Internal Medicine Residency Personal Statement Example #1

Entering medicine was a natural progression for me to fulfill my desire to care for people with passion, love, and sincerity. The care-taking role is one that I have been in since I was nineteen years old when I began working in homeless family shelters and remained for over eight years. Working with the homeless population taught me about compassion, and how to talk to, relate to, and soothe the pain of others. [ad#bannermain]In addition, the experience helped me to hone my communication and leadership skills. These skills would serve me well when my family and I lost my grandmother, who was my best friend, to lung cancer. I remained at her bedside throughout her last months of life doing all that I could to comfort her and to ensure that she would not suffer. Here, I quickly learned that with compassion and true caring, another’s pain often and easily becomes your own. It is a trait that enables you to succeed and yet one that drives you onward when you cannot. During this very difficult time I was introduced to a physician that would become the epitome of caring. He was the hospice doctor who visited my grandmother every day. He not only took care of her, but took care of us, her family, reassuring us that he would do everything to make sure that she was at ease and that she would die with the peace and dignity she deserved. In that physician, in his caring and compassion, I saw myself and my own future path in the field of medicine.

During my third and fourth years of medical school I had the opportunity to complete electives in palliative care. Within the first few hours of those rotations, I knew that this subspecialty was my true calling. While my experiences in palliative care were demanding, they were also immensely gratifying. Much of what I did during these months came very naturally to me. I was often asked to moderate difficult family meetings and was able to facilitate compromises while simultaneously educating family members about various diseases and the dying processes in general. I assisted families and patients with complex decisions, provided symptom management, and eased their overall anguish. I was an integral part of the palliative care team and became an anchor for these families during their greatest time of need. I find palliative care not only challenging, but also extremely rewarding and satisfying.

I strongly believe that internal medicine will provide me with the best foundation for a fellowship in palliative care and hospice. My third year clerkship in internal medicine truly cemented my desire to pursue the field. I vividly remember my first code and watching as the third year resident took control and command of the situation, handling it with delicacy, compassion, and professional poise. At that moment, I knew that I too wanted to manage those very same types of situations. A residency in internal medicine will give me the experience and expertise I need to handle these difficult scenarios. It will give me the foundational knowledge to treat chronic and critically ill patients in both inpatient and outpatient settings. This provides me the opportunity to have continuity of care with patients, but also to manage acute exacerbations and end stage medical management of illnesses in the hospital setting. Internal medicine will teach me how to manage complex patients with multiple co- morbidities. It is a specialty that will expose me to a wide range of people, diseases, treatments and situations. I am excited to meet the challenges and demands of internal medicine.
[ad#main-300×250]
One of my mentors once told me that “in order to be a good palliative care physician, you must first be a great internist.” I am confident that a residency in internal medicine will provide me with the best training to further my medical career, allowing me to combine my natural skills for human understanding and communication with a solid foundation of medical knowledge. I know that the residency will be demanding, challenging, frustrating, and grueling at times. But even in these moments, I can rely on those central beliefs that have motivated me all along, those skills for caring and compassion that have driven me this far, that true human understanding that I know will be there to fuel my future success.