Personal Characteristics Essay: Writing Tips that Boost Your Chances as a Medical School Applicant
28.09.2022

Personal Characteristics Essay: Writing Tips that Boost Your Chances as a Medical School Applicant

Successfully applying for a medical school in the US is a dream for many striving healthcare students. If it is one of your goals, then you are well aware of the American Medical College Application Service (abbreviated as AMCAS). This centralized service is aimed at simplifying the application process for a variety of medical schools in the United States. However, there is an exclusive service if you strive to study in Texas and write a personal characteristics essay to apply for one of its dental, veterinary or other medical schools. Thus, you have to be aware of a separate application platform called the Texas Medical & Dental Schools Application Service, with its shortened version – TMDSAS. Composing TMDSAS personal characteristics essay is a must, as it helps the committee in charge to decide whether your candidature is suitable for the enrollment in the chosen medical institution of the mentioned state. This blog article is intended for all the prospective Texas medical schools’ students. It is full of valuable TMDSAS essay prompts to enhance your chances of being accepted into the healthcare school of your dreams.

The Ultimate Definition of Personal Characteristics Essay

The core element of a personal characteristics definition in an academic paper revolves around the scope of the diversity of your self-expression merged into your knowledge. It may have miscellaneous objectives, including presenting an authentic background, skills and talents, viewpoints, ideas, versatile experiences and insights. It ought to demonstrate your creative side as well as analytical and critical thinking vital for the medical school education. It has to be a thought-provoking personal characteristics essay, where you would elucidate your abilities, which are deemed valuable in healthcare circles. It is important not to underestimate your knowledge and any special skills you might have because even student-candidates need to present themselves as potential future leaders in the preferred medical field.

Tips to Compose an Insightful TMDSAS Personal Characteristics Essay

It is much easier to give a meaningful answer to the TMDSAS personal characteristics prompt if you efficiently define personal characteristics, which might help you stand out among other candidates. The initial hint would be to focus not only on yourself as a leader, but also as a favorable teamwork player. In medical profession, it is highly significant to interact with everyone involved to establish fruitful cooperation. You can mention something about the successful collaboration with your peers, your ability to teach others as well as learn from more knowledgeable individuals. If you have any volunteering experience, it is worth mentioning. Great focus is to be placed on your positive perception of diversity because medical workers ought never to discriminate neither a colleague nor a patient in terms of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Thus, in addition to describing your talents and experiences, be as open-minded as possible. Do not hesitate to talk about your unique interests, peculiar background, overall life path (which, supposedly, made your more altruistic), and relevant opinions popular in the modern medical field. Thinking outside the box, while sticking to your real-life principles, is the fundamental secret of this application essay.

Learn Write the TMDSAS Personal Characteristics Essay with Seamless TMDSAS Essay Prompts

If you have many experiences to write about, choose around two or three the most significant ones to respond to the TMDSAS essays prompt. You have to consider the general academic rules related to the clarity, coherence, and impeccable logical order of your ideas. An abundance of viewpoints may not be advantageous, as it makes it difficult for your audience to keep focus on the most essential aspects. Thus, select only the strongest ideas, which would interest the majority. You ought also to take into account the determined word count of the personal characteristics essay in accordance with TMDSAS regulations. Its word scope is brief, comprising about 2500 characters, which even includes spacing. Our experts also prepared amazing tips on composing an attention-grabbing personal characteristics essay when applying for a medical school in Texas:
  1. Illuminate your diversity through brainstorming the most essential ideas and personal motives.
It is highly effective to employ a brainstorming technique when producing your personal characteristics essay TMDSAS. It entails intensive thinking, which is aimed at delving into the deepest knowledge on the issue you might have, as well as evoking memories about the fundamental experiences, which influenced your medical career choice. At the brainstorming stage, you ought not to pay attention to the chronology of your thoughts, essay structure, spelling, and grammar. It is important to collect the most vital information as well as insightful flashbacks. Although your ideas might flow tremendously and there seem to be too many thoughts in your head, try to write everything down. Yet, not to immerse in chaotic thinking and keep in mind an approximate essay structure, try to answer the following questions. They will help you to arrange all the ideas you generated and, what is more important, comprehend your own diversity.
  • Can you describe your inner essence in terms of your vocation?
  • What are the most self-identifying experiences you have gained?
  • Did the place where you grew up influence your life principles?
  • Have some traditions in your family influenced your choices?
  • What instigated the main development of your personality as it is now?
  • Have you traveled to many countries? If yes, then how does traveling affect your outlook?
  • Do you speak foreign languages?
  • Do you have a military experience?
  • Have you taken part in volunteering missions?
  • Do you belong to any healthcare-oriented organizations or communities?
  • Have you ever suffered a serious physical or mental trauma?
  • Have you ever looked after disabled or ill people?
  • Have you ever been severely rejected in your life?
  • Can you recollect a bullying experience in school?
  1. After you have collected all the necessary ideas and experiences by dint of brainstorming, read through your stories attentively and pick the most thought-provoking ones. They have to reflect your ambition to pursue medical career.
As the focus on demonstrating diversity of your views and experience forms the core of personal characteristics essay, select the ideas, which can be life-changing even for your peers. Keeping a concise word count of the essay, get rid of all the widely-known facts or irrelevant details. Sometimes, it can be enough to focus even on the only one idea, but it has to reflect an essential insight or a cutting-edge perspective. Your narrative ought to prioritize meaning; quality has to surpass quantity.
  1. Discover the benefits of outlining to arrange your ideas
After you have found the main standpoint to concentrate on, it is time to produce a thorough outline. It helps to establish the most suitable essay structure and coherently organize all your body paragraphs. Consider, even if you are only the beginner, it ought not to impede you from creating professional content. Also, your application has to stick to the generally accepted academic structure, having an introductory part, a main body part, and a concluding part.
  1. Start writing the primary draft from the beginning to the end
Only after your outline is fully complete, it is reasonable to proceed with producing the first draft. Always keep in mind the 2500-character limit. The tone of your essay, despite the prevailing personal elements, is to be rather academic than casual. Instead of filling in your brief application with adjectives, such as “empathetic, altruistic, benevolent”, etc., tell a unique story about the experience, which embodies your compassion. For instance, a motivational sentence could be, “Being raised as a single child of the divorced parents, who failed in co-parenting because of the constant quarrels, I decided to help children in the same situation to feel they have a happy childhood no matter what. My experience inspired my striving to become a children’s psychotherapist.” Yet, you do not have to invent a fake story if it does not reflect your real-life experience.
  1. Go through the mistakes of your first draft and try to correct them all
Proofreading is the transformative stage in the process of draft preparation. At this stage, scrutinize every sentence of your essay, checking it for all the possible errors related to grammar, spelling, coherence, and content itself. One more important thing to keep in mind is that your core task is to answer the essay prompt, so you have to follow it. All the parts of your essay have logically to flow into each other. So, your introduction has coherently to merge into the body paragraphs, and the main text is to lead to your conclusion. It is useful to have someone who could read through the final essay draft to see the errors you have failed to notice. If there is no one who could seamlessly proofread your text, then we suggest that you request professional help on TMDSAS essay via Writing-Service.org.

What You Have to Avoid in Your TMDSAS personal characteristics Essay

  • Make sure there are no controversial and diversity-discriminating statements;
  • Avoid any negative statements and non-euphemistic expressions in terms of diseases or disabilities;
  • Even when drafting, pay attention to the grammar patterns you use;
  • Do not waste the limited space on fillers and cliches;
  • Do not present imaginary situations, no matter how well you can write about them.

Personal Characteristics Essay Example to Encourage Smooth Ideas’ Generation

Many people find it hard to fit into new environments away from the ones they have grown used to. To such a people, coming to a new place or to new a group of people more often than not appears a little scary. Most of them would therefore fear being transferred to places where they know very well that they have few if any acquaintances. I am not that kind of a person, I am confident of my unique ability that enables me to blend in with any new environment that am presented with, an ability that on many occasions goes a long way in helping me make valuable contributions to that particular community. Speaking of my unique personal qualities, I strongly believe and am confident that my greatest and valuable asset is the communication skills that on many occasions help me to speak a common language with different kinds of people coming from many diverse backgrounds. I hate anything that looks upon or discriminates against other people, I hate prejudice and inequality and therefore am always ready to stand up and defend any person if I learn that others in the community are mistreating or treating this individual with bias or discrimination especially on the basis of their race, origin or other qualities that relate to background that has been bestowed on one or has been inherited at birth and therefore the individual in question has no powers to change or run away from. The determination to always be fair to every human being, has usually won me many kinds of friends. I strongly believe that the experiences I have had in the past can go a long way in making the groups of people that I associate with, including me, form safer places that others can happily stay in terms of having an environment that is free from prejudice and judgments that are premature. I also have natural organization skills that have greatly helped me in my social life. What this means is that I can easily form and organize individuals into groups and teams of friends by coming up with different activities that they can engage in during their leisure time such as organizing for little outings that are appropriate in acting as an incentive for groups of people to get together and build that concept of always working together as a team. I make them grasp the principle of “together we stand, divided we fall.” I have no doubt whatsoever that the ability to bring and hold a group of people together is a big talent as it not only strengthens social ties in the society, but also contributes immensely to the social cohesion and friendliness in the new community that I intend to move into. The compassion and kindness I have for other people and the sensitivity that I have towards other peoples’ feelings, makes me very popular in any community I visit. I like participating a lot in charity to assist and give my services to the community. These include visiting the sick, participating in cleaning initiatives, and giving relief food to the hungry. I usually get that sense of belonging to humanity when I volunteer at places where people seriously need my help like the sick and the disadvantaged. This does not mean that I only do this during periods of my official part-time, I am always on the look and therefore respond to all people who need a friend and always prepare myself to be ready to reach out and help them. I don’t usually hesitate in doing what I know is right, I don’t wait for others to ask first, I go straight ahead and help once I spot a need. This has made most of my many friends to enjoy my company and are also convinced that I can be a great asset to any community I will end up in because of my friendly, sociable and open character. I comprehend “agreeableness” as an indispensable attribute for one to be able to get along with others. I find my inherent ability to balance the idea of agreeing with people as much as I disagree with them as so favorable. This is because, agreeing with people makes me come out as quite accommodative but at the same time failing to disagree with them on certain issues over which they have mistaken ideas can make them take me for granted. I therefore avoid agreeing with people in the work place on issues requiring assertiveness since this can make me get viewed as weak and too submissive. An equally important attribute I possess is tolerance. I do fully appreciate the fact that people can’t always behave the way I want them to, but this doesn’t mean that the way they behave is wrong. I therefore cannot try to change people for the simple reason that I don’t understand or like their behavior since trying to do this is tantamount to trying to change their personality which is what makes them distinctive. I do appreciate the fact that tolerating the opinion of others helps foster harmony in the society. I therefore consider these attributes personality trump cards which would come in handy as far as living in harmony with members of my new community is concerned. I view my passion for a continuous acquisition of new ideas and skills as an indispensable tool in the modern dynamic world. I also take pride in sharing the ideas and experiences I acquire with other people. This would surely fit the community am just about to join as well as give its members an example of cultural diversity and thirst for knowledge. I do honestly derive pleasure from helping others in any sphere of life. Helping them in the knowledge arena is one of the most valuable things in the present times. I do strongly believe that people do get more information from life experiences and therefore for one to be able to interact well with other people performing different cultures, he/she should be receptive to new ideas. Learning and understanding the culture and experiences of other people from diverse backgrounds is the first step to seeing the advantages and disadvantages of what we have in every sphere of life. I believe that my effort to make interaction between members of the new society more productive in the sphere of knowledge and experience exchange would help members draw the “portrait” of potential learners which am confident every one will learn from. Finally, am self motivated, an attribute that sees me undertake an activity for the enjoyment it provides, the learning it allows as well as the feelings of accomplishment it evokes. This will definitely ensure that I live up to what is expected of me in the new society without any supervision as well as any external rewards or reinforcements. Seldom do I get the driving force to pursue any activity from verbal praises or any other rewards and this is the reason why my motivation in every task hardly fades. This attribute is bound to see me undertake tasks which are time-limited, routine and unexciting, which other people may not enjoy in the new community. Intrinsic motivation enables people to make sustained progress toward significant goals, learn to take risks as well as explore and develop their potential to the fullest. In my view, this would be very good for the new community.
The given TMDSAS personal characteristics essay sample shows that you have the freedom to portray any healthcare career-relevant experience as long as it remains truthful. Also, it is wrong to think that all your experiences have been trivial because your professional life has not started yet. Whenever you have certain obstacles in creating this kind of medical school application essay, you can address a marvelous team of Writing-Service.org. Our experts will guide you through all the necessary stages of this experience-based composition.