth to your future goals. Explain how the lessons you’ve learned will continue to empower you in college and beyond.

Hypothetical Student Examples

Here are a few hypothetical examples of how students might approach this essay:

• Emily, an aspiring environmental scientist: Emily has always been passionate about nature, a value instilled in her by her parents, who often took her hiking. However, her appreciation of nature shifted when she spent a summer working on a reforestation project in a region devastated by wildfires, as that was the first time she grasped how fragile the world is. This experience inspired her to volunteer at a local national park the following summer and lead workshops on fire-safe practices, to be proactive about preventing fires rather than just cleaning up the aftermath.
• Maya, a future travel writer: Maya had the opportunity to participate in a summer foreign study program through a partnership her school has with an Italian institution. Through the program, she learned just how much variety there is in Italian culture, in contrast to the monolithic way it’s often presented in the US. When she got back, she started a blog to reflect on her experiences, and now has the long-term goal of expanding on those blog posts in a series of travel books highlighting the striking regional differences across the Italian peninsula. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Being Too Vague: Avoid generic statements like “I believe in hard work” without backing them up with specific examples. Your essay should tell a story.
• Covering Too Much Ground: 800 words is on the long side for a college essay, but you still want to be mindful you don’t try to cram too many things in. There should be a single theme or arc of growth that your reader can clearly trace from start to finish.
• Résumé Recap: Don’t turn your essay into a list of accomplishments or activities. The point of the essay is to provide insight into aspects of your personality that aren’t already clear from your activities list or transcript, so make sure you go beyond the nuts and bolts to give admissions officers a sense of what makes you tick on a deeper level.
• Ignoring the Prompt: Make sure you don’t just describe the experience, but also address the “empowered growth” element, by clearly showing what you learned about yourself, and why the growth you experienced is relevant to understanding your potential as an honor student at Penn State.

Excerpts of Good and Bad Examples

Why it works: This example uses a personal experience to vividly illustrate how this student developed the right mindset to persevere through long-term challenging experiences, and uses engaging, reflective language to show us exactly why a seemingly simple tradition has affected their life so profoundly.

Why it doesn’t work: This example is scattered across several different topics, and thus is hard to follow, and relies on vague, dry statements that are unlikely to make admissions officers feel a connection to the student’s experiences. There’s also no detailed story or reflection, making the essay feel generic and impersonal.

In Conclusion

Provide a detailed, reflective narrative that highlights your empowered growth. Be specific, show rather than tell, and make sure to tie your past experiences and values to your future goals. By doing so, you’ll create a compelling and memorable essay that stands out to the Schreyer Honors College admissions committee.

This is essentially a “Why This College?” prompt, but focused on Penn State’s Honors College specifically, rather than a college as a whole. The keys to writing a strong response are essentially the same, however: identify specific resources that can only be found at Schreyer Honors College (not things that you could also take advantage of as any other Penn State student!), and explain how those resources align with your goals for college and beyond.

For example, you might choose to highlight Schreyer’s goal that all Schreyer Scholars have at least one experience abroad by the time they graduate as something that is particularly attractive to you, as you are interested in international relations and thus hope to familiarize yourself with other cultures as much as possible during college.

Alternatively, you might talk about how you’re excited by the thought of living in Atherton or Simmons, one of Penn State’s two honors housing residence halls, because you hope to attend law school after college, and so the more practice you can get with lively, intellectual debates, the better.

The only thing you really want to avoid in your response is general or superficial reasons for wanting to attend Schreyer, that don’t do much to help your readers envision you as a Schreyer Scholar. For example, you don’t want to talk about the prestige of the program, or the fact that Atherton and Simmons have prime locations on campus. Admissions officers want to accept applicants who are ready to hit the ground running, and the more specific you can be in spelling out how Schreyer will help you achieve your goals, the more confident they will be in your readiness.

This prompt is a more-lighthearted question that just wants a sense of your personality – are you more adventurous or more restrained? Are you more interested in culture and history or relaxation and some peace and quiet? Your answer says more than you may think about what kind of person – but there’s no right or wrong answer here. Like many of the questions before it, you’ll want to answer both honestly and in a manner that showcases your true personality. Your answer should be as unique as you can think of, but as usual, the more personal a connection to your answer the better.

For example, maybe you’re the first-generation child of immigrants from India but have never been back there yourself. You could write about how a trip to India would reconnect you with your family roots, your culture, and the pasts of your parents. 

If you don’t feel like you have a special story or experience to share, however, don’t worry. Your answer will be strong so long as it is unique to you, so brainstorm a place or country that would be at the top of your bucket list. Maybe you’re an avid hiker and want to take a crack at Mount Kilimanjaro. You can write about how visiting and climbing the mountain has always been a dream of yours that you hope to have the resources to achieve later on in life. Write about what hiking means to you and why, as well as why Mount Kilimanjaro is the end goal.

Although this prompt asks you to discuss your “leadership experiences,” plural, in reality you want to keep your focus pretty narrow, since you only have 200 words to provide the elaboration they’re asking for. You can start off with a general overview of the leadership positions you’ve held, but you pretty quickly want to zoom in on an anecdote or two that show what you’ve learned about leadership from these experiences.

For example, the start of your essay might look something like this:

From here, the writer can dive into a discussion of how, while many people see confidence and inspiration as the most important traits a leader can have, their experience showed them that accountability is just as crucial. And because that point is grounded in an anecdote from their own life, we know exactly why they feel this way–without that specificity, your essay will likely come across as generic or even preachy.

This prompt is a great opportunity for you to paint a better picture of yourself and your accomplishments, both academic and otherwise. After listing all of your awards and recognitions, there are two main ways you can approach this question—you can highlight an honor or distinction you have received for an academic or extracurricular achievement, or you can flex your creative muscles and expand on a smaller award or appreciation you have received. 

For example, if you have been recognized for your success in an extracurricular activity with a competitive element like debate, Model UN, or robotics, you can explain the activity’s importance to you, and what the process of winning meant to you. You could also take this approach if you have won your school’s talent show, or received a ribbon in a local photography contest. Alternatively, you could talk about being voted captain of your cross country team, or awarded the lead role in your school’s musical theater production, and describe how you handled that responsibility. 

However, if you lack any formal awards, try to think of any informal recognitions you have received over the years – a superlative in the yearbook, a counselor of the summer award at a sleepaway camp, even a “Best Cousin Ever!” sticker your 5-year-old cousin gave you last Thanksgiving. While you may feel awkward writing about something not conventionally “impressive,” this approach can actually show a high level of maturity. College applications are by definition pretty braggy, so showing admissions officers that you have an appreciation for “the little things” in life can, perhaps counterintuitively, help set you apart from other applicants who may have written about more traditional, resume-y achievements.

Think about something that you’ve read, watched, or listened to that has stuck with you or impacted you personally. This isn’t meant to be an opportunity for you to recant your love for Shakespeare or your appreciation for Charles Dickens, although you certainly can if it’s deeply resonated with you. And that’s the key – you want to be genuine with your answer. You can go on and on about how much you admire an author or filmmaker’s style or craft – but what the admissions reader really wants to know is how a piece of media has changed your perspective and impacted you personally.

Is there a movie that you can endlessly rewatch? A book you always find yourself going back to? A podcast or an album you can’t stop listening to? The trick is to do some reflection into the “why” – media above anything else has a strictly personal connection to your mind, so see if you can figure out what about the connection to your selected media is so special. If you’re stumped, do a bit of journaling, either while participating with your chosen media or afterward, and write down how it makes you feel and what it makes you think about. Chances are you’ll be able to uncover what it means to you and how it affects you.

Perhaps your mother’s favorite movie is the musical West Side Story, and you and her went to see the Steven Spielberg remake together. Maybe she has a special connection with the musical because she’s originally from Puerto Rican – you could write about how sharing that experience with your mom got you in touch with your heritage and your roots, and got you to reevaluate what it means to be a Puerto Rican in the America of today.

Everyone has a different story, and it is tapping into that story and how it relates to your media choice that should be the basis of your response here.

This is an example of the classic “Diversity” prompt, so you have two main goals in your response: highlight some aspect of your identity, and explain how that part of you has shaped your personality as a whole. If you just say “I lived in Italy from age 8 to age 14” or “I come from a family where we don’t bleed red, but green, for the Philadelphia Eagles,” but don’t explain what you’ve learned from these experiences, your reader won’t actually understand you any better.

Instead, like always, you want to include a specific anecdote or two that highlight some personality trait, or part of your worldview, that you wouldn’t have if you weren’t a part of this community. Take the Eagles example above. Later in the essay, you might say something like:

In this excerpt, the student doesn’t just list a community they’re a part of, but also shows us why that community is so important to them.

Finally, note that the prompt gives a broad definition of “community.” Hopefully, our two examples also help emphasize that you don’t need to write about any one particular thing. If your race has been a huge part of shaping your identity, then you should of course write about it! But you can also write a strong essay about any community you’ve been a part of, even ones that may seem a little unconventional.

This prompt is the last opportunity for you to fill in any gaps left over in your application to the Schreyer Honors College. Look over your application and all your previous responses and reflect on if there’s anything still left unsaid. Remember, the admissions reader wants the clearest picture of you as they can possibly get, and the more information you can provide them about yourself the better.

Here are some examples of details you may wish to write about here:

• Unusual circumstances or hardships (financial hardships, first-generation status, illness, tragedy, etc.)
• Family responsibilities that may have prevented students from taking traditional extracurriculars
• Unique extracurricular that wasn’t written about in another part of the application outside of the Activities Section
• Describing your identity in the context of race, gender, or LGBTQ+

This prompt is going to be on an extremely case-by-case basis, so do what feels right for you and remember that you don’t have to embellish anything about yourself or your life in an attempt to make it sound more interesting to an admissions reader. They really just want to get to know you as your authentic self, so make sure that you’re answering this prompt in a manner that is genuine and honest.

This prompt is the classic Extracurricular Activity essay. Remember that the admissions committee already has a list of your extracurricular activities, so make sure you’re delving beyond a simple list of your responsibilities. You’ll want to share your emotions and thoughts as you participate in this activity, as well as how it’s impacted you.

As you choose your activity, consider which qualities you’ve already demonstrated in your application, and which ones you’d like to highlight more. If you’ve already written about one activity in your Common App essay, there’s no need to repeat it here. Or, maybe your Common App essay demonstrates resilience when you also consider yourself a very ambitious person. Then, you might want to pick an activity that highlights your ambition.

If you’ve had any jobs or internships in the medical field, this is your opportunity to expand on your experience and what it may have taught you. However, the key to this prompt is to choose something that was the most meaningful to you. Don’t feel like you have to choose an extracurricular in medicine just because you’re applying to a BS/MD program. 

Once you’ve chosen an activity to write about, reflect on how it has shaped who you are. This is extremely important, as a common mistake with this prompt is to focus too much on the activity itself without explaining the “why” behind its importance. What lessons has the activity taught you? What skills did you learn? Why has this activity kept you engaged or kept you motivated? These are just a few of the questions that can guide your answer.

As you are probably aware already, the Penn State-Kimmel program is a highly rigorous seven-year program that will require you to commit to a career in medicine. It is not a fast track to becoming a doctor, but rather a set path to reaching that goal. Keeping that in mind, this prompt should be somewhat easy to answer. It is simply a space asking you to explain why you are interested in medicine and the program specifically, which means your answer will be best the more it sounds like you.

Brainstorming a list of reasons why you want to become a physician will be a great starting point – there will likely be several things that draw you to this career path, so list as many you can think of and use that as a jumping-off point. Some questions that can get you thinking may include:

• What was the first experience that made you think about medicine as a career?
• Are there any subjects in school that gave you an interest in medicine? What about extracurriculars?
• What do you hope to do as a physician? Any specific field you would like to work in?
• Are there any personal experiences that you have that make you want to be a physician?

Of course, there are dozens of other questions that you can ask yourself to get a solid foundation for this prompt, but the point is to Jeopardy-style your way into an answer. Ask yourself a series of questions and see what answers you come up with!

Once you describe your reasons for pursuing medicine, you can move forward to the next two parts of the prompts, which are more or less the same question – why this accelerated program? 

When it comes to explaining your interest in an accelerated program, the admissions committee has likely heard it all: guaranteed admission to medical school, getting your MD sooner, etc. But what will these benefits do for you specifically? What will you do with the extra time you’ll have from not needing to apply for medical school, or being able to graduate early? Maybe you have a specific clinic you want to spend a lot of time in, or perhaps you want to serve patients in countries impacted by climate change, which will only get more urgent over the next several years. Dig deeper beyond the obvious benefits of an accelerated program.

Finally, you want to explain why the Penn State-Kimmel Program is right for you. How will it help you achieve your specific goals? This will require you to do a fair amount of research on the program and the Sidney Kimmel Medical College. Look into the specific courses, research opportunities, statements from alumni, and more. 

For example, maybe you want to help develop immunotherapies for cancer after your aunt received an experimental treatment that worked wonders. You could express interest in contributing to the Immune Cell Regulation & Targeting Research Program at Jefferson Health (the home of the Sidney Kimmel Medical College). Or, maybe you want to conduct research on the social determinants of health as a Black woman, particularly when it comes to race. Since Philly (where the Kimmel Medical College is located) is 40% Black, the city would be a good setting for your research.

A large thing to keep in mind is that this program is a 7-year commitment to getting an MD, so you’ll want to frame your answer around how you’ve wanted to be a doctor for a large part of your life. The questions you ask yourself and the information you find on the website will not only help you with this prompt, but also help you figure out if this program is right for you!

This is a common question not only in college applications, but also career interviews, so your answer to this question may even prove helpful down the road!

This prompt is more straightforward, so you can simply discuss a few strengths and weaknesses. Given the word count, we recommend sticking to 1-2 each. Try to follow them up with examples of times you demonstrated those qualities. 

If your strengths relate to medicine, that’s all the better! But no need to explain how these qualities will benefit you in medicine. The connection can be implicit, as doctors need many soft skills.

For example, maybe one of your key skills is that you’re very organized – you could explain how you managed seven different committees as Student Body President, and how you kept track of their progress by having them use a color-coded Google Sheet. The implicit connection to medicine is that being a physician requires you to keep tabs on a plethora of patients and follow-up on their changing needs.

When you get to the weakness part of the question, remember that this prompt is meant to get you thinking about what you believe you can improve upon. For instance, you don’t want to write that you’re not a people person. Not only is this an aspect of your personality that may be difficult to change, but it is also an essential component of becoming a physician. 

Think about weaknesses that you can work on – for example, maybe you have trouble with criticism and take it personally because you’re very proud of the work you do. But, you also recognize how important it is in improving your work. So, you’ve already started actively seeking out criticism, such as submitting your artwork to art feedback Discord servers.

Your answer to these questions will give the admissions reader a sense of your work style and will help evaluate if you are a good fit for the requirements of the program, so remember to frame your answer with that in mind. 

Speaking of questions that you’ll likely get in job interviews, this is another classic. This prompt, which falls under the Overcoming Challenges archetype, will get you reflecting on any experience, both in and out of the classroom, where you had some sort of shortcoming, and how you applied that knowledge to future endeavors. 

Admissions readers know that in a program like this one, you’re bound to fail at one point or another – they just want to see that you know how to grow from your mistakes. There are a plethora of examples you could probably choose from, but the best one will be the most personal to you.

Keep in mind that your topic doesn’t need to be medicine-related. The point of this prompt is simply to see how you pick yourself up after a failure. You don’t even need to have succeeded in the end; what’s important is that you show what you learned.

Roughly 50% of the essay should describe the process of overcoming the challenge. In this portion of the essay, you should lay out the basics of the challenge, discuss the steps you took to overcome it, and any final accomplishment that illustrates what you’ve overcome. 

The remaining 50% of the content (spread throughout the overall narrative) should cover your state of mind, your emotional state, and how your perception of the challenge has changed over time. This should span the initial challenge, the steps you took to overcome it, and the final accomplishment (if there is one). 

This prompt is similar to the classic “diversity” essay, which asks you to share your unique background, perspectives, and experience, but with the added layer of making a connection to Sidney Kimmel Medical College specifically and your future career as a physician. The admissions committee wants to see that, beyond having the intelligence necessary to be a physician, you are committed to equity and inclusivity.

Understanding the Prompt

The key elements to address are:

• Diversity: How will your experiences, identity, or background enrich the medical school community? Keep in mind that diversity goes beyond traditional markers like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on–you can also share personal passions and interests, formative experiences, and so on.
• Connection to Medicine: Link your experiences to your motivations for becoming a physician, and explain how they will inform your approach to patient care.
• Equitable and Inclusive Care: How have your experiences prepared you to understand and meet the needs of patients from various backgrounds and of various identities?

Brainstorming Questions

Here are some questions to help you brainstorm:

• What aspects of your identity or background are unique or underrepresented in medical school settings?
• Have you had experiences that exposed you to diverse cultures, communities, or perspectives? How did they shape your understanding of inclusivity?
• Have you faced challenges or barriers related to your identity? How did you overcome them, and what did you learn?
• How do your experiences influence your approach to patient care? How will they help you provide compassionate, culturally competent care?

What Makes a Good Response

• Specificity: Provide concrete examples of your experiences and how they have shaped your understanding of diversity and inclusion. Don’t just say “To me, diversity means x.” Instead, describe an experience that taught you that lesson.
• Personal Insight: Reflect on how your background and experiences have influenced your worldview, particularly in relation to healthcare. Go beyond just explaining what happened, and clearly show admissions officers how you grew.
• Connection to Future Practice: Concretely articulate how your experiences will help you contribute to the medical school community and provide inclusive care to future patients. In other words, explain why these specific aspects of your past are relevant to understanding your future as a doctor

Hypothetical Student Examples

• Maria, a first-generation American: Maria grew up in a bilingual household, where she often acted as an interpreter for her parents during medical appointments. These experiences exposed her to the challenges faced by non-English-speaking patients, which inspired her to pursue medicine and work to build a broader network of translators across the country, especially rural areas.
• Daniel, an LGBTQ+ advocate: Daniel is bisexual, with two doctors as parents who have always been supportive of him and ensured he had access to excellent healthcare. However, as he became more involved in the LGBTQ+ community, he realized how rare his situation was, and how many of his peers feared stigmatization, or even being outed to their parents by their doctor. By drawing on his parents’ knowledge of HIPAA, he’s given a range of talks at local high schools explaining patient privacy, and when he eventually becomes a doctor, he also hopes to lead presentations for his colleagues on how to ensure LGBTQ+ patients feel comfortable during their appointments.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Being Too Generic: Avoid broad statements about diversity without backing them up with specific examples from your life. Remember, your goal is to distinguish yourself from other applicants, and relying on platitudes like “diversity of perspectives makes all communities stronger” won’t do that–you need to show how you have learned and applied this lesson in your own life.
• Ignoring the Healthcare Connection: Ensure that your essay ties back to your future as a physician and explains how your experiences will inform your patient care. Your identity should anchor the essay, but you don’t want the focus to be exclusively on your past.

Excerpts From Good and Bad Examples

Why it works: This example centers on a specific aspect of the applicant’s background, reflects on why this experience changed their perspective on medicine, and explains how their new perspective influences their goals as a physician. The student shows genuine concern for the confusion medical jargon can cause, and true empathy for the people they are hoping to help.

Why it doesn’t work: This example is vague and lacks depth. The student doesn’t provide any specific examples of what they’ve learned from their friend or their grandpa, nor the particular challenges those two people might face because of their identities. Additionally, the connection to their future career is generic, and could have been written by anyone, so we don’t get any sense of why this student is a better fit for this highly competitive program than another applicant.

In Conclusion

First, identify an aspect of your identity that you want to focus your essay on. Then, describe specific experiences that show how this quality influenced your growth. Finally, connect what you’ve learned about yourself to your interest in medicine, and your commitment to being an empathetic, open-minded physician.

Where to Get Your Penn State Essays Edited For Free

Do you want feedback on your Penn State essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool, where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

Need feedback faster? Get a free, nearly-instantaneous essay review from Sage, our AI tutor and advisor. Sage will rate your essay, give you suggestions for improvement, and summarize what admissions officers would take away from your writing. Use these tools to improve your chances of acceptance to your dream school!