Ideal Length of a Residency Personal Statement ?

My sleep often tends to behave like what they taught us about gas in Physics - it occupies all space available ;-) When it comes to personal statement, MyERAS allows a limit of upto 28,000 characters to fit in per statement - which amounts to approximately 8 pages in a 10-pt. size Courier New font - BUT do not occupy all that space available !

Since we are living in the era of evidence-based medicine, lets check out what evidence says ! Here are some personal statement length suggestions on some residency program websites:

Department of Psychiatry - Yale University:

"Please include the following: a brief typewritten autobiography (about 500 words). We would like to know a bit about you as a person—your interests, experiences and aspirations. It would also be helpful to describe your reasons, both professional and personal, for choosing the field of psychiatry"

Department of Psychiatry: Stanford University:

" Personal Statement: Use the remaining portion of this form for a typewritten description (approximately 500 words) of the development and current direction of your interest in psychiatry and your reasons for applying to the Stanford program. "

Family Medicine Residency : Columbia University :

"Personal statement (fewer than 500 words)"


Nuclear Medicine Residency: Harvard Medical School:

"Personal Statement (approximately 500 words) briefly describing your background, previous training experiences, and why you wish to pursue residency training in Nuclear Medicine. "


Urology Residency: Comments by A Program Director at UrologyMatch.com:

"Make your personal statement concise (no longer than one page), and try to emphasize some unique aspect of your life which will catch the interest of the reader. Remember that the reviewer will probably be reading at least 200 of these statements."

Hmm...There are tons of residency programs who do not give any such limits on what the personal statements should be constrained to and additionally one must remember that when it comes to specialties like Internal Medicine, there will be more than 1000-1500 that the reviewers will have to read more than a thousand of these statements.

So to make the statements less of a pain to the programs and force ourselves to ONLY include the relevant stuff, it is your best interests to keep the Residency Personal statement about one-page long with MyERAS font standards - thats about 600 to 650 words on Microsoft Word. (10 - Size Courier New Font)

Also remember to split the content into three or more neat paragraphs rather than look like one big onerous corpus of words...




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