psychiatrist medical school personal statement

From Pre-Med to Med School to Residency

Sample Psychiatry Residency Personal Statement

The Psychiatry Example Preventative Medicine Personal Statement Library is now open!

These sample Psychiatry and Psych residency personal statement examples are here for your viewing pleasure (fully anonymous). We’re hoping to add more in the future, including Pre-Med personal statements. If you’ve got one to add to the free library, don’t forget to  contribute yours .

PSYCHIATRY RESIDENCY PERSONAL STATEMENT “Career Change” My desire to improve people’s lives as a and the prospect of restoring sight attracted me to ophthalmology, resulting in my completion of a residency and fellowship in ophthalmology in China. The Cultural Revolution of the sixties and the democratic movement of the eighties in China shaped my life and aspirations. I came to the United States after completing my postgraduate training, to follow a dream: to become an outstanding academic physician. My early focus was the pursuit of an academic medical career in ophthalmology which would allow me to advance research and to provide state-of-the-art clinical care for patients. Towards this goal, I spent three years in Physiological Optics at the University of Opthalmology. During these years, I gained a tremendous amount of research experience, which helped me to develop my critical thinking and gave me skills in medical statistics. Later I obtained a clinical fellowship position in the Ocular Immunology and Uveitis Service at the Major Medical School from 1999 to 2000 and a clinical fellowship in Pediatric Ophthalmology at Children’s Medical Center. These programs provided me with a rich and diverse clinical experience and further exposed me to vast amounts of clinical pathology, cutting-edge clinical practice and patient management.

My training in ophthalmology was very rewarding and challenging. However, I realized that most ophthalmologists today still work in private-solo practices, and I felt a bit restrained by the limited opportunities to discuss complex clinical cases and do research in the future if I become an ophthalmologist. Therefore, I started working to towards gaining a chance at a residency training that will be able to combine my interest in an academic clinical and research career. My interest in Psychiatry has grown exponentially during my research and clinical work over the past few years. My studies in neural control of saccadic eye movement gave me insights into the neuronal processes that influence a person’s reaction to external environment. I also learned that the neuronal processes of the human brain are integrated with neuropsychopharmacology that relates to a person’s neurophysiology, cognitive-behavior, thinking, and mental situation. I found that psychiatry, just like a discipline of philosophy, seeks to explore and organize the results of the various sciences to show the many ways in which they are related. It addresses the neurological conditions, genetic conditions and environmental conditions that affect an individual. I was fascinated with the interaction of neurophysiology and neuropsychology. My clinical training further provided me the opportunity to see a great need and interest for psychiatry. During my clinical practice, I saw over and over that many patients have not just physical problems but also suffer from the problems of stress, depression, substance use disorders and culture stress problems with the increasing of population of immigrant. These mental illnesses and stresses have become increasingly common in our daily workplace, society, community, family, and our daily lives. Today, as the increasing need of a higher level of multiple services including body, mind and behavior from our patients, psychiatry has become a one of the most rewarding careers and it required a high level of commitment. I feel that the interaction between the psychiatrist and the patient is very meaningful and interesting in a clinical base and in addition, broad research in psychiatry challenges my interest and capability.  I have learned from my experiences in this wonderful country, that there is no better place in the world to perform medical research or to have access to the best treatments for my patients. For these reasons, I intend to pursue my career in academic medicine in the United States. Completing a psychiatry residency will be a great value for my future career. My culture background and life experience will allow me to gain the trust and respect from minority patients and to provide more valuable access and service to those patients, who remains a large undeserved medical community. This has prompted me to change my specialty focus at this point in my medical career and to apply for a psychiatry residency. I believe that my experience in research and clinical work over the year as well as my tenacity and willingness to work hard and to learn will allow me to make a great contribution to your program and to my medical community in the future.

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Zen Psychiatry

By Elana Miller, MD

Sample Psychiatry Personal Statement

Here’s the personal statement I used for my psychiatry residency application. This post is a continuation from my blog, How to Apply to Residency in Psychiatry, that details how to schedule your 4th year rotations, requesting letters of recommendations, what to consider when choosing a residency program, how to prepare for your residency interviews, and of course, how to write your own psychiatry personal statement. If you’re in the process of applying to psychiatry residency, check out that post too!

My Psychiatry Personal Statement 

I came to the field of psychiatry circuitously. For almost as long as I wanted to pursue medicine, I thought my future would be in surgery. At an early age, I remember visiting my mother’s laboratory, where she worked as a neuropathologist, and helping her dissect neurological tissue under the microscope. I would sit with her, mesmerized, gently teasing tissue off a monkey spinal cord with the delicate instruments, and imagining a future using similar tools to manipulate tissues and heal illnesses of the body. But while I believed that my future path was in surgery, I naturally gravitated toward the study of the human mind and behavior.

My father is a psychiatrist, and between him and my mother, the dynamic between the mind and brain were always topics of conversation at the dinner table. Partially because of their influence, and largely because of my own inclination and interest, I have always been driven to understand not only the “how” of thought processes and interpersonal interaction, but the “why”. Why do some minds create happiness, and others suffering, in the face of the same external circumstances? How do our internal states transform our external experiences? To what extent are these habits and predispositions fixed, and to what degree can they be reconstructed to improve our relationship with the external world and with ourselves?

When I entered college, instead of focusing on a basic science such as biology or chemistry like many of my pre-med colleagues, I was drawn to the study of psychology. It was here that I first began to investigate the more mysterious aspects of the human mind, and learned the ways the mind and brain can act unpredictably and destructively. I was fascinated by the complex psychopathologies of mental illness and motivated to understand the anatomical and biological basis of psychiatric disorders. I was struck by the realization that often our own mental processes, in trying to alleviate suffering, would instead create it.

When I graduated, I decided to further investigate these ideas in a research context. I joined the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University and delved into the study of the relationship between stress, cortisol levels, APOE genotype and cognitive decline in older adults. I found the subject matter challenging and stimulating, and loved the excitement of discovering something new and contributing to the fund of knowledge available to all clinicians and practitioners. But when I entered medical school, I was drawn back toward the surgical specialties. I appreciated the technical aspects of surgery, the almost artistic nature of the field, and the dedicated, conscientious and disciplined nature of the surgeons. I focused on urology as a subspecialty, and directed the same interest that led me to pursue research at Stanford to a project at the USC/Norris Cancer Center investigating comparative pathological findings in men who underwent prostate biopsy and subsequent radical prostatectomy.

I began my third year surgery rotation excited to finally put into practice what I had studied from a theoretical perspective for so long. But instead of dreaming of spending time in the OR, I would look forward to clinic days, where I could sit across from patients about to have surgery, or recovering from a recent operation, and listen attentively as they told stories of fear, sadness and apprehension. I learned how underlying anxiety or distress could manifest as subtle physical complaints, such as pain or insomnia. I began to appreciate how mental states could influence a patient’s interpretation of his or her illness, and either aggravate or mitigate the suffering the patient felt in the face of the same degree of pain. I learned that by simply being attentive and mindful, I could demonstrate my empathy and concern, and show these patients they were not alone in the process.

Physicians in both surgery and psychiatry share a profoundly intimate role in the patient’s life. As a surgeon plunges into the body to heal with a scalpel, a psychiatrist plunges into the mind to heal with a few well-chosen words, an empathetic nod, or medications that modulate the neurochemistry of the brain. My subsequent third and fourth year psychiatry rotations have confirmed that my passion lies in alleviating suffering through reconstructing the mind, rather than in fixing the mechanics of the body. I look forward to developing the skills to transform both the mind and brain to serve my patients in a meaningful way, and am enthusiastic to combine my interest in clinical practice with my passion for academic research to create a fulfilling career in psychiatry.

Residency & What Happened Next

I ended up doing my residency in psychiatry at UCLA from 2010-2013. In late 2013, I found a passion for exploring and studying integrative medicine, and decided to start a private practice after graduation.

However, on December 17, 2013, I went to the ER for what I thought were minor symptoms — but it turned out to be Stage IV Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. I was diagnosed 6 months before completely my residency program.

You can read what happened next here (don’t worry, it has a good ending).

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