diversity essay premed

How to Write the Medical School Secondary Diversity Essay

By Med School Insiders
June 13, 2022
Secondary Application

The medical school secondary diversity essay exists because admissions committees want to ensure their campus is as diverse as possible. Medical schools want to attract applicants from all walks of life so that each student contributes something unique to the student body. The diversity essay is an opportunity for applicants to discuss their minority background or otherwise unique history or identity and how their uniqueness will contribute to the college community.

In this post, we’ll break down why this prompt is asked, what admissions committees are looking for, and how to best answer it.

Medical School Secondaries

The AMCAS application opens for the following year’s medical school class around the first week of May. Submissions open around the end of May to early June, so you have a month to prepare your primary application. Therefore, if you hope to begin medical school in the fall of 2023, you must apply in the spring of 2022.

Your secondary applications will take about two to four weeks to arrive after you submit your primary application. Secondaries must be completed as soon as possible without compromising quality. We recommend taking no longer than 7-14 days to submit each secondary you receive.

This is especially true because, at Med School Insiders, we recommend applicants apply to around 20 different medical schools . This could mean receiving 20 different secondaries, all within the same general time frame.

For more information about ideal scheduling, read our Medical School Application Timeline Guide .

Why Do Schools Include a Diversity Essay?

Colleges, and not just medical schools, believe their college culture, community, and campus learning experience can be enriched by including a wide array of different backgrounds, perspectives, identities, and beliefs. Therefore, many admissions committees assign a diversity essay so that each applicant can explain in their own words how their identity and background will help enhance the student body at large.

Diversity essays are an opportunity for applicants with minority backgrounds, unique family histories, an unconventional education, or otherwise distinctive experiences to explain how their uniqueness will add to the campus community.

How to Answer the Medical School Secondary Diversity Essay

1 | diversity comes in many forms.

This is an extremely important point, as many applicants who don’t come from a specific socioeconomic or ethnocultural background believe they are unable to add diversity to a prospective medical school class. This is a common misconception. Diversity isn’t limited to the color of your skin or which religion your family belongs to.

Did you experience a non-traditional upbringing growing up? This could include losing a family member, having a sibling or family member with a health concern or disability, growing up in a single parent home, needing to work at a young age, or much more. There are many, many factors that could contribute to your diversity.

Focus on your story. Which personal qualities make you unique? What aspect of your personal identity, upbringing, or family has separated you from your peers?

2 | What is Your Personal Identity?

If you’re stuck on what direction to take this essay, take time to look inward and consider your own identity. Who are you? What kind of person are you? What makes you, well, you? What makes you unique from other candidates?

Your identity is made up of a number of different factors, including your ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and health.

You might also consider any non-traditional experiences you’ve had or a non-traditional upbringing.

What was your home life like?
What was your financial situation growing up?
What is your family’s education level?
How much did you have to work when you were younger?
Do you come from a multicultural background?
Have you experienced a personal health scare?
Do you have family members who have significant health concerns?
Have you lost close family members?
Did you lose a parent at a young age?
Did you grow up in a single parent home?
Have you experienced any kind of traumatic event that has informed your values and identity?

3 | Get Personal

Don’t hold back when sharing your experiences. Surface-level stories or bland anecdotes will not stand out. What personal details can you add that will better illustrate your points?

Describe in detail how the experience made you feel. What did you learn? What qualities have you developed as a result of the experience? How will you apply what you learned and the qualities you earned to your medical education and eventual career?

At the same time, remember that your experience may be brought up during your interview. Anything you mention in your application is fair game to be asked about on the interview trail. Do not write about any experience you will be unable to speak about in person. It’s good to be open and show vulnerability, but it’s also vital that you maintain your composure during your interview.

If you don’t think you can speak about the experience face-to-face with an interviewer, leave it out of your essay.

4 | Don’t Repeat Yourself

You may have been asked a diversity question in your primary application, or you may have chosen to focus on this aspect of your life in your personal statement.

Do not repeat yourself in your secondary. Admissions committees already have access to your primary application. Repeating the same stories won’t provide adcoms with any additional insight into who you are. The secondaries are an opportunity to add something new to your story.

If you’re going to touch on an experience, moment, or lesson you’ve already mentioned, ensure that you are adding to it. You must provide a notable amount of additional context if you utilize the same examples in your secondaries.

5 | Continue Crafting Your Narrative

An essential piece of a successful primary application is the cohesive narrative you build throughout it about who you are and why you want to be a doctor. The secondary application is no different. The diversity essay is an opportunity to continue the narrative you established in your primary application.

It’s important that the diversity essay fits well with the rest of your secondary application. Each piece of the application should add to your story and provide additional context about how you’ve arrived at where you are today.

Learn How to Develop a Cohesive Narrative for Medical School Applications .

Medical School Secondary Diversity Essay Examples

There are a number of different directions you can take your diversity essay.

You might discuss a time when you or someone you care about experienced prejudice. How did that experience make you feel? What did you learn? How did it shape who you are? If you took action in response to this, what action did you take? Did you try to support others who are experiencing prejudice?

You might discuss the difficulties you’ve had growing up with parents who have different values than your own. How did these differences change your relationship with your family? How did that conflict in your life shape who you are today? Were you able to resolve your differences with your family, or did you need to prioritize your own needs and identity?

You might discuss how your cultural background has been a positive influence on your life. How has learning another language and participating in cultural values distinct from those of the US shaped who you are? What have you learned from the traditional values of your family? How can you apply what you’ve learned to interacting with people who come from other ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds?

You might discuss how from a very young age you needed to help support your family financially. How did taking on that burden when you were young shape you? How were you able to help and support your family? Was it financially or with your time? What did you learn from that experience growing up, and how has it informed your priorities and outlook on life?

Secondary Application Editing With Med School Insiders

We get it. We understand how long you’ve already been working on the application process, but now is not the time to give up. It’s time to knuckle down and drive this thing home.

Med School Insiders can help. Our Medical School Secondary Application Editing services will help you write the kind of singular secondary applications that will get you noticed by your top choice medical schools. Our doctor advisors have served on medical school admissions committees, and they’ve read hundreds of secondary essays. Our team will help you craft a stellar secondary application tailored to each school you apply to.

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Medical School Diversity Essay: Complete Guide

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Admissions committees want to ensure their campus is as varied as possible, so they require additional diversity essays for medical schools.

Medical schools strive to draw candidates from diverse backgrounds so that each student can bring something unique to the school.

The diversity essay allows you to talk about your ethnicity or other distinctive characteristics and how those characteristics will benefit the campus community.

This article will give you a thorough understanding of a medical school diversity essay and the best tips on making a compelling one.

What is a Diversity Essay for Medical School?

Many secondary admissions require a diversity essay. If a diversity essay is suggested, you should still view it as a requirement because contributing additional, compelling materials increases your chances of getting accepted.

Sending extra resources will enable the admissions committees to understand your distinctive background better since they matriculate well-rounded, diversified, and experienced individuals. A recurrent element across purpose and vision statements on medical school websites is diversity.

This is due to the necessity for healthcare professionals who can relate to and treat a variety of patient populations in the medical industry.

Some institutions even have unique diversity declarations demonstrating their unwavering dedication to enrolling a diverse student body, including students of every color, religion, sexual orientation, identity, and experience in education and the workforce.

To further promote the advantages of diversity in medicine, admissions committees give unconventional applicants with non-science backgrounds substantial consideration and admit them.

What Counts as Diversity?

Put your worries aside if you are concerned that because you do not identify with a historically underrepresented group, you do not qualify as a diverse applicant.

Diversity in the context of med school applications does not mean that only members of racial or ethnic minorities should be admitted.

Yes, minority applicants are diverse and are urged to submit applications to medical school, but diversity does not stop there.

Instead, diversity is viewed broadly to embrace a variety of areas. In addition, everyone is diverse because each person may draw on their own particular experiences and backgrounds, which is advantageous in the healthcare industry.

Candidates might be diverse due to a variety of distinct qualities and traits:

Career switchers
Returning older students
Non-traditional candidates
Returning parents to the workforce
Candidates with military experience
Candidates who did not major in science
Candidates from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds
Candidates who persevere in the face of enormous difficulties
Historically underrepresented groups (including those based on race, ethnicity, gender, and gender identity as well as language, sexual orientation, and more )

You will have many examples to pick from if you widen your idea of diversity to include your learning experiences and worldviews.

8 Tips for Answering Medical School Diversity Essays

Diversity essays for medical schools give candidates with diverse backgrounds, unusual families, unorthodox educations, or other different experiences a chance to describe how their distinctiveness would enrich the campus community.

Your diversity essay is your chance to show the medical school you are applying to what you have to offer. Hence, it is a must that you ensure that you stand out among the other candidates.

Below are the best tips when writing your diversity essay for medical school.

Decide What Makes You Unique

Before you even start writing, develop a list of the characteristics in your background that set you apart.

Consider your schooling, employment history, extracurricular activities, upbringing, family life, and other facets of your path to medical school.

The purpose of brainstorming is to stimulate your creative thinking.

Do not worry about spelling, grammar, or sentence structure at this time. Your objective is to write down as many thoughts as you can so that you can start to develop a narrative for your diversity essay using one to three examples.

Focus on Your Story

This is a crucial aspect since many applicants who do not belong to a particular socioeconomic or ethnic group feel they cannot bring variety to a potential medical school class.

Unfortunately, this is a typical misunderstanding. Diversity is not only about your skin tone or the religion your ancestors practiced.

Did you grow up in a non-traditional environment?

This could involve losing a family member, having a brother or other family member who is ill or disabled, growing up in a home with only one parent, starting work at an early age, or many other things. There are a ton of different things that could be a part of your variety.

Do not Hold Back

Do not be reluctant to share your experiences. Simple or uninteresting anecdotes will not stand out. What specific information about yourself can you include to support your arguments?

Clearly state how the encounter affected you.

What did you discover?

How has the experience helped you grow in terms of your character?

How did you utilize what you learned and acquired skills to further your medical education and, ultimately, your career?

In addition, keep in mind that your experience can come up during the interview. Therefore, any information you include in your application is fair for questioning throughout the interview process.

Never write about an experience that you will not be able to discuss in person. It is beneficial to be honest and vulnerable. Still, it is equally important that you keep your cool throughout the interview.

Make Sure Your Story Has a Potential Contribution to the Community

Occasionally, candidates focus so much on their differences that they lose sight that being unique is a means, not an end, to an objective.

These distinctions and distinctive traits/experiences must have a purpose. They must assist in demonstrating your merit for a place at the roundtable discussion for medical schools.

Being a two-time offender or a habitual absence from school are two examples of unusual qualities and experiences for a medical school applicant . Will they aid you in entering?

Most likely not, and for apparent motives. Concentrating on another subject for your medical school diversity essay might be best.

The idea is straightforward. Once you have determined your unique traits, your primary responsibility is to explain how that distinctiveness will enable you to offer something extraordinary both in and outside school.

Enter your text here...

Keep Developing Your Narrative

The coherent story you weave throughout your primary application about who you are and why you want to be a doctor is crucial to a successful application.

Nothing different applies to the second application. The diversity essay allows you to develop the story you started in your main application.

The diversity essay must flow naturally with the remainder of your secondary application. Each application component should support your narrative and offer further background information on how you came to be where you are.

Do Not Repeat Yourself

Make sure you are expanding on any experiences, moments, or lessons you have already addressed if you will bring them up again. You must include more background if you use the same examples in your secondaries.

Do not say the same thing twice in your secondary. Your initial application is already available to the admissions committee. Repeating the same tales will not give the admission committee any new information about you. The secondary chapters offer you the chance to develop your plot further.

Have Enough Evidence of What You Are Writing

Even if diversity may be an elusive idea or characteristic, it needs concrete proof. Therefore, diversity essays for med school are not comprehensive without a clear explanation of how your "diversity" relates to your experiences.

You cannot, for instance, blatantly claim that your history as an immigrant son or daughter and first-generation college student gives you some important insight into the concerns of immigrant populations.

You still need to provide evidence, even though it makes sense that you would be more knowledgeable than people from wealthy, non-immigrant families. Clearly state the links.

Therefore, the ideal strategy is not to overemphasize how significant your minority identity is if you do choose to focus on ethnic, cultural, or religious diversity.

Instead, a compelling essay might concentrate on your commitment to diversity and social justice issues or your efforts to address the health disparities between minorities and non-minorities. It could also be your encounters that show a concrete proof of your cross-cultural competence in patient or client interactions.

These three subjects are not exhaustive but could serve as an excellent starting point.

Proofread and Double-Check Your Diversity Essay

Spend some time going over a few crucial details in your article again. Ensure the element or elements you emphasize have real personal significance for you. Then, reread your essay one last time to ensure you genuinely respond to the question.

The diversity essay is multifaceted. For example, one school might require you only to list any noteworthy aspects of your background.

At the same time, another would want you to explain how those aspects will improve their curriculum or influence your future line of work.

Additionally, make sure you relate your attributes to medicine, particularly to the institution you are applying to.

Medical School Diversity Essay Sample Prompts

The leading schools' diversity essay prompts are provided below to give you an idea of what is anticipated. Remember that each of these prompts has a consistent theme.

Specifically, medical schools are interested in your broad diversity and how it will benefit the institution's purpose, vision, and student body.

Larner College of Med – University of Vermont

The Larner College of Medicine understands that diversity embraces all of a person's experiences and goes beyond their self-identified or unidentified identities. Consider a period when you gained knowledge from a person or organization that is different from yourself.

Mayo Med School – Mayo Clinic

Our individual inflections, which make up our diversity, distinguish us from one another or bind us together. Describe how your personal and professional activities reflect your relationship to your own variety and the diversity of others.

Stanford University School of Medicine

The diversity of an entering class is viewed by the admissions committee as a crucial component in advancing the school's educational purpose. The Committee on Admissions encourages you to address any distinctive, personally significant, and/or challenging aspects of your background.

These aspects may include how well you were educated as a child, your gender, your sexual orientation, any physical disabilities, and life or employment experiences.

Please explain how these influences have shaped your aspirations and training for a future in medicine and how they might enable you to make a distinctive contribution to the Stanford learning environment.

University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine

The Pritzker Sch of Medicine at the University of Chicago is committed to encouraging diverse students with an extraordinary promise to become leaders and innovators in science and medicine for the benefit of humanity. This is done in an environment of multidisciplinary scholarship and discovery.

Our essential objective and educational ethos are expressed in our mission statement. In particular, it emphasizes how important diversity is to us since we believe that variety in the student body is vital to academic performance. Please submit an essay outlining how you would further Pritzker's goal and promote diversity there.

Wake Forest School of Medicine

We want to develop doctors who can relate to various patient populations, even though they may not have a common background. Tell us about a situation that helped you to see the world more broadly or to understand people who are different from you better and what you took away from it.

Medical School Diversity Essay Samples

The diversity essay questions you are given by various institutions may differ, meaning that the terminology and what is being asked of you will be unique to each institution.

To prepare yourself, reading a few samples is a good idea.

While the general substance of each prompt will not fluctuate significantly depending on the school, you might want to change the organization or sequencing of the content for various prompts.

Here are some of the best samples of medical school diversity essays.

Prompt: Diversity can take many different shapes. How do you think you could add to the class's diversity?

I feel fortunate to have a solid sense of my roots. Being in Italy frequently throughout my life has allowed me to see how this culture's ideologies differ from those of the United States.

Italian society is frequently tarnished by the myth that its people are idle or unwilling to put forth the effort. People will, in my opinion, see a community where love and camaraderie are more critical than monetary possessions if they view the world objectively.

As a result, there is a considerable emphasis on other people's health and wellness. There is always time for family dinner, a coffee with a friend, or a mind-clearing walk in the evening.

Growing up, my family always ensured everyone had access to food and conversation. I adhere to this concept and see working in the healthcare industry as a chance to assist people in leading fulfilling lives and seeking their own happiness.

Healthcare experts have continuously allowed my loved ones to live independently and be there throughout my life. They have provided me with a service and a gift, and I want to spend the rest of my life sharing that gift with others. My passion for studying medicine and my holistic way of living have been influenced by my culture, background, and experiences in life.

In addition to being a physician in training, I will bring these qualities of empathy and holistic care to my role as a classmate who supports others through medical school challenges.

Prompt: Without restricting the discussion to your identity, please elaborate on how you see yourself supporting the fundamental principles of inclusion and diversity at our school of medicine and the medical field.

When I think about diversity, the first thing that springs to me is "a difference of opinion." As a member of the debate club and a student with a budding interest in classical philosophy, I've come to understand the importance of having a variety of viewpoints. I think advancement is basically impossible without the ability to question our assumptions and expectations about the world and ourselves.

My responsibility as a volunteer scribe at a mobile clinic was to document the specifics of patient examinations. We saw primarily middle-aged or older people. One patient, Paul, showed up at the mobile clinic with a nasty cut on his foot that he claimed was caused by catching his foot on an old rolled-up fence behind his barn. He was skeptical when we suggested he get a tetanus injection. He expressed why he didn't think immunizations were effective.

It was crucial to avoid conflict. We emphasized that while maintaining his autonomy was our first goal, he was likely to contract tetanus, which is potentially fatal. We explained to him that the tetanus vaccine has contributed to a 95% reduction in tetanus cases since about 1950. The patient thought for a bit, then agreed to the vaccination and thanked us for our assistance before leaving. I want to provide the University of Maryland School of Medicine with what I've learned through polite, open communication.

Prompt: What diverse characteristics and experiences could you offer the community of medical schools?

Our training for the Peace Corps taught us a metaphor for our work. Our new neighborhood could be compared to a square if America, our country of origin, were a circle. Volunteers like me formed triangles. The purpose? We could see both as legitimate modes of existence since we were a part of both.

The majority of us have several identities. I also practice living in the center by driving a boat across an island chain. The translator assumes a crucial role in Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, one of my favorite books, which tells the tale of foreign ambassadors who are taken hostage during a banquet. He is the one who must communicate, interpret, and give voice to the blank spaces between characters.

I have had many opportunities to translate for my siblings, parents, Belizean villagers, and others in my health advocacy work. I am the oldest child, a former Peace Corps volunteer, and a member of a mixed-race family.

My "triangular" persona enables me to take an alternative perspective on issues. The medical school is a hub for creative thinking and an entrepreneurial community. I wish to take part in the translation of differences and support of evidence-based solutions to health issues.

I believe that to fulfill my duty, I must be willing to try to comprehend others. My capacity to stand in two places, ears and heart open, enable dialogue, and give my perspective from a place of collaborative appreciation, will be my most outstanding contribution to the medical school community. In a silo, growth cannot take place. It starts with acknowledging the significance of all identities while learning from and working with others.

Additional FAQs – Medical School Diversity Essay

Do all medical schools require a diversity essay, why is diversity good in medical school, you're no longer alone on your journey to becoming a physician.

Medical School Diversity Essay Examples and Tips

Cracking Med School Admissions

Diversity secondary essay questions are a common prompt in secondary medical school applications. Diversity essays are extremely open-ended and broad. Many premedical students struggle with this secondary essay prompt because it is broad. Each year, our Cracking Med School Admissions team receives hundreds of questions from applicants about how to write about diversity in your secondary essays? Our Cracking Med School Admissions team thinks you can use the broad nature of diversity essay prompts to your advantage! Use your response to your diversity essays as a way to discuss an aspect of your application you have not been able to elaborate on already in your other secondary essays for that specific school. Additionally, you can use diversity secondary essays to augment your awesomeness to admissions officers through discussing your passions in medicine and conveying your leadership experiences! If you want to read medical school diversity essay examples , skip down below!

This diversity essay medical school essay blog post will cover:

What are medical school diversity essays?
Sample diversity essay prompts from various medical schools
Tips on how to write about diversity in your secondary essays
FAQs about medical school diversity essays
* Medical school diversity essay examples*

What are Medical School Diversity Essays?

Medical school diversity essays are questions on medical school secondary applications that applicants write as part of the medical school application process. Medical schools value diversity in their student bodies because it leads to a more dynamic learning environment where students can learn from each other and benefit from diverse perspectives and experiences. Additionally, medical schools want to recruit students who aspire to improve healthcare in different ways. For examples, some applicants’ strengths lie in research. Other applicants thrive in creating public health programs to improve community health. Still other applicants are interested in narrative medicine and want to inspire others through future books they write about the human condition.

Diversity essays provide an opportunity for applicants to showcase their unique personal experiences, cultural background, educational experiences, extra-curricular activities, and perspectives. Applicants can express how they will contribute to the diversity of the medical school community.

As stated earlier, diversity essays are broad. Applicants are asked to describe how their culture background, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or any other characteristic that defines them has shaped their life experiences and perspective.

Topics you can discuss on your medical school diversity essay include:

Personal background – ethnicity, socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion
Perspectives from your cultural background
Family background and life circumstances with regards to upbringing
Adversity and challenges
Healthcare experiences that reflect your motivation to pursue a career in medicine
Unique non-healthcare passions and activities
Courses that inspired you
Majors and minors in college
Summer internships
Gap year activities
Post-graduate degrees
Personal qualities, including leadership skills and your personal strengths

Remember that secondary application essays should complement your primary application essays.

Medical School Diversity Essay Prompts

Diversity secondary essay questions may be phrased in a multitude of ways. Diversity essays have a wide range of character limit; some medical schools only allow 1,000 characters while other medical schools have no word limit. Additionally, some diversity secondary prompts are optional while other diversity secondary prompts are mandatory.

To better understand what diversity essays are and how broad they can be, let’s take a look a sample medical school diversity essay prompts.

Harvard Medical School Diversity Essay Prompt

If there is an important aspect of your personal background or identity, not addressed elsewhere in the application, that you would like to share with the Committee, we invite you to do so here. Many applicants will not need to answer this question. Examples might include significant challenges in access to education, unusual socioeconomic factors, identification with a minority culture, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity. Briefly explain how such factors have influenced your motivation for a career in medicine.

As listed in the Harvard Medical School prompt, you can write about:

Demographic variables, such as ethnic, racial, social, gender, religious, etc. diversity that have substantially shaped your life or your passion for medicine
Personal circumstances/hardships that have shaped your growth
A specific passion that you have cultivated and pursued over time (for example, sexual health, LGBTQ advocacy, etc.) You should further write about how this passion/activity that you have pursued has allowed you to develop qualities that you believe contribute to your individual diversity.

Note: You basically can write about anything.

In essence, these diversity secondary essay questions are asking you how your unique qualities/experiences will serve their medical community AND will help make you an excellent physician.

Let’s take a look and examine other medical school secondary essay prompts:

Yale School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Yale School of Medicine values diversity in all its forms. How will your background and experiences contribute to this important focus of our institution and inform your future role as a physician?

Read a Yale medical school diversity essay example below!

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Optional: The (Johns Hopkins) Admissions Committee values hearing about each candidate for admission, including what qualities the candidate might bring to the School of Medicine if admitted. If you feel there is information not already addressed in the application that will enable the Committee to know more about you and this has influenced your desire to be a physician, feel free to write a brief statement in the space below. You may address any subject you wish, such as being a first generation college student, or being a part of a minority group (whether because of your sexual orientation, religion, economic status, gender identity, ethnicity) or being the child of undocumented immigrants or being undocumented yourself, etc. Please note that this question is optional and that you will not be penalized should you choose not to answer it.

A special point to notice here: This essay is optional. See our thoughts below in the FAQ section as to whether you should write this essay or not. Also, read an example Johns Hopkins diversity essay below!

And here are even more secondary essay prompts from various schools….

Baylor College of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Indicate any special experiences, unusual factors or other information you feel would be helpful in evaluating you, including, but not limited to, education, employment, extracurricular activities, prevailing over adversity. You may expand upon but not repeat TMDSAS or AMCAS application information. This section is mandatory. Please make sure you submit an essay or your application will not be reviewed by the committee.

Drexel University College of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

What else do you feel is important for us to know about you? You can use this space to highlight something not addressed in your application, including new experiences not in your AMCAS application. You can also talk about how COVID -19 impacted you. For example, it may have caused disruptions or changes in your plans. If there is something you would like to share regarding how this event impacted you, share that information here.

Duke University School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Tell us more about who you are. You may provide additional information that expands your self-identity where gender identification, racial and/or ethnic self description, geographic origin, socioeconomic, academic, and/or other characteristics that define who you are as you contemplate a career that will interface with people who are similar AND dissimilar to you. You will have the opportunity below to tell us how you wish to be addressed, recognized and treated.
Optional: In addition to the broad categorization of race, ethnicity, geographic origin, socioeconomic status as provided through your AMCAS application, you may use the text box below to provide additional clarifying information that may reflect the impact of any of these parameters on your development thus far as well as the impact that these may have had on your path to a career in medicine and your plans for the future.
No word limit & Optional: Please let us know of any additional information that you would like us to consider while reviewing your application.

Special note: Duke University School of Medicine has THREE diversity essays. Applicants can really leverage this an opportunity to give a holistic and varied view about themselves!

Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Please share with us something about yourself that is not addressed elsewhere in your application and which could be helpful to the Admissions Committee as we review your file.

Georgetown University School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Is there any further information that you would like the Committee on Admissions to be aware of when reviewing your file that you were not able to notate in another section of this or the AMCAS Application?

George Washington University School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

What makes you a unique individual? What challenges have you faced? How will these factors help you contribute to the diversity of the student body at GW?

Stanford University School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

The (Stanford) Committee on Admissions regards the diversity (broadly defined) of an entering class as an important factor in serving the educational mission of the school. The Committee on Admissions strongly encourages you to share unique, personally important and/or challenging factors in your background which may include such discussions as the quality of your early education, gender, sexual orientation, any physical challenges, and life or work experiences. Please describe how these factors have influenced your goals and preparation for a career in medicine and may help you to uniquely contribute to the Stanford learning environment.
Optional: Please include anything else that will help us understand better how you may uniquely contribute to Stanford Medicine?

Note: Stanford University School of Medicine has multiple essays where you can write about your “diverse” experiences. Other than Stanford secondary essay questions about how you want to take advantage of Stanford’s curriculum, the rest of the Stanford University School of Medicine essay prompts are very open-ended!

The Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

How will your unique attributes (e.g., cultural or socioeconomic background, lifestyle, work experiences) add to the overall diversity of the Alpert Medical School community?

Tufts University School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Do you consider yourself a person who would contribute to the diversity of the student body of Tufts University School of Medicine ?

Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Feinberg’s mission is to train future leaders in medicine who will serve their patients, communities and society. Describe one specific interest in medicine and how FSM, located in Chicago which is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country, will help you achieve this professional goal
The Feinberg School of Medicine values diversity as a measure of excellence. We define diversity as the totality of the characteristics and experiences of our students. We believe that a diverse student body improves the educational environment and the ability of our graduates to serve an increasingly diverse patient population. Narrative Descriptions: Everyone has their own narrative. Please provide more detail about how your experiences would enrich the Northwestern community.

Note: Northwestern University has TWO diversity essays! In the first essay prompt, your essay topic should be more related to healthcare and medicine. But, in the second prompt, you can write about anything!

Washington University School of Medicine Secondary Application Diversity Essay Prompt

Optional: Is there anything else you would like to share with the Committee on Admissions?

How to Write About Diversity in Your Secondary Essays

Our goal at Cracking Med School Admissions when helping students strategize and edit their secondary application essays is to always help students stand out. Yes, that means, we want students to stand out in every single essay, including this open-ended diversity essay question.

It is incredibly important to do THREE THINGS when it comes to your diversity essays:

1. Include anecdotes.

You want to make sure that you show your readers how specific experiences and demographic factors have shaped you as an individual, rather than tell them.

Examples of anecdotes include:

Demographics – if you are going to discuss something from your demographic background, don’t just say where you are from. SHOW your culture through anecodotes and stories. For examples, premedical students in the past have talked about cooking a cultural meal with their grandparents. Other medical school applicants have talked about a grandparent’s or parent’s experience with the American healthcare systems.
Challenges – Give specific instances where you faced a challenge. What was the challenge? How did you overcome the challenge?
Patient care stories – Give anecodotes about memorable patient experiences. What were your interactions with a patient? Why was the patient in the hospital? What happened? What are your reflections about the human experience and human condition?
Leadership – give a specific challenge you faced as a leader or a specific event that you organized. Alternatively, you can talk about a time when you led a team or founded an organization / initiatives.

2. Connect your stories to medicine.

How will your experiences help you become a better doctor? That is the question that is relevant to almost every single prompt regardless of if it is explicitly worded as such or not. You absolutely must discuss how your past experiences and the qualities you have cultivated through these experiences will help you in medicine. For example, you can illustrate how your experiences with patient advocacy or within medical teams will help you as a future doctor; it is a good idea to include particularly challenging patient encounters and how you grew from such experiences. You should further write about leadership, teamwork, resilience, and other qualities learned from your experiences—make the explicit connection to how you will use these qualities as a doctor.

3. Tailor your diversity essays TO EACH MEDICAL SCHOOL.

Connect your stories and experiences to what you will do at the medical school. You can talk about how you want to do research with a specific professor or work with a specific club to pioneer a new initiative. Talk about how your presence at the medical school will enhance the community.

Different schools have different strengths. You must do your research on each school that you are applying to, and try to connect your experiences to the schools’ strengths.

Moreover, different schools have different needs. If there is a specific problem in the regional community that the school belongs to that you feel you are poised to solve (for example, homeless health, refugee health, etc.), you can further tailor your essay to a medical school by making that connection.

Be creative to show EACH INDIVIDUAL medical school that you would be a standout contributor to their community.

Frequently Asked Questions about Diversity Secondaries

We want to share with you frequently asked questions about diversity secondaries. Our responses below are here to help you strategize your secondary essay topics.

Again, our goal is to help you STAND OUT in every single part of your application, including your secondary applications!

Remember, the point of the diversity essay is to help you discuss the strengths of your application. Whatever you write should complement the other responses and other essays in each school’s secondary application. Each applicant will have his or her own unique strengths, stories, and experiences, so if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact Dr. Mediratta and Dr. Rizal , who literally read thousands of secondary essays each year!

What is the biggest mistake you’ve seen on diversity essays?

This is our biggest advice for medical school diversity essays:

Applicants often think that they have to write about their personal background, specifically culture, ethnicity, race, and/or socioeconomic status. While there are some secondary applications that ask for specifically those topics, most diversity essay prompts are broad. We often encourage students to talk about other extra-curricular activities and passions UNLESS they their cultural background plays a significant role in their pursuit towards a career in medicine.

You can think about the following questions:

What will you bring to the medical school class?
How will you change healthcare (and how have you already started on that journey)?
What are your strengths as a person?

Can the topic of my secondary essay be the same as topics I wrote about in my primary application personal statement?

Yes! Absolutely! However, we would suggest that you write about a different angle.

For example, if in your primary application personal statement you talked about your research and what you did in your research, in your diversity essay medical school, talk about a challenge you faced in your research project. Or, talk about a different study or research lab your were involved with. Finally, premeds may write about teaching and mentoring younger individuals in their labs, again, to give a different angle in their diversity essays for medical school.

Can I “recycle” or “reuse” my diversity essay response for multiple schools?

Yes! What we typically advise students is to use most of the essay as a template or starting point. And then, tweak the essay as necessary based on the number of words or characters available. If applicable, you can tailor the diversity essay towards each school.

Many students will have 2-3 “diversity essay medical school topics and essays” that they draw from. And, depending on the medical school and other prompts, they will pick and choose which essay to use.

Can I talk about a challenge in my diversity essay?

Definitely. Make sure you did not use this essay for another essays like a “challenge” prompt for that specific school’s secondary. Discuss how overcoming the challenge has helped you grow, and what you will contribute to the medical school student body.

Can I talk about how COVID-19 impacted me and my application in my diversity essay?

Typically, talking about COVID-19 challenges isn’t the strongest topic for the diversity essay. But, if you faced a challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic and took action to improve society or healthcare, then you can definitely use those experiences! Also, another secondary application strategy to consider: make sure there is not another prompt that allows you to talk about COVID.

You can read about an ICU expererience during COVID down below in our diversity secondary essay examples!

Medical School Diversity Essay Examples

You can include multiple experiences in one diversity secondary essay, but make sure that your transitions are seamless. Furthermore, in such essays, you want to pay attention to your paragraph breaks to further communicate your strong attributes and diverse experiences with maximum impact. Remember—make it as easy as possible for your reader to understand your writing and to visualize you as a strong physician.

Below are 2 medical school diversity essay examples answers from a student who then received an interview at both Yale University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Yale Medical School Diversity Essay Example

Prompt: Yale School of Medicine values diversity in all its forms. How will your background and experiences contribute to this important focus of our institution and inform your future role as a physician?

When I first arrived at UPenn, I was made acutely aware of an issue that plagued our campus community: an extensive culture of sexual assault. I felt compelled to act in opposition. I joined Abuse and Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP) in my first semester and later became a Sexual Assault Counselor.

A lesson I learned as Co-Chair of ASAP is that leaders must critically examine their communities to meet unfulfilled needs. I transformed our programming to better serve survivors with an intersectional lens. I held a workshop at UPenn with a community leader from the Movement for Black Lives and discussed how racial justice must inform our advocacy. This focus was integrated into our Take Back the Night advocacy event, as we spoke at length about how to serve the needs of black and trans survivors. I piloted the expansion of this event to being held with eight other schools.

Moreover, the Title IX reporting process at UPenn is quite complex and not readily accessible. Given the number of sexual trauma survivors at our university, I worked to clarify this process for our student community by directing an educational campaign, to be released in the next academic year. I played the leading role in a meeting with the Title IX Coordinator and Associate Vice President for Equity, as well as Directors and Associate Directors from various UPenn Centers—we discussed my vision for the project and dove into specifics of the campaign. I enjoyed collaborating with individuals who direct initiatives and policy changes for the safety of our campus community of 25,000 students.

As a physician, I will continue to lead the movement to build a world free of sexual violence and gender inequity. I strive to integrate clinics that offer primary, psychiatric, and gynecological care for sexual trauma survivors into national healthcare. These clinics will also offer forensic examinations led by Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners (SAFE), as well as social and legal support. By providing a centralized location for all of the care needs of survivors, I want to limit the difficulties of navigating the healthcare system often faced by this vulnerable population. I would love to work with Dr. Jubanyik to drive this initiative forward and promote health equity for survivors at Yale. Furthermore, statewide tracking of SAFE centers is inconsistent. I want to generate a national database to consolidate these programs and help survivors better access them. I would love to extend my advocacy for survivors as a member of the student group, Prenatal Partners, to be able to advocate for a trauma-informed approach to medical care for expectant mothers.

As a medical student and physician, I am eager to leverage my skill in storytelling to inform and strengthen healthcare. I believe that compelling stories can be important catalysts for change, particularly in the context of my aspirations to serve women and survivors. I would love to work with Dr. Reisman to write a journalistic novel on women’s sexuality and resilience deriving from my longitudinal patient relationships.

Johns Hopkins Medical School Diversity Essay Example

Optional: The Admissions Committee values hearing about each candidate for admission, including what qualities the candidate might bring to the School of Medicine if admitted. If you feel there is information not already addressed in the application that will enable the Committee to know more about you and this has influenced your desire to be a physician, feel free to write a brief statement in the space below. You may address any subject you wish, such as being a first generation college student, or being a part of a minority group (whether because of your sexual orientation, religion, economic status, gender identity, ethnicity) or being the child of undocumented immigrants or being undocumented yourself, etc. Please note that this question is optional and that you will not be penalized should you choose not to answer it. 2500 characters

As a Neuro/COVID-19 ICU clinical volunteer operating at the center of the pandemic crisis, I encouraged patients who were suffering the worst of COVID-19 symptoms through our patient call bell system.

In public health emergencies, I understand how patients can feel detached from and misunderstood by their healthcare systems, causing them to refuse treatments or preventive measures like vaccines. I once had a conversation with an ICU patient who was approaching discharge and refusing to wear a mask. My team respectfully asked questions and listened to his supplication of answers and reasoning. I knew that convincing someone to let go of an entrenched opinion would be difficult. But I tried as hard as I could and felt him soften in conversation. He ultimately wore his mask. I left this interaction with a better understanding of how to approach and care for an individual with a radically different perspective from my own.

I take seriously my responsibility to listen carefully to my patient’s concerns and assure them that recommended measures are medically sound. To promote patient trust in medicine and to address health disparities exacerbated by the pandemic, I will work to leverage community partnerships, as I have done as an advocate for survivors. I will listen to what specific communities need and tailor health care delivery accordingly.

Throughout the coronavirus surge, I was able to have a more hands-on role with neurological care in the ICU. After caring for an unconscious patient with moyamoya disease and two ischemic strokes in the Neuro/COVID-19 ICU and learning of her poor prognosis from her physician, I pored through the medical literature. I hoped that studies would reveal something different. The patient’s antiplatelet therapy was proving ineffective. Yet surgery was not a safe option as her unstable moyamoya carried greater postoperative ischemic complication risk. I struggled, unable to find an alternative. Thereafter, I wrote “Between you and me,” excerpted below.

Her eyes are closed, a tube connecting her to her life.

They are draining her cerebrospinal fluid and it should

be yellow. But it’s pink. Like watermelon juice.

The act of writing brought me peace and helped me come to terms with my patient’s suffering.

Nikita’s work in the ICU was featured in U.S. News , “ What Premeds Can Learn in Intensive Care Units ”

We hope this blog post was a great starting point in giving you ideas for how to write a medical school diversity essay.

Check out our other helpful resources:

COVID-19 Secondary Essay Prompts
How to Write “Why This Medical School?” Secondary Essays
Medical School Secondary Essay Editing

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Medical School Secondary Essays: The Complete Guide 2024 (Examples Included)

Proven strategies to write your diversity, challenge, “why us,” gap year, “anything else you’d like us to know,” leadership, and covid medical school secondary essays.

Two medical school applicants sit sharing their secondary essay drafts with each other in their open notebooks.

(Note: This article can also be found in our free, 102-page comprehensive guide to medical school applications, Get Into Medical School: 6 Practical Lessons to Stand Out and Earn Your White Coat . )

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: the medical school diversity essay, part 3: the medical school adversity essay, part 4: the medical school “why us” essay, part 5: the medical school gap year essay, part 6: the medical school leadership essay, part 7: the medical school “anything else you’d like us to know” essay, part 8: the medical school covid essay, appendix: frequently asked questions.

As a medical school applicant, you’ve worked hard on your submitting the best AMCAS application you can. You’ve written a compelling medical school personal statement , a detailed AMCAS Work and Activities section , and more. Now med schools are sending you school-specific secondary applications that require you to write additional essays?

Given that you’ll need to submit multiple essays for most med schools you’ve applied to, the secondary essay writing process can be incredibly grueling, even more so than completing your primary application.

While secondary essay prompts vary in length and topic, there are two pieces of good news:

Secondary essays are typically shorter than your personal statement.

Some topics come up over and over and over again.

You can use this second fact to your advantage by recycling certain “core essays” with a few modifications for multiple schools. Moreover, you can pre-write recurring essays using our medical school secondary essay prompts database .

( WARNING: Make sure to always answer each school's specific prompt, especially when secondary application fatigue inevitably kicks in. In addition, double check that you've referred to the correct medical schools' names in your secondaries. For example, if you're writing an essay for Tufts, be careful not to mistakenly leave in “Emory” if you're recycling your Emory essay for Tufts.)

In our nearly 20 years of experience working with medical school applicants, the following six essays—with varying prompts—come up most often:

Diversity essay

Challenge essay (e.g., “Describe a significant challenge you overcame and what you learned from it.”)

“Why us?” essay (e.g., “Why do you hope to attend [our school]?”)

Gap year essay

Leadership essay

“Anything else you’d like us to know?” essay

Rather than list a bunch of general tips on how to write your secondary application essays, in this guide we’ll provide some background for each essay topic before listing and challenging some common misconceptions that limit students’ thinking. Then we’ll offer fresh ways to write each one, as well as strong samples from students who got into prestigious medical schools.

Struggling to write your med school application essays?

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Part 2: The medical school diversity essay

Example diversity essay prompts.

Example 1: “We seek to train physicians who can connect with diverse patient populations with whom they may not share a similar background. Tell us about an experience that has broadened your own worldview or enhanced your ability to understand those unlike yourself and what you learned from it.” ( Wake Forest School of Medicine )

Example 2: “ The Georgetown University School of Medicine (GUSOM) strives to ensure that its students become respectful physicians, with cultural humility, who embrace all dimensions of caring for the whole person. With our Jesuit values of Cura Personalis, People for Others, and Community in Diversity, we are steadfast in our commitment to racial justice and to addressing the health inequities exacerbated by the recent pandemic. Please describe how your values, life experiences, and your identity will contribute to these GUSOM priorities.” ( Georgetown University School of Medicine )

Diversity essay background

Medical schools love advertising the diversity of their student bodies through their class profile statistics, brochures, and pictures of smiling students from various backgrounds. Is this just for show?

Unlikely. Medicine—and other healthcare fields—are most effectively practiced when clinicians are able to understand and respect whomever is seeking service, regardless of their backgrounds. Thus, having a diverse student body creates a stimulating learning environment that incorporates multiple perspectives.

Before we get into misconceptions about the diversity essay, let’s clarify the meaning of “cultural competency” by first offering the NIH’s definition : “Deliver[ing] services that are respectful of and responsive to the health beliefs, practices and cultural and linguistic needs of diverse patients."

In other words, cultural competency refers to:

The awareness that patients have diverse health beliefs, practices, and needs

The effort and willingness to understand these differences

The effort and willingness to incorporate these differences to provide effective care that fits patients' contexts

On the other hand, cultural competency does not mean:

Believing you know everything about a particular group of people—including your own—and therefore knowing exactly how to treat them

Having to learn everything about a particular group of people before you are able to effectively treat them

Diversity essay misconception 1: “I don’t come from a minority background, so I have nothing to write about.”

Let’s clear this up right away: your diversity essay does not have to be about your or others’ ethnocultural or socioeconomic backgrounds. Moving past this notion will expand your thinking and options for choosing a compelling topic many fold.

Diversity can refer to anything that makes you unique or interesting, including:

Your great qualities (e.g., being a social connector)

Unique experiences (e.g., working as a certified scuba diving instructor)

A commitment to service

Visions and goals (e.g., using artificial intelligence to improve healthcare).

Think about why diversity is interesting in the first place: everyone is different. If all people came to medicine from a certain ethnic minority or low socioeconomic background, that wouldn’t be so interesting, would it?

If you do want to focus on ethnocultural and socioeconomic diversity, strong essay topics include:

Extracurricular activities , pursuits, or organizations committed to diversity and social justice issues

Health disparities

Demonstration of multicultural competence during patient interactions

Navigating your own multicultural identity

Diversity essay misconception 2: “I come from an ethnic minority background that’s already well represented in medicine, so I have nothing unique to share.”

We hear this most often from students of various Asian backgrounds who feel their demographic is so well represented in medicine that they cannot make a case for their uniqueness as a medical school applicant.

However, given Asia's many countries, and the races, cultures, subcultures, languages, religions, and philosophies across and within countries, there's probably a ton you could write about. Although you may feel your background is common in medicine, don’t sell yourself short.

Possible topics include:

(If you’re an immigrant) Your immigration and assimilation experience

(If you’re not an immigrant but your parents immigrated to the U.S.) A thoughtful account about the values/perspectives/goals your parents tried to instill in you, how they may have clashed with your values growing up in a bicultural environment, and how you resolved these differences

Different cultural views on healthcare and how both can be valuable for treating patients

Regardless of the topic you choose, as with all essays, make sure to link it back to your identity and experience by answering these questions:

How did you feel?

What qualities did you demonstrate?

What did you learn?

What do you have yet to learn?

How do you plan to apply these lessons throughout your education and career?

Diversity essay misconception 3: “The more I write the words ‘diversity,’ ‘cultural/multicultural,’ and ‘underserved,’ the more admissions committees will be impressed by my cultural sensitivity/awareness/competence.”

Quite the opposite. These terms, especially when used repeatedly or inappropriately, can be cliché and come off as dishonest. The best essays are those that are written honestly about who you are and your actual perspectives and interactions with diverse individuals.

Medical school diversity essay example

There are many things a girl could be self-conscious about growing up, such as facial hair, body odor, or weight gain. Growing up with a few extra pounds than my peers, I was usually chosen last for team sports and struggled to run a 10-minute mile during P.E. classes. As I started to despise school athletics, I turned towards other hobbies, such as cooking and Armenian dance, which helped me start anew with a healthier lifestyle. Since then, I have channeled my passions for nutrition and exercise into my volunteering activities, such as leading culinary workshops for low-income residents of Los Angeles, organizing community farmer’s markets, or conducting dance sessions with elderly patients. I appreciate not only being able to bring together a range of people, varying in age, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity, but also helping instill a sense of confidence and excitement that comes with making better lifestyle decisions. I have enjoyed encouraging kids in the inner city to combat similar issues of weight gain and low self-esteem through after-school gardening and physical activity lessons. Now, I hope to share my love for culinary nutrition and fitness with fellow medical students at UCLA. As students, we can become better physicians by passing on health and nutrition information to future patients, improving quality of life for ourselves and others.

Part 3: The medical school adversity essay

Example adversity essay prompts.

Example 1: “Share with us a difficult or challenging situation you have encountered and how you dealt with it. In your response, identify both the coping skills you called upon to resolve the dilemma, and the support person(s) from whom you sought advice.” (University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine)

Example 2: “Tell us about a challenging problem you faced and how you resolved it. Include how the experience contributed to the person you are today.” ( University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine )

Adversity essay background

Medical school admissions committees ask about adversity simply to understand how you respond to difficult situations. They want to see that you have the maturity, resilience, and capacity for growth to do well in med school.

In other words, medical schools are not trying to start a competition to determine which students have experienced the greatest adversity in their lifetimes.

Rather, they want to know how you:

Manage stress

Attempt to resolve issues

Reflect on challenges

Apply learned lessons in your life

Adversity essay misconception 1: “Nothing really bad has ever happened to me. Neither my family members nor I have suffered a serious illness or death. I also did not overcome poverty or flee to America as a political refugee, etc.”

Let’s say it again: this is not a competition, so it’s perfectly fine if you haven’t experienced an extreme challenge in your life. If you have, you’ll have an obvious topic to discuss, but a significant difficulty alone doesn’t make a great essay.

There are multiple ways to approach adversity essay prompts, including writing about:

Relatable life events (e.g., letting your best friend down, facing major criticism, making new friends after a big move)

Situations beyond your control (e.g., your parents’ divorce, a friend’s drug use).

Adversity essay misconception 2: “Fine. I was able to identify some challenges I’ve faced in life. It still doesn’t matter because none of them are significant enough!”

We get it. Medical school admission is a high stakes process, and you want to stand out in every part of your application.

Remember, however, that the best essays aren’t necessarily the ones with the greatest challenges or sob stories. It's your thoughtfulness and handling of those challenges that will set you apart.

To make this process easier, we ask students to create the following list of 3–4 challenges to help them choose a strong topic. Below we’ve also included a common topic as an example:

Challenge: Difficult academic adjustment from high school to college with corresponding drop in confidence and drive, as well as questioning fitness for medicine

Response: Acknowledged poor study habits and corrected them, humbly asked for help from faculty and classmates

Result: Sustained improvement in study habits and grades, developed mentorships with professors

Lesson: No shame in asking for guidance and help, better to strengthen weakness than rely on false confidence

Once you’ve listed some challenges and their aftermath, choose the one that demonstrates the greatest maturity, thoughtfulness, and growth. Transparency about your hardships and honesty about your growth help to write great essays. It’s also more than acceptable to discuss how you’re still a work in progress and mention the areas you’d like to continue improving on.

Medical school adversity essay example

I named my one-year-old beagle Fitch, after my favorite clothing store. That fact recurred through my mind as I shouted her name for hours at the break of dawn, wondering how I left the door open and where she could have gone. Was she attacked by roaming bands of coyotes? Killed in a hit-and-run? Lost in the desert mountains? I had raised and taken care of Fitch for years, and so I believed I was solely responsible for her loss and her safe return. Yet, my mother admonished me to not let guilt interfere with my judgments and to reach out for help. Therefore, I enlisted the support of the community, including friends, fellow dog owners, and neighbors, some of whom I had never met before, to find my pudgy, spotted beagle.

Over the next two days, this dedicated group helped me create flyers to post in nearby parks, organize teams for day and night searches, and send neighborhood-wide emails. It’s hard to be prepared for difficult situations like these, so between the sleepless nights and uneventful status updates, I found myself learning to be calm and patient like my neighbors, Bill and Susanna, encouraged me to be. Finally, on the third day, a biker found Fitch behind a dumpster, shivering beneath a pile of debris and branches. Although she was eventually safe, I would not be able to hold and feed her to this day had I not knocked on that first neighbor’s door, opening me up to both the physical and mental strength of the surrounding community.

Example “Why us?” essay prompts

Example 1: “What makes LLUSM particularly attractive to you?” (Loma Linda University School of Medicine)

Example 2: “Why have you chosen to apply to the Georgetown University School of Medicine and how do you think your education at Georgetown will prepare you to become a physician for the future?” ( Georgetown University School of Medicine )

“Why us?” essay background

These are everyone’s favorite prompts (we wish our sarcasm could jump through the screen).

The first step to writing an effective “Why us?” essay is to restrain yourself from writing about how great their medical school is or where it's located.

Glad that’s out of the way. Now consider why admissions committees want you to answer this question. After all, they know you’re applying to many other schools and that your GPA and MCAT scores are at least reasonably close to their admission averages.

(Suggested reading: How Many Medical Schools Should I Apply To? Which Ones? and Average GPA and MCAT Score for Every Medical School )

Admissions committees read thousands of essays annually and want to know that you’ve considered them for reasons beyond the obvious (location, prestige, average GPA and MCAT, etc.).

By integrating your qualities, experiences, and aspirations with their specific mission, programs, and resources, you will have a unique opportunity to demonstrate "fit" in your application. Don’t take this for granted!

“Why us?” essay misconception 1: “I should just read a school’s mission statement and research available resources on their website, and then rewrite the same information in essay form.”

The vast majority of students approach the “Why us?” essay this way, so it won’t make your response seem very special.

We basically see the expanded version of the following essay 90+ percent of the time:

I want to go to [School Name] because of their wonderful [program name] and incredible [resources]. {Program] cultivates [attribute] that helps their students become great physicians. In addition, [resources] provide support to help students reach their potential.

You should be able to see how this essay says nothing about why YOU want to go to their school.

Moreover, medical schools already know about all of the programs and resources they offer, so you wouldn’t be providing much value through writing solely about those offerings.

The better approach to this essay would be to look through schools’ websites to find programs and resources that actually interest you and to identify what each school keeps boasting about (e.g., perhaps they mention diversity or early clinical experience multiple times on their homepage). Then consider:

How YOUR experiences fit with their offerings

What YOU could contribute

How YOU would uniquely benefit from their program

For example, if a school focuses a lot on community service and you have similar experiences, mention that. In addition, let the school know how you want to further focus your skills while there. On the other hand, if you have a more research heavy background and are applying to the same school, you could either focus on research or discuss how community service will make you a more well-rounded physician. The more specific you can be, the better.

“Why us?” essay misconception 2: “There’s no other way to find out information about a medical school than by reading their site.”

Looking at a school’s website and demonstrating fit is certainly a tried-and-true approach to answering "Why us?" essay prompts, but it isn’t the only one.

To really impress admissions committees, you could integrate information from current students or recent alumni into your response. Ask these individuals whether they would be willing to share their experiences attending a particular school, and also whether you would be a good fit there given your background and goals.

How do you find these people? The easiest people to contact are those you know personally or through a mutual acquaintance. Otherwise, you could contact a school’s administrative staff and ask whether they could connect you to a current student. While this requires additional work, it will be well worth it for your top school preferences.

If you have to contact a stranger, use the following email template:

Dear [Student Name],

I hope this email finds you well. My name is [Your Name}, and I am currently completing my med school applications. I’m especially interested in attending [School Name] and am therefore hoping to get some more information about the program. [School Name]'s admissions committee gave me your email address as someone who could help me out.

I'd really appreciate it if you would spare 15-20 minutes to answer 3-5 quick questions in the upcoming days. If so, please let me know some days and times that are most convenient for you, your time zone, and the best number to reach you. I’ll do my best to accommodate.

Thanks for your time and consideration. Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

[Your Name]

If you have the opportunity to take a campus tour, you should also make it a priority to meet with students and faculty (the latter may require arranging an appointment in advance). Even a brief conversation might generate some interesting insights that you can refer back to in your secondary essays.

Medical school “Why us?” essay example

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” Throughout my undergrad years, I’ve found that working hard to involve myself with others and their unique perspectives is one of the most productive ways in which I can learn. For example, I used to believe that illnesses were just a set of tangible symptoms that resulted solely from maladaptive genes. However, after working closely with families in Boston's inner city, I have come to realize how racial, physical, and social factors, such as a lack of access to fresh produce or primary health services, can influence the likelihood of disease. As I obtained a broader understanding of the many factors that contribute to health, I find myself asking new questions and wanting to learn more. How can we properly assess a community’s needs and design appropriate solutions? How can an understanding of sociocultural factors be used to heal current patients and prevent new ones?

I believe that the answers to these questions and others will come from the Community Health Program at the University of Washington (UW). The year-round lecture series on topics, such as “Health Disparities: An Unequal World's Biggest Challenge,” will allow me to engage closely with faculty and students to work towards developing holistic community-based solutions. Furthermore, the UW PEERS clinic and Friends of UW provide an opportunity to work closely with urban Seattle neighborhoods similar to those I have worked with in Boston.

Having connected with a range of Boston families, varying in age, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity, I have improved my sense of self-awareness and cultural sensitivity, attributes I hope to continue developing with the surrounding Seattle community. I am confident that UW and the Community Health Program can further prepare me to be a physician who not only improves the lives of individual patients, but also addresses the needs of entire communities.

Example gap year essay prompts

Example 1: If you are not attending college during the upcoming academic year, what are your plans? ( Weill Cornell Medical College )

Example 2: Are you planning to matriculate into medical school immediately after completing your undergraduate education? If not, please explain what activities and/or careers you have pursued in the time between your college education and your application. ( Baylor College of Medicine )

Gap year essay background

Essay prompts that ask about gap years tend to be fairly straightforward. Given that the average age of med school matriculants is currently 24, these days, it’s more common than not for applicants to have taken one or more years off between undergrad and med school.

If that describes you, here’s how to think about your gap year essay: medical schools simply want to know what you’ve been up to since graduation and how those activities have prepared you to succeed in med school and beyond.

To approach this essay, begin with the factual. Here are the questions you should try to address in your gap year essay:

What was your goal in taking a gap year?

What did you do during your gap year? Or, if you haven’t taken it yet, what are your plans? Be specific in regard to dates, durations, jobs worked, places traveled to, etc.

How did your gap year experiences enhance your preparedness for medical school, your future skill set as a physician, and enrich your point of view about the world and/or the healthcare field? In other words, what did you learn that you’ll carry with you into medicine?

Bonus points if you can also connect your gap year experience to a specific program or feature of the medical school you're applying to.

Gap year essay misconception 1: “My gap year was unrelated to medicine so I have nothing to write about.”

If you’ve spent your gap year engaged in something directly related to medicine—say you worked in a research lab or were employed as an EMT —it’s easy to argue that you’re better prepared for med school now than when you were right out of college. But what if you’ve spent your gap year doing something else?

Even if your gap year experiences were non-medical in nature, you should still explain how they’ve helped you become a stronger med school candidate.

For example, say your main goal in taking a gap year was to improve your MCAT score, and you spent the year studying for the test while supporting yourself through a bartending job. Not only would you want to talk about much you were able to improve your score, you’d also want to discuss the skills you gained from bartending that are relevant to being a physician, such as social skills, teamwork, and adaptability.

Gap year essay misconception 2: “Writing about how I took a gap year to become a better candidate will make me look bad.”

Sometimes applicants who took a gap year to improve their medical school application profile in some way (a better MCAT score, more clinical experience, completing prerequisites, etc.) worry that talking about this in their essays will make them come off as an underqualified candidate.

This could not be further from the truth. In reality, so long as your time off has yielded meaningful results, medical schools will see your efforts as evidence that you’re resilient, mature, and working towards constant improvement. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t the ideal candidate straight out of college—what matters is that you’re ready for med school now.

Medical school gap year essay example

After graduating from college in May, I moved to Mexico City in order to attend a Spanish language school full-time and volunteer on the weekends at a low-income women’s health clinic. My goals in taking a gap year have been to improve my Spanish language skills to fluency while gaining experience in an international health setting.

I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and plan to return to the area after medical school. While I studied Spanish through the intermediate level in college, given that 45 percent of residents in the LA metropolitan area currently speak Spanish at home, I feel that advancing my Spanish skills beyond the conversational is critical to becoming the best healthcare provider that I can be to patients in LA.

Volunteering at the women’s clinic has also been illuminating. Not only has it accelerated my language acquisition, particularly in that it’s helped me pick up valuable Spanish medical vocabulary, it’s also opened my eyes to how many women do not have adequate access to prenatal care and routine preventative services like cervical cancer screenings. I know that these issues are not unique to Mexico; too many women face the same barriers in the United States.

As the result of my gap year experiences, I am committed to providing compassionate care for all patients, especially those without financial resources or English fluency, and plan to work towards creating greater healthcare access for disadvantaged patients. I look forward to the opportunity to begin this work as a volunteer at Columbia’s student-run free clinics for vulnerable populations in New York City.

Example leadership essay prompts

Example 1: “Describe your most unique leadership, entrepreneurial, or creative activity.” ( UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine )

Example 2: “The pillars of our curriculum are Leadership, Curiosity, and Commitment. Tell us about how you have embodied one or more of these attributes in your path to medicine thus far. In which of these areas do you see the most opportunity for personal growth and why?” (University of Colorado School of Medicine)

Example 3: Please describe your most meaningful leadership positions. ( Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons )

Leadership essay background

Medical schools are looking for students who are going to drive change in healthcare. They don’t want students who only want to be physicians; they want leaders, too.

Why is leadership important in a medical context? There are several problems that plague the United States healthcare system today, including rising healthcare costs, inequities in access to care, racial discrimination in medicine, and more. Change begins with doctors—think of Paul Farmer, Vivek Murthy, and Atul Gawande. All of these doctors are leaders in their respective fields and have created structural change in specific areas of medicine, whether it was through research, writing, or policy.

Medical schools want students who are going to make an effort to solve problems, like the aforementioned physicians. The leadership essay is an opportunity to show admissions committees that you have what it takes to make a difference by reflecting on your own experiences as a leader.

Over 90% of our students get into med school—the first time.

Leadership essay misconception #1: “i haven’t had any experiences as a leader.”.

One does not have to hold formal leadership positions to be considered a leader. For example, working as a teacher could be considered a leadership position even though a teacher might not have a formal title like “President” or “Treasurer.” Leadership could also entail taking care of a family elder or directing a group project. By reflecting on positions and scenarios in which you have made an impact and demonstrated initiative, you will likely find an example of your own leadership.

Of course, it is to your benefit if you have formal leadership positions—it means that someone thought you were worthy enough to be chosen for some sort of responsibility. But, if you don’t, that’s perfectly okay as well. The most important takeaway of this essay won’t necessarily be the status or level of the experience you describe—it’s what you learned and how you describe it.

Leadership essay misconception #2: “It is enough to just describe my leadership experiences and what I did in them.”

These essays are a place for you to reflect on your experiences as a leader and demonstrate what you’ve learned—simply describing your work isn’t going to cut it.

The idea in this essay is to show growth. If you are applying to medical school, it goes without saying that you have a lot more to learn before you can become a practicing physician. This is true not only when it comes to medical and scientific knowledge, but also when it comes to the personal qualities necessary to be an effective doctor.

In this essay, you will want to discuss your past growth as a leader—highlighting this experience is how you can indicate to medical schools that you will continue to learn and develop as a leader on your road to becoming a physician. Therefore, your essay must be reflective: to discuss past growth, you must deeply analyze your own experiences.

Medical school leadership essay example

During my sophomore year of college, I was selected as the Executive Director of BerkeleyShelter, an undergraduate volunteer organization that operates a shelter for students experiencing houselessness. The next year, I founded HealthGroup, a nonprofit focused on increasing access to affordable medications for individuals with chronic conditions. From these activities, my understanding of what it means to be a leader has begun to change. At HealthGroup, we tried to drive change by drafting legislation, working with elected representatives, and launching campaigns to raise awareness about issues surrounding medication prices. As the founder, I took it upon myself to come up with a plan for other staff and members to follow. I thought it was my job as a leader to direct the organization’s work. But, initially, HealthGroup struggled to create any sort of tangible change in prescription medicine prices; there were too many obstacles generated by pre-existing problems within the American healthcare system. In fact, one year after HealthGroups’s conception, not much had changed. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to fix the healthcare system overnight, but I didn’t expect my efforts to have yielded so little. Before my senior year of college, I began to wonder how I could change HealthGroup: what could I do differently as the leader of the organization? I came to recognize that I hadn’t really given others an opportunity to share their own ideas—I had just assumed that I needed to run the group by myself. Maybe, as a leader, it wasn’t my job to single-handedly decide the organization’s direction but, rather, to create an environment where others could share their thoughts. Today, HealthGroup has written several bills that have created significant changes in prescription drug access—the results of a 40-person collaboration.

Example “Anything else you’d like us to know?” essay prompts

Example 1: “Is there anything else you would like us to know?” ( Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons )

Example 2: “Please reflect on your primary application and share something not addressed elsewhere that would be helpful to the Admissions Committee as we review your file.” ( Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine )

“Anything else you’d like us to know?” essay background

The open-ended nature of “Anything else you’d like us to know?” essays tends to cause confusion for many applicants. Being invited to share anything you want can be intimidating!

The good news is that these types of essays allow you to highlight something about yourself that isn’t well represented elsewhere in your application, and you may even be able to use one of your pre-writes to do it.

There are two basic ways to approach “Anything else you’d like us to know?” essays:

You can submit one of the above pre-writes that hasn’t already been asked for. For example, say a medical school asks you for an “Anything else?” essay but not a “Why us?” essay. In that case, you could slot in your “Why us?” essay here. Just be sure the content of the essay doesn’t repeat details and anecdotes that you’ve already mentioned in another essay you’re submitting to that school.

You can write a completely new essay— if time permits you to do it well. For applicants who choose this route, common topics include strengths that haven’t gotten much attention yet, such as:

Extensive volunteer work

A strong research background

Other impressive achievements or skills

If you decide to write a new essay, take care not to treat the space like a catch-all by simply listing a bunch of skills or experiences, which will make your response sound like a résumé rather than an essay. Instead, give your essay focus by first deciding what you want to communicate to adcoms (for instance, your research bona fides), and then choose a few related examples that can together create a through line towards medicine. Despite the vagueness of the “Anything else?” prompt, your essay should still make an argument.

Even if you choose to write about a strength that isn’t explicitly related to medicine, such as an artistic or athletic achievement, you’ll still want to draw a connection to how it has made you a better medical school candidate.

“Anything else you’d like us to know?” essay misconception 1: “I must answer this prompt even though it’s optional.”

“Anything else you’d like us to know?” essays are often optional, which leaves many applicants struggling to determine whether they should answer the question at all. Some applicants erroneously believe that they must answer it, no matter what.

Our advice is to not force it. We generally consider these types of essays as falling somewhere between optional and required.

If you have something to add that would help further differentiate you as an applicant, you should do so, and if you’re able to do this using a pre-write, even better. However, if submitting an essay here would seem completely forced, or if you aren’t able to use a pre-write and don’t have the time to commit to writing a new essay that’s high quality, it probably isn’t worth it.

The bottom line is to always optimize for quality.

“Anything else you’d like us to know?” essay misconception 2: “Any unused pre-write will work here.”

In many cases, you will be able to take advantage of your unused pre-writes to answer “Anything else you’d like us to know?” prompts. However, before shuffling through your already-written essays, consider whether there indeed is something you want adcoms to know beyond what you've been able to communicate through AMCAS or secondaries. In other words, you should ask yourself if the pre-write you want to use adds anything meaningful to your candidacy.

You also don't have to necessarily use your “best” secondary here. Instead, consider which of your answers will best fit with the remainder of your application to that school, based on what you've already written for them and what they're looking for in candidates.

Medical school “Anything else you’d like us to know?” essay example

On the first Sunday of every month, I leave the house at 5:30 AM, coffee in hand, so I can be among a group of 20 volunteers who greet a new group of “bully breed” dogs ready to find loving families. Despite being sensitive, loyal pets, these dogs face pervasive negative stereotypes of aggression that make them among the most vulnerable to abuse and euthanasia. Fortunately, the Paws Please rescue culls bully breeds from high-kill shelters in the greater Houston area to give them a second chance at adoption.

I first became acquainted with Paws Please when my own family adopted an American Staffordshire Terrier, Mary, through them when I was 15. Mary quickly bounded her way into the center of our family, and as a teenager it deeply distressed me whenever I attempted to reconcile the joy she brought us with the fact that she’d come close to being put down. A year later, I decided that I would become a Paws Please volunteer in order to help save dogs like Mary. I began attending the monthly “homecoming day” when I was a junior in high school, and have continued this work through my four years at Rice.

On homecoming day, every new dog receives grooming, vaccines, microchips, and more. For six years, it’s brought me immense gratification to provide these initial moments of care, sometimes for the first time in a dog’s life. While many dogs come from troubling situations and arrive frightened or in need of medical attention, being part of the experienced volunteer team has taught me a great deal about taking stressful or even upsetting moments in stride, not to mention making effective use of teamwork to “process” large numbers of dogs efficiently but with thoroughness and compassion. In fact, as I’ve completed shadowing hours, medical volunteer work, and other clinical experiences as a premed, I’ve frequently found myself leaning on skills that I first developed through Paws Please, and I believe that these experiences will help shape my competence as a physician. I’m grateful for what my work in animal rescue has taught me and for the chance to make a difference in these dogs’ lives.

Example COVID essay prompts:

Example 1: “Describe how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted your pathway to medical school. Include any academic, personal, financial or professional barriers, as well as other relevant information.” ( UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine )

Example 2: “What have you done during the recent COVID-19 pandemic that will better prepare you to be a medical student and future physician?” (University of Miami Miller School of Medicine)

COVID essay background

During the 2020–2021 application cycle, many medical schools added COVID secondary essay prompts—usually optional—that allowed applicants to discuss how the pandemic had impacted their applications. In the 2021–2022 cycle, as the long-term effects of the pandemic became more evident, many of those formerly optional prompts became required of all applicants.

However, starting in 2023–2024, some schools have reverted to making their COVID prompts optional, and others have removed the prompts from their applications entirely.

Most COVID essay prompts can be divided into the following categories, with some med schools asking for a combination of the two:

Prompts that ask you to explain how the pandemic has negatively affected your medical school applications. In these essays, you can discuss disruptions to your education, test taking, and extracurriculars, plus any relevant personal circumstances that prevented you from presenting your best self to adcoms.

Prompts in which you’re tasked with reflecting more broadly on the pandemic, whether that’s in the realm of personal challenges you’ve faced or medicine in general.

COVID essay misconception 1: “I should make excuses for everything that’s less than ideal about my application.”

It’s likely that the pandemic has thrown plenty of obstacles in the way of your medical school applications, but that doesn’t mean they should all receive equal weight in your COVID essay.

Keep the following in mind, particularly when answering prompts that ask how COVID has affected your preparedness for medical school, and especially if those prompts are optional: the essays are meant to account for appreciable challenges to your application process, allowing you to be seen holistically. Med schools want to understand how you’ve been kept from putting your best foot forward.

“Appreciable challenges” will differ for everyone. For some applicants, they might include illness, the death of a loved one, or financial difficulties. For others, they might mean a lack of access to required extracurriculars, like shadowing or research, or fewer opportunities to take the MCAT.

Whatever circumstances affected you, we suggest trying not to lament relatively insignificant frustrations, like receiving a worse grade in a virtual class than you might have in person or having to complete an extracurricular online. If your essay reads like you’re looking for sympathy regarding something minor, you’ll risk seeming insensitive or out of touch.

That said, it’s fine to write that you found virtual learning challenging or that certain opportunities were unavailable to you. Pick the circumstances that affected you most, stick to the facts, and make sure to talk about how you adapted and what you learned, with the goal of showing that you’re still a strong applicant.

COVID essay misconception 2: “Nothing bad happened to me during the pandemic, so I have nothing to write.”

As we just mentioned, everyone’s pandemic experience has been different, and it’s certainly true that some people have been much more fortunate than others. Nevertheless, COVID has affected everyone, and to reiterate what we wrote in the adversity essay section earlier, it’s not a competition to see who’s suffered the most.

Even if you’ve been relatively fortunate during the pandemic, you can still write about your COVID experience if it’s required of you. Describe the ways that you were affected and what you did to meet those challenges. Again, the key is to remain factual rather than seem like you’re seeking pity for relatively minor inconveniences. It’s also okay to acknowledge that you’ve been fortunate.

Additionally, bear in mind that a COVID essay doesn’t inherently need to describe something difficult. If appropriate to the prompt, you can also discuss:

Unexpected events or silver linings of the pandemic

Ways you’ve changed, lessons you’ve learned, or perspectives you’ve gained

How the pandemic informed your views of medicine

COVID essay example

When my college campus closed in March 2020 due to COVID-19, just a few months before my graduation, the momentum I’d felt propelling me into the future was suddenly put on hold. Nevertheless, I recognized that I was fortunate in many ways, including as a student. Although transitioning to online classes was admittedly disorienting, I’d already completed the vast majority of my coursework in person, including all my premed requirements .

However, my post-graduation plans changed dramatically. I was set to take a gap year, during which time I’d planned to complete my medical school applications while working full-time in the genetics lab I’d been a part of for the past year. Because the lab shut down along with the rest of the university, my position was paused and then a few months later cancelled entirely. As a result of losing this additional research experience, I decided to delay applying to medical school for another year.

Looking for ways to stay busy and help others after graduating, I became a virtual volunteer with a domestic abuse crisis text hotline and an online MCAT tutor. After a few months of job searching, I also began working as an ER scribe in August 2020. Although an intense experience, it was deeply gratifying to work with patients during the pandemic, and my clinical knowledge increased rapidly.

In April 2021, I was invited to come back to the genetics lab, which had reopened months before with just a couple researchers. While I’m grateful that, improbably, I’m now able to complete the gap year I’d envisioned pre-pandemic, I also know that the unexpected experiences of the past 16 months have made me a better future physician and reinforced my certainty that medicine is a field I’m excited and proud to be a part of.

Final thoughts

Secondary applications will likely be one of the most time-consuming, stressful, and exhausting parts of your application process (the other is the medical school admission interview circuit if you’re fortunate to receive multiple invitations).

Nevertheless, you should give yourself some breaks to recharge so that you never rush submissions for the sake of rolling admissions and sacrifice quality.

Like every other piece of written material you submit, aim not only to answer the prompt, but also to give admissions committees deeper insights into what makes YOU so great for their school specifically.

About the Author

Dr. Shirag Shemmassian is the Founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting and one of the world's foremost experts on medical school admissions. For nearly 20 years, he and his team have helped thousands of students get into medical school using his exclusive approach.

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Below is a list of the most frequently asked questions (FAQ) we receive about medical school secondary essays that are not answered in this guide.

We encourage you to ask any other questions you have about secondary essays in the comments section below. We’ll make sure to answer your questions ASAP and add some of them to this FAQ section to make it easier for other students to find this information.

When should I expect to receive secondary applications?

Once you certify and submit your primary application and AMCAS receives your official transcripts, they begin verifying your application. You will receive your secondary applications after AMCAS completes verification and releases your primary applications to medical schools.

Because the verification process can take several weeks, it's important to submit your primary application as soon as possible after AMCAS opens submission on May 28. Students who submit AMCAS by early June can expect to begin receiving their secondary applications in late June to early July, positioning themselves to take full advantage of rolling admissions.

Note: Some DO schools send out secondaries as early as mid- to late-June.

(Further reading: The Ideal Medical School Application Timeline )

Will all medical schools send me a secondary application?

The majority will. However, whereas most schools send secondary applications without screening your primary application, some competitive schools will screen. You may experience a slight delay in receiving secondary applications from schools that screen.

How soon after receiving a secondary application should I aim to submit it?

As soon as possible, without sacrificing quality. While you should aim to submit secondaries within two weeks after receiving them, this is not required and you should never forfeit essay quality to do so. Many students believe there is a two-week “rule,” but very few schools actually expect the secondary to come back within two weeks. Moreover, the schools that have this expectation will make this explicit. In the grand scheme, a few days to a week later won’t make a huge difference.

Is it really a good idea to pre-write secondary essays? What if a school changes their secondary prompts during my admissions cycle?

Yes, you should absolutely pre-write secondary essays whenever possible because medical schools rarely change their prompts. In the event that a medical school does change their prompt, you'll likely be able to recycle your already-written essay for other schools.

Are “optional” essays really optional?

Yes. You should only answer an optional prompt when you have appropriate information to discuss. Forced responses will annoy admissions committees and can cast a negative light on the rest of your application.

Which secondaries should I work on first?

We recommend prioritizing your target schools, and specifically those that have the longest secondaries (so you can recycle more material for future applications) and those that you're most interested in attending. (so you can maximize the rolling admissions process at those institutions)

Do I need to submit my secondary essays two weeks after I receive my secondary applications?

Try not to get too caught up on the idea of a “two week” submission deadline. Unless a school has explicitly set a deadline of two weeks, your goal should just be to submit your essays as early as possible while still maintaining the quality of your essays.

If a secondary prompt asks me to explain my preference for a particular location, can I be honest about my reasons?

Various factors impact a med school applicant’s decisions about where to apply. Many applicants make these decisions based on proximity to family or home, for example. There’s nothing wrong with being transparent about your desire to stay close to home, but don’t leave it at that. You don’t want to give adcoms any reason to think that you might have only chosen their school out of convenience, so be sure to also describe how your connection to the local community will make you a great fit on the campus and vice versa. How will you utilize your existing networks and cultural knowledge of the local area to benefit the school?

Is it okay to repeat some information from my primary application on my secondary applications?

As a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t be repeating the same anecdotes or details in your secondary essays that you used in your personal statement. However, the experiences listed in the Work & Activities Section of your primary application will almost certainly reappear in your secondary essays. You’ll want to use your secondary essays to provide additional context, so it may help to think of the Work & Activities Section as the movie trailer and the secondary essays as the feature film.

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The Medical School Diversity Essay: Everything You Need to Know

June 13, 2017

The Medical School Diversity Essay

Now that you've turned in your AMCAS (phew!), you're probably wondering how to tackle the monster of secondaries coming your way. One of the most common questions asked in one form or another is the medical school diversity essay . Have you ever wondered why diversity is such an important component of the medical school admission process? I’ve heard a lot of pre-med students eager to write this off as a political move on the behalf of medical schools, without taking the time to truly consider its value.

Of course, in the US we have a powerful tradition of diversity in higher education. Diversity in the classroom (and on campus) allows students to produce a “creative friction,” thereby improving the educational experience for all.

However, in the medical school context, diversity has an additional, more utilitarian purpose: it is crucial to the quality of medical care provided by these soon-to-be physicians. An ability to understand your patients -- regardless of background -- is an integral part of your life as a doctor.

So, now that we have solved the great admissions diversity mystery, we can get started on the actual essays. First, what does a medical school diversity essay actually look like? Let’s take an example from one of Stanford Med School’s recent secondary applications:

“The Committee on Admissions regards the diversity (broadly defined) of an entering class as an important factor in serving the educational mission of the school. The Committee on Admissions strongly encourages you to share unique, personally important, and/or challenging factors in your background, such as the quality of your early educational environment, socioeconomic status, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and life or work experiences. Please discuss how such factors have influenced your goals and preparation for a career in medicine.”

Or this question from Wake Forest School of Medicine :

“The Committee on Admissions values diversity as an important factor in the educational mission of the Wake Forest School of Medicine. How will you contribute to the diversity of your medical school class and to the medical community in general?”

Ultimately, these medical school diversity essay prompts are all variations on the same question, “How are you different from other applicants, and how does that difference impact your ability to contribute in medical school and beyond?”

This prompt brings us to our first action point:

1. “Diversity” and “Underrepresented Minority” are not synonymous.

Have you ever heard someone lament, “[sigh]...I’m not a minority so I’m not diverse.” I have. Many times. Most frequently, this lamentation originates from a lack of creativity and fundamental understanding about what diversity means. As we’ve already discussed, diversity serves two purposes: 1) varying perspectives in a classroom and on campus so as to produce more comprehensive learning, and 2) Improving patient care once these applicants become newly-minted MDs.

Thus, while ethno-cultural, religious, or socioeconomic backgrounds are all forms of diversity, they are by no means the only forms of diversity. Indeed, diversity is anything about you which is special and which will allow you to satisfy the objectives of diversity as described above.

Multlingual? That’s diversity.

Been in the military? That’s diversity.

Had a rare disease as a child? That’s diversity.

Have a special personal quality (such as being a talented connector, or unusually high EQ)? Diversity.

Have a very specific and innovative career path in mind (e.g., using robotics to improve prosthetics)? Diversity.

Worked as a personal trainer or a nutritionist?....you see where I’m going with this. The key is not to narrowly define diversity, but instead to broadly construe how your “diverse elements” will allow you to contribute something unique to your prospective school and ultimately, your profession.

This brings us to our second action point:

2. Your “diversity” means nothing if it isn’t clearly connected to your potential contribution.

Sometimes, applicants get too caught up in the ways they are different, that they forget that being different is not an end, but a means to an end. These differences and unique qualities/experiences have to accomplish something. They have to help prove that you are deserving of a seat at the med school roundtable.

For example, being a chronic truant or two-time felon are certainly unique qualities and experiences for an applicant to medical school. Will they help you get in? Almost certainly not, and for obvious reasons. Best to focus on some other topic for your medical school diversity essay .

The point is simple: once you have identified what makes you unique, your primary task is to explain how that uniqueness will allow you to contribute something special in school and beyond.

This brings us to our third action point:

3. Diversity, as with all other parts of your application, requires evidence.

“I am the smartest person in the world.”

Really!? Are you actually the smartest person in the world? Prove it.

“I have unique insight into the needs of immigrant populations.”

Oh do you? And what, pray tell, gives you this incredible insight?

“I have always dreamed of being part of Doctors Without Borders, and helping to save the world one person at a time.”

Is that so? Because I don’t see a single international community service experience on your application...

...see where I’m going with this? Diversity, though it may be an intangible concept or quality, still requires tangible evidence. A medical school diversity essay is not complete without a clear explanation of how your “diversity” relates to your experiences.

For example, if you are a first generation college student and the son/daughter of immigrants, you cannot just baldly state that this background gives you some crucial insight into the needs of immigrant populations. Although it seems plausible that you would know more than others who are from affluent, non-immigrant backgrounds, you still need to prove it. Make the connections explicit.

You could do this by providing anecdotes about your communication skills with immigrant families during your time with Habitat for Humanity. Or you could explain how you used your special insights and cross-cultural communication skills in becoming a leader in La Raza.

Ultimately, if what makes you diverse is that you have a very high capacity for empathy, you don’t need to have an activity on your AMCAS experiences section called “the society for people who empathize good and want to learn to do other things good too.” You just need to explain how your diverse element(s) have affected or motivated your activities, even if they seem totally unrelated.

E.g., “I am a motivator. I love motivating people to better their lives. That is why I worked as a nutritionist. Moreover, as a writing instructor at Dartmouth’s RWIT program, I had the opportunity not only to help students with their writing, but also to show them how exciting and fun it could be.” Please note: this is not from an actual essay, and if it was, it would not be especially good. This is just to demonstrate a point.

Thus, if you do decide to focus on ethnic, cultural, or religious diversity, the best approach is not to hammer the adcom with how significant your minority status is. Rather, a strong medical school diversity essay might focus on your activities which were committed to diversity and social justice issues; or on your pursuits which address health disparities between minority and non-minority populations; or experiences which provide tangible evidence of your cross-cultural competence during patient or client interactions. Of course, these three topics are not exhaustive, but might be a good place to start.

This brings us to our final, and most succinct point:

4. Using buzzwords doesn’t convince anyone

This is a common mistake among applicants who think that repeating buzzwords such as “diverse,” “multicultural,” “cross-cultural,” “underrepresented,” etc. will automatically convince an adcom that they are those things. It won’t. In fact, it is no more likely to convince them of your diversity credentials than if I tried to convince you of the quality of this article by simply repeating “this article is super informative and comprehensive, and it is likely the best thing you’ve read all week.”

In short: let your evidence and experience do the talking.

Tags : applying to medical school , medical school , medical school essays , med school , applying to med school , hot to get into medical school , medical school diversity essay

joel butterly

Joel Butterly, Co-founder and CEO of InGenius Prep, is an experienced admissions counselor and entrepreneur. Joel comes from a rich educational background—his immediate family alone has 14 Ivy League Degrees—from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth.

Joel attended Dartmouth College, where he studied Government, Geography, and the Philosophy of Ethics. He was inducted early into Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated Summa Cum Laude. He graduated with a double major in Government and International Studies, and a minor in Ethical Philosophy.

After Dartmouth, Joel attended Yale Law School, where he served on the executive board of the Journal on Regulation, as well as the Law School’s entrepreneurship society.

Joel currently resides at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. He lives with his fiance – Emily – who teaches and is receiving her PhD in Medieval History from Yale.

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Weekly Weigh-in: The Diversity Secondary Essay

Welcome to PDr’s Weekly Weigh-in! Each week, we ask medical students and physicians to weigh in on some of our most frequently asked pre-med questions. This week’s question: How did you approach “the diversity secondary essay” on your secondary applications?

Edward Chang, DGSOM MS3

Honestly I had a pretty tough time with the diversity question. I didn’t know how far I could go with this question and I had a difficult time putting what I thought made me unique on paper without sounding arrogant or cliche. At the time I was applying, I also thought this question was very ethnically charged (I felt that I couldn’t be “different” as a typical Asian American from a middle-class family) but looking back, I realized that I was approaching the question very narrow-mindedly. If I were to answer the question now, I would emphasize the unique aspects of my personality and the specific instances that demonstrate those unique qualities. I personally wouldn’t talk about race but rather focus on how my uniqueness would contribute to the student body overall. I think a few things that make me who I am are:

Obviously many people have those qualities but I think its the combination of those characteristics that make me unique.

|| Read: Diversity in Medical Secondary Questions ||

Evan Laveman, DGSOM MS3

When I was answering questions on diversity in my secondary statements, I would catch myself unconsciously interpreting the word ‘diversity’ as a difference in race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. I urge everyone to not be limited in their approach to portraying their own diversity. What sets me apart is not my skin color, religion, or how much money my parents make. What sets me apart is that I worked within the same marine safety department for 7 years. I got permission to obtain my EMT license earlier than most other California residents. I’ve been personally involved in saving lives and losing lives. I love the ocean. I once paddled 41 miles down the Southern California coast in one day.I helped to found a social fraternity at UCLA. I value community, camaraderie, compassion, and service. I attempted a day hike of Mount Whitney in the snow, and knew when to turn back. I’m a hard worker, but I strive to never work so hard that I lose my grounding. There are many qualities and characteristics I possess that I share with others, and some that may be unique to just me, but the constellation of what I’ve done is a fingerprint that I feel defines me and makes me diverse. This is how I chose to answer questions on diversity- by focusing on the active aspects of my character, instead of passive identifiers.

|| Read: Three Secondaries to Pre-Write ||

Brandon Brown, UCSF MS2

I approached the diversity question by just writing about what made me a unique individual that would provide new perspectives to the incoming medical school class. Diversity doesn’t merely mean diversity in how you look or where you came from, but how your experiences have shaped you as an individual and how your experiences provide a valuable addition to a group. I wrote about about my family, my upbringing, and some of the skills I’ve acquired (e.g. programming) and how those inform my decisions, thought process, and contribute to improving team work.

|| Check out: PDr’s Secondary Essay Prompts Database to start pre-writing! ||

Evan Shih, DGSOM MS3

As a heterosexual Asian-American male from an immigrant family with aspirations of applying to medical school, I wasn’t exactly jumping to the top of anybody’s diversity checklist, at least not in the classic sense of “racial background, sexual identity, and social background”. However, I wanted to show medical schools that despite growing up in an “cookie cutter” suburban community, I still possessed experiences that provided me with both an enriched background and an open-minded outlook. With my diversity essay, I sought to exhibit the fact that I was eager to learn more about the diverse patient population that I was going to serve in the future. I wrote about my experiences volunteering with a homeless clinic and the multitude of patient backgrounds in the Greater Los Angeles area: recently displaced families, chronic cocaine addicts, veteran war heroes, Latino immigrants, and countless individuals of the LGBT community.

Working with the homeless clinic showed me two things: 1) I knew very little about the world around me and 2) If I wanted to practice medicine in Southern California, I needed to hone my Spanish skills. These two realizations compelled me to plan a summer trip to Cusco, Peru with a friend. For 3 weeks we took medical Spanish, learned to salsa dance, and hiked the Inca Trail. My multicultural experiences in both Peru and inner-city Los Angeles provided me with an understanding of the many different patient backgrounds that I would encounter as a physician, and I wanted to show schools that I was confident that I could contribute the same enthusiasm and capabilities in medical school.

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The Secret to Writing an Excellent Secondary Diversity Essay

With expert tips and 3 sample essays.

Even though diversity secondary essays are increasingly common in medical school (and other disciplines), some students think that they can dismiss them because they are typically optional. While this is an understandable misapprehension, students should take advantage of this prompt to give the admissions committee a better view of themselves as an applicant. Many medical school secondary essay prompts ask students to discuss what they can bring to the incoming class. "Diversity" doesn't refer only to marginalized or underrepresented groups; we all have qualities that differentiate us from others. Asking students to write about their experiences with diversity isn't meant to exclude those traditionally well represented in higher education, and thinking about diversity "broadly defined" offers opportunities to reflect on your unique traits, experiences, and identity. Also, read our two samples of diversity secondary essays for medical school!

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Article Contents 16 min read

What is "diversity".

There are many misconceptions regarding the diversity secondary essay – a now-common essay prompt for medical schools and professional programs of all sorts. In particular, some critics assume that “diversity” is a kind of politically correct code word, and – stemming from a similar misunderstanding – some assume that if they are part of a “majority” (whether this means ethnic majority, linguistic majority, or even a majority within a discipline), then that means they can’t be “diverse.” These are both incredibly unfortunate and carry a wealth of assumptions that need to be addressed before discussing how to write a great secondary essay on the topic of diversity.

Consider the qualities of a sound definition of diversity:

1. Diversity is multi-definitional

Diversity does not necessarily (or exclusively) refer to religious, ethnic, cultural, or linguistic minorities. Yes, such applicants would indeed be diverse and would contribute to the diversity of a school or program and advocating for traditionally underrepresented or marginalized peoples in academia is a worthwhile task pursued by many institutions.

However, there are any number of other identities and designators you might apply to yourself that act as distinguishing features. If you’re a returning student, a parent, or a non-traditional applicant, those are “diverse” attributes on a university campus. If you’ve served in the military, for example, that would be considered a “diverse” attribute.

Let’s see some examples of diversity:

You’re someone with a disability or unique health challenges
You’re the first person in your family to pursue higher education
You come from a lower socioeconomic background
You’re from a rural area
You’re multilingual (either by choice or by necessity)

In short, “diversity” isn’t just some kind of PC buzzword (not that this would necessarily be a bad thing); seeking reflections on diversity, along with diverse candidates, is a genuine effort on the part of institutions to bring a variety of voices into the intellectual arena of academia. The more kinds of voices we have in our institutions, the more robust, nuanced, and intersectional that education becomes.

It wasn’t all that long ago that campuses were nearly exclusively dominated by a relatively homogeneous demographic – this isn’t meant as a contentious statement, it’s a simple statement of fact. Today’s campus makeup is considerably different from that of even 50 years ago, and the ways in which we understand what constitutes “diversity” expand continuously. That means that there is an array of experiences, perspectives, worldviews, and intellectual positions in contemporary academe, and our institutions are all the better for prioritizing such a plethora of voices.

3. Everyone has “diverse” experiences

That leads us to the third point: the misconception that if you are a candidate from a majority demographic in your country, or if you are part of a well-represented demographic group within a particular discipline, you would not qualify as “diverse” and wouldn’t have anything to contribute to an essay on diversity. However, the idea that “diversity” simply refers to, say, racialized minorities, is a very narrow assumption, indeed, and one that does a disservice to the spectrum of human experience and the value of such experience in our educational institutions. You can be a member of the “majority” culture, linguistic group, religion, etc., and still have experiences that differentiate you from others.

To expand this view, let’s start by looking at Stanford Medical School ’s recent secondary essay prompt on diversity:

\u201cThe Committee on Admissions regards the diversity (broadly defined) of an entering class as an important factor in serving the educational mission of the school. The Committee on Admissions strongly encourages you to share unique, personally important, and\/or challenging factors in your background , such as the quality of your early educational environment, socioeconomic status, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and life or work experiences . Please discuss how such factors have influenced your goals and preparation for a career in medicine.\u201d ","label":"Diversity Secondary Essay Prompt","title":"Diversity Secondary Essay Prompt"}]" code="tab1" template="BlogArticle">

This broad understanding of what constitutes “diversity” offers everyone an opportunity to reflect on the uniqueness of their own situation and life experiences. Who among us wouldn’t be able to connect to at least one of these categories? All of us have faced challenges in our lives; all of us have lived through “personally important” experiences; all of us have “life or work experiences”; and none of us have lived any of these in ways completely identical to others. This is in no way to diminish some of the specific challenges faced by minority or underrepresented groups (in fact, helping to ensure equitable access to higher education, regardless of social status or cultural background, is one of our core values and driving philosophies here at BeMo !). The point, rather, is simply to open up our understanding of “diversity” as a multifaceted term without one specific, universal definition.

We still have a way to go in terms of creating a truly equal – and equitable – society, and there is no sensible person who could deny that some people and groups have had advantages within our social structures, including general and higher education, which have been denied to others. Indeed, universities have historically (and somewhat paradoxically) both maintained and challenged such divisions, and the push for diverse campuses is one method of trying to counterbalance long-standing inequities. Reflecting on the notion of “diversity” from a different perspective, however, gives us the opportunity to consider the multilayered issue of identity itself. The idea of a “center” or “majority” is somewhat insufficient, when we step back and contemplate the vast wealth of human experiences.

The “secret” to writing a good diversity essay is recognizing that “diversity” can refer to any of those things that make you “ you. ” Anything that makes you interesting, any terms you use to describe yourself, can be “diverse.” If you’re a middle-class, heterosexual, white, male-identifying individual from a mid-sized city, who went to standard public schools, got average grades, and goes home to do laundry every weekend (an admitted caricature of a “majority” in North America), there are still unique, defining elements that make you who you are.

From a slightly different perspective, if you feel that you are from a background that is already heavily represented in the area you want to study, that doesn’t mean that you don’t manifest diversity in any number of other ways. Think about the landmark moments in your life: events, achievements, or challenges that shaped how you think about the world and about yourself. No one has lived exactly those events, experiences, or challenges in precisely the same way as you. Think about your values and priorities and the reasons behind them. No one holds exactly these same values and priorities for the same reasons as you.

The point here is that everyone has something – some set of qualities, perspectives, and experiences – that makes them who they are. This can be the focus of your diversity essay.

Want more tips and secondary essay examples? Watch this video!

How Important Is Writing a Diversity Secondary Essay?

There are a number of reasons why writing a diversity Secondary Essay is important. Not every medical school requires applicants to write a diversity secondary essay, but submitting one can attract the attention of the admissions committee. Here are a few reasons why you should write the diversity secondary essay for a more impactful application:

1. To show that your values align with the school’s

The first and most important reason why you should consider a diversity secondary essay a requirement, even when it’s listed as optional, is because it’s an opportunity to show that your values align with theirs. For instance, notice the explicit mention of diversity in Yale Medical School’s mission statement:

“Yale School of Medicine educates and nurtures creative leaders in medicine and science, promoting curiosity and critical inquiry in an inclusive environment enriched by diversity. We advance discovery and innovation fostered by partnerships across the University, our local community, and the world. We care for patients with compassion and commit to improving the health of all people.”

Most medical schools make diversity an integral part of their mission and growth plans. If you can elicit your definition of diversity and what it means to you, you’re showing the admissions committee that you have the potential to be a valuable contributor to the school’s culture and community.

2. You can show personality

Medical schools know that people are more than just their stats. That’s why secondary essays, resumes, and personal statements are part of the application process. Medical schools want to get to know the person behind the application because qualitative traits tell a story about who you are as a person. Diversity essays are an opportunity to introduce yourself on a more intimate level; you can explain where you came from, or how a formative experience shaped you as a prospective medical school student. Don’t underestimate the explanatory power of the diversity secondary essay; use it to show the admissions committee that you’re a resilient, prepared candidate.

3. You might have some explaining to do

Sometimes, diversity secondary essay prompts are more open-ended; in other words, they don’t explicitly mention diversity. Rather, they might ask the applicant to mention anything else they might like the admissions committee to know regarding academic records, or if there’s an important aspect of their background they think the committee should consider. You might think that your circumstances are extraneous; on the contrary, you can use the diversity essay to explain gaps in your academic background, interesting or influential experiences, or to simply give the committee a better view of who you are. If you look at your application holistically and identify valuable information you think is missing, take the opportunity to rectify those gaps in the body of this prompt.

Building on the above observations, the first step in writing an excellent diversity statement as part of your medical school secondary essays is to explore your own diversity (“broadly defined”). If you’re applying to med school through AMCAS, you likely had to write a medical school personal statement , or at least assemble your list of experiences for the AMCAS work and activities , which would have required you to think about your experiences, qualities, and overall trajectory as a student and as a person. Similarly, if you're applying to med school through TMDSAS, you would have had to brainstorm for the TMDSAS personal characteristics essay . Returning to that and thinking through what you wrote through a slightly different lens is a great way of gathering some ideas about what sets you and your life story apart from others. For more ideas, you can always read some medical school secondary essay examples that can inspire your own.

While you can certainly go through the litany of traditional categories of "diversity" and discuss ways in which you represent these (racial[ized] background, economic class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, language, immigration status, disability, etc.), you also want to think about experiences you’ve had that may not be common experiences among other members of your class. For example, all of us have had to overcome things – illness or injury, bullying or rejection, loss or separation, things outside our control that threw us into turmoil or that caught us in a pit from which we had to find a way to emerge. As well, all of us have triumphed or excelled in some way – music, art, or craft; academics, athletics, or competitions; personal triumphs only evident to those who care to hear of them. Though others may have experienced similar things, only you have experienced those specific things in your own way, in the larger context of your own life. Thinking deeply about your life and those beautiful things that make you “you” helps you appreciate all the things – little and big – that you’ve done or that you’ve overcome in your life. Whatever those things are, they aren’t common to everyone (few things are!), and anyone who has gone through them hasn’t gone through them as you . Only you have!

Writing a Successful Diversity Secondary Essay - Step 2: Reflect on Your Experiences With Others

Increasingly, “cultural competency” is a quality valued by any number of different professions and disciplines, including medicine, law, education, and even business and management. Cultural competency broadly refers to acknowledging the validity of diverse beliefs, values, and practices – especially when they are different from one’s own.

The AAMC considers cultural competency one of the core pre-professional competencies for entering medical students, where possessing “cultural competence” is defined as someone who:

Just as we all have experiences unique to us – or have experienced similar things uniquely – we have all interacted with people who see the world differently from us. Think about such exchanges and what they mean to you, what role others have played in your life, and what role you’ve played in the lives of others.

Consider these questions to help you start thinking about how diversity manifests in your life:

Have you done volunteer work that allowed you to work with or for people from a different background than yourself?
Have you traveled to places or taken up service opportunities that let you see other ways of life different from your own?
Have you connected in meaningful ways with someone who challenged you to think from a new perspective?
Do you have family, friends, or loved ones who have shown you other ways to think and be? If you have, and if you can articulate such experiences, then this may be something to reflect on as part of your diversity essay.

In writing, we must always ensure that we are “showing” our thoughts to our audience, not just “telling” them. In this context, that means the following: don’t just tell your reader that you’ve had diverse experiences or experiences with diverse others. You must show your readers these things, both with your words and – importantly – through your deeds. This is particularly the case when discussing service or other work with marginalized or underserved communities.

It’s not enough, for example, to simply state that you have unique insights into the needs of those living in poverty. You need to be able to demonstrate such insights and point to specific events that helped you develop them.

Using the example of understanding the needs of those living in poverty, ask yourself the following questions to test how demonstrable your experiences are:

If you answered no to these questions, that doesn’t necessarily suggest that your intentions aren’t genuine, but it does mean that an admissions committee member may raise an eyebrow as they look for evidence of your claims.

So, to develop a strong diversity secondary essay, you must have the following:

Asking you to think and write about diversity and your own diverse experiences isn’t meant to make you feel like you don’t belong. Quite the opposite. With each passing year, we find new ways to value and cherish the unique experiences and qualities that make up the larger human endeavor, and that’s a good thing . The more voices contributing to the conversation – whether that “conversation” is about medicine, education, justice, or any other facet of life – the more we can learn, understand, and grow, both as individuals and as a society. So, think about what you have to contribute to that big, human conversation, what makes that contribution uniquely your own, and let it shine in your diversity secondary essay!

Learn more about the medical school secondary essay prompts you MUST know in this video:

Examples of Diversity Essay Prompts

The diversity essay prompts you receive from different schools may vary; that is, the wording of the prompts and what they ask for will be specific to the school. It’s a good idea to read a few examples, so that you know what to expect. While the gist of what you should include in each prompt won’t vary all that much for each school, you might choose to alter the structure or order of content for different prompts.

Here are a few examples of diversity secondary essay prompts:

\u201cWithout limiting the discussion to your own identity, please describe how you envision contributing to the core values of diversity and inclusion at our School of Medicine, and in the medical profession.\u201d (1500 characters) ","label":"University of Maryland School of Medicine","title":"University of Maryland School of Medicine"}]" code="tab2" template="BlogArticle">

Check out our 3 sample diversity secondary essays below. Written for two different programs, you can see how different diversity essay prompts can be!

Diversity Secondary Essay Sample #1

Prompt: “Diversity comes in many forms. How do you think you might contribute to the diversity of the class?” (1500 characters)

I am extremely fortunate to have a strong connection to my roots. Spending time in Italy throughout my life has allowed me to see how the ideology of this culture differs from that of the United States.

Italian society is often marred by the stereotype that its citizens are lazy or not willing to work. I believe that if people look through a truly objective lens, they will see a society that derives its happiness less from material objects and more from love and companionship. Resultantly, there is a monumental emphasis placed on the health and wellbeing of others. There is always time for a family meal, a coffee with a friend, or an evening walk to clear one’s mind. Growing up, my family always made sure everyone had enough to eat and someone to talk to. I believe in this philosophy and view the health care field as an opportunity to help others live a full and fruitful life pursuing their own happiness.

Throughout my life, health care professionals have consistently given my loved ones the ability to live autonomously and be present in my life. It is a service and a gift that they have given me and a gift I wish to spend my life giving others. My culture, upbringing, and life experiences have fostered my desire to pursue medicine and my holistic approach to life. I will bring these elements of empathy and holistic care to not only as a training physician, but as a fellow classmate who is there for others through the rigors of medical school. (1466 characters)

Want BeMo's help with your secondary essays? Check out this review from one of our successful students!

Diversity Secondary Essay Sample #2

Prompt: “The Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont recognizes that diversity extends beyond chosen and unchosen identities and encompasses the entirety of an individual’s experiences. Reflect on a time you learned something from someone or a group of people who are unlike yourself.”

Through globalization, the world is smaller than it has ever been, and so diverse that it’s easy to only care for and be informed of one’s own interests. To connect with someone else is to choose to abandon ignorance and aim to understand other people and their backgrounds. This choice is critical to a society that uses diversity as a strength instead of a tool of division.

In my freshman year of college, I roomed with an international student named Jorge who had immigrated from Guatemala to attend X University. We had a lot in common, despite our differences, and helped each other a lot in this transitional time in our lives. However hard adjusting to college life was for me, I saw how hard it was for him to transition to a new country and breach cultural barriers, while also acclimatizing to the responsibility and workload of a college student.

Instead of accepting the fact that our backgrounds rendered us incompatible, I decided to educate myself on his culture. I began reading about the political unrest in Guatemala, I found Latin Hip-Hop we could listen to, and I worked to develop my Spanish to try to make him feel at home. We grew very close and I learned a lot from being his roommate. Seeing his work ethic and commitment to building a life for himself inspired me to pursue my own goals with the same vigor I saw in him. He looked at the opportunity to study in the United States as a privilege and didn’t take his chance to pursue his education for granted. We were roommates throughout college and in that time I learned a lot culturally from him as well. Through our friendship, I spent time with his family and within the Latin community at X University, and came to incorporate many aspects of his culture into my own life. I learned a lot about letting the people in my life know they are loved and taking the time in my day for simple pleasures like a good meal with friends. I am very thankful for my friendship with Jorge and for the growth fostered by our friendship.

My experience with Jorge has made me particularly excited about the Larner College of Medicine, which I see as an institution invested in producing physicians who are culturally adept and equipped to treat all members of a patient population. The Larner College of Medicine’s commitment to improving health care for the LGBTQ+ population and investing in the wellbeing of its community speaks volumes about what this program values. My undergraduate and my own personal experiences as a first-generation citizen in this country have demonstrated for me how continuing to learn from others who are different is imperative, and how an enriching life comes from an open mind. (470 words)

Diversity Secondary Essay Sample #3

Prompt: “Without limiting the discussion to your own identity, please describe how you envision contributing to the core values of diversity and inclusion at our School of Medicine, and in the medical profession.” (1500 characters)

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of diversity is “a difference of opinion.” As a debate club member and as a student with a fledging interest in classic philosophy, I’ve learned to appreciate the value of a different perspective. I believe that it’s fundamentally impossible to make progress without having the ability to challenge our beliefs and preconceptions about ourselves and the world.

As a volunteer scribe at a mobile clinic, my job was to record the details of patient exams. Most of the patients we saw were middle-aged or elderly. There was one patient, Paul, who had arrived at the mobile clinic with a deep cut on his foot, which he told us he caught on an old rolled-up fence tucked behind his barn. We recommended a tetanus shot, but he was immediately sceptical. He explained that he didn’t believe vaccines worked.

It was important to remain non-combative. We explained that his autonomy was our priority, but there was a chance that he would develop tetanus, which could be lethal. Elaborating, we told him that the tetanus shot is the reason for cases of tetanus decreasing by roughly 95% since about 1950. After taking a moment to reflect, the patient agreed to receive the vaccine and went on his way after thanking us for our help. My experience using placatory, open dialogue is precisely what I seek to contribute to the University of Maryland School of Medicine. (1,404 characters, with spaces)

The secret is understanding that diversity is universal. The definition is much broader than most traditionally think it is; for instance, having a diverse perspective qualifies just as much as other common diversity signifiers, like racial or ethnic background.

Not all schools make the diversity secondary essay mandatory. However, even when it’s optional, you are encouraged to reflect on your experiences and what you can contribute to the school’s culture and mission. Diversity is important, but so is taking every opportunity to use your qualities to your advantage and stand out from the crowd.

Telling means you’ve simply stated a fact about yourself. For example, you might say you’re a “compassionate” person. To show that this is true, you need to use an experience that evinces this quality.

It’s best if you reflect on your experiences with others. Interaction and connection are the two cornerstones of diversity. For example, maybe you collaborated with a diverse group of people in a music band and this was a challenging but emboldening experience.

Diversity isn’t about what makes us separate from other people. On the contrary, part of it defines our role in society and in large or small interdependent groups.

Diversity is about breaking convention; the definition is never fixed; everyone has diverse experiences; and diversity, in the final analysis, is what makes you “you.”

No, each school’s diversity essay prompt will most likely be different. Read each prompt thoroughly and be sure to address each component of the prompt, including character or word count.

It’s impossible to sound self-righteous if you’re being authentic. Pick out relevant experiences and show the admissions committee that you can demonstrate your moral convictions through action.

Image credit: Manel Torralba, via the Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

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May 8, 2024

The Diversity Essay: How to Write an Excellent Diversity Essay

What is a diversity essay in a school application? And why does it matter when applying to leading programs and universities? Most importantly, how should you go about writing such an essay?

Diversity is of supreme value in higher education, and schools want to know how every student will contribute to the diversity on their campus. A diversity essay gives applicants with disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds, an unusual education, a distinctive experience, or a unique family history an opportunity to write about how these elements of their background have prepared them to play a useful role in increasing and encouraging diversity among their target program’s student body and broader community.

The purpose of all application essays is to help the adcom better understand who an applicant is and what they care about. Your essays are your chance to share your voice and humanize your application. This is especially true for the diversity essay, which aims to reveal your unique perspectives and experiences, as well as the ways in which you might contribute to a college community.

In this post, we’ll discuss what exactly a diversity essay is, look at examples of actual prompts and a sample essay, and offer tips for writing a standout essay.

In this post, you’ll find the following:

What a diversity essay covers

How to show you can add to a school’s diversity, why diversity matters to schools.

Seven examples that reveal diversity

Sample diversity essay prompts

How to write about your diversity.

A diversity essay example

Upon hearing the word “diversity” in relation to an application essay, many people assume that they will have to write about gender, sexuality, class, or race. To many, this can feel overly personal or irrelevant, and some students might worry that their identity isn’t unique or interesting enough. In reality, the diversity essay is much broader than many people realize.

Identity means different things to different people. The important thing is that you demonstrate your uniqueness and what matters to you. In addition to writing about one of the traditional identity features we just mentioned (gender, sexuality, class, race), you could consider writing about a more unusual feature of yourself or your life – or even the intersection of two or more identities.

Consider these questions as you think about what to include in your diversity essay:

Do you have a unique or unusual talent or skill?
Do you have beliefs or values that are markedly different from those of the people around you?
Do you have a hobby or interest that sets you apart from your peers?
Have you done or experienced something that few people have? Note that if you choose to write about a single event as a diverse identity feature, that event needs to have had a pretty substantial impact on you and your life. For example, perhaps you’re part of the 0.2% of the world’s population that has run a marathon, or you’ve had the chance to watch wolves hunt in the wild.
Do you have a role in life that gives you a special outlook on the world? For example, maybe one of your siblings has a rare disability, or you grew up in a town with fewer than 500 inhabitants.

If you are an immigrant to the United States, the child of immigrants, or someone whose ethnicity is underrepresented in the States, your response to “How will you add to the diversity of our class/community?” and similar questions might help your application efforts. Why? Because you have the opportunity to show the adcom how your background will contribute a distinctive perspective to the program you are applying to.

Of course, if you’re not underrepresented in your field or part of a disadvantaged group, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have anything to write about in a diversity essay.

For example, you might have an unusual or special experience to share, such as serving in the military, being a member of a dance troupe, or caring for a disabled relative. These and other distinctive experiences can convey how you will contribute to the diversity of the school’s campus.

Maybe you are the first member of your family to apply to college or the first person in your household to learn English. Perhaps you have worked your way through college or helped raise your siblings. You might also have been an ally to those who are underrepresented, disadvantaged, or marginalized in your community, at your school, or in a work setting.

As you can see, diversity is not limited to one’s religion, ethnicity, culture, language, or sexual orientation. It refers to whatever element of your identity distinguishes you from others and shows that you, too, value diversity.

The diversity essay provides colleges the chance to build a student body that includes different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, backgrounds, interests, and so on. Applicants are asked to illuminate what sets them apart so that the adcoms can see what kind of diverse views and opinions they can bring to the campus.

Admissions officers believe that diversity in the classroom improves the educational experience of all the students involved. They also believe that having a diverse workforce better serves society as a whole.

The more diverse perspectives found in the classroom, throughout the dorms, in the dining halls, and mixed into study groups, the richer people’s discussions will be.

Plus, learning and growing in this kind of multicultural environment will prepare students for working in our increasingly multicultural and global world.

In medicine, for example, a heterogeneous workforce benefits people from previously underrepresented cultures. Businesses realize that they will market more effectively if they can speak to different audiences, which is possible when members of their workforce come from various backgrounds and cultures. Schools simply want to prepare graduates for the 21st century job market.

Seven examples that reveal diversity

Adcoms want to know about the diverse elements of your character and how these have helped you develop particular personality traits , as well as about any unusual experiences that have shaped you.

Here are seven examples an applicant could write about:

1. They grew up in an environment with a strong emphasis on respecting their elders, attending family events, and/or learning their parents’ native language and culture.

2. They are close to their grandparents and extended family members who have taught them how teamwork can help everyone thrive.

3. They have had to face difficulties that stem from their parents’ values being in conflict with theirs or those of their peers.

4. Teachers have not always understood the elements of their culture or lifestyle and how those elements influence their performance.

5. They have suffered discrimination and succeeded despite it because of their grit, values, and character.

6. They learned skills from a lifestyle that is outside the norm (e.g., living in foreign countries as the child of a diplomat or contractor; performing professionally in theater, dance, music, or sports; having a deaf sibling).

7. They’ve encountered racism or other prejudice (either toward themselves or others) and responded by actively promoting diverse, tolerant values.

And remember, diversity is not about who your parents are. It’s about who you are – at the core.

Your background, influences, religious observances, native language, ideas, work environment, community experiences – all these factors come together to create a unique individual, one who will contribute to a varied class of distinct individuals taking their place in a diverse world.

The best-known diversity essay prompt is from the Common App . It states:

“Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.”

Some schools have individual diversity essay prompts. For example, this one is from Duke University :

“We believe a wide range of personal perspectives, beliefs, and lived experiences are essential to making Duke a vibrant and meaningful living and learning community. Feel free to share with us anything in this context that might help us better understand you and what you might bring to our community.”

And the Rice University application includes the following prompt:

“Rice is strengthened by its diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders and change agents across the spectrum of human endeavor. What perspectives shaped by your background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity inspire you to join our community of change agents at Rice?”

In all instances, colleges want you to demonstrate how and what you’ll contribute to their communities.

Your answer to a school’s diversity essay question should focus on how your experiences have built your empathy for others, your embrace of differences, your resilience, your character, and your perspective.

The school might ask how you think of diversity or how you will bring or add to the diversity of the school, your chosen profession, or your community. Make sure you answer the specific question posed by highlighting distinctive elements of your profile that will add to the class mosaic every adcom is trying to create. You don’t want to blend in; you want to stand out in a positive way while also complementing the school’s canvas.

Here’s a simple, three-part framework that will help you think of diversity more broadly:

Who are you? What has contributed to your identity? How do you distinguish yourself? Your identity can include any of the following: gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, religion, nontraditional work experience, nontraditional educational background, multicultural background, and family’s educational level.

What have you done? What have you accomplished? This could include any of the following: achievements inside and/or outside your field of study, leadership opportunities, community service, internship or professional experience, research opportunities, hobbies, and travel. Any or all of these could be unique. Also, what life-derailing, throw-you-for-a-loop challenges have you faced and overcome?

How do you think? How do you approach things? What drives you? What influences you? Are you the person who can break up a tense meeting with some well-timed humor? Are you the one who intuitively sees how to bring people together?

Read more about this three-part framework in Episode 193 of Accepted’s Admissions Straight Talk podcast or listen wherever you get your favorite podcast s.

Think about each question within this framework and how you could apply your diversity elements to your target school’s classroom or community. Any of these elements can serve as the framework for your essay.

Don’t worry if you can’t think of something totally “out there.” You don’t need to be a tightrope walker living in the Andes or a Buddhist monk from Japan to be able to contribute to a school’s diversity!

And please remember, the examples we have offered here are not exhaustive. There are many other ways to show diversity!

All you need to do to be able to write successfully about how you will contribute to the diversity of your target school’s community is examine your identity, deeds, and ideas, with an eye toward your personal distinctiveness and individuality. There is only one you .

Take a look at the sample diversity essay in the next section of this post, and pay attention to how the writer underscores their appreciation for, and experience with, diversity.

A diversity essay sample

When I was starting 11th grade, my dad, an agricultural scientist, was assigned to a 3-month research project in a farm village in Niigata (northwest Honshu in Japan). Rather than stay behind with my mom and siblings, I begged to go with him. As a straight-A student, I convinced my parents and the principal that I could handle my schoolwork remotely (pre-COVID) for that stretch. It was time to leap beyond my comfortable suburban Wisconsin life—and my Western orientation, reinforced by travel to Europe the year before.

We roomed in a sprawling farmhouse with a family participating in my dad’s study. I thought I’d experience an “English-free zone,” but the high school students all studied and wanted to practice English, so I did meet peers even though I didn’t attend their school. Of the many eye-opening, influential, cultural experiences, the one that resonates most powerfully to me is experiencing their community. It was a living, organic whole. Elementary school kids spent time helping with the rice harvest. People who foraged for seasonal wild edibles gave them to acquaintances throughout the town. In fact, there was a constant sharing of food among residents—garden veggies carried in straw baskets, fish or meat in coolers. The pharmacist would drive prescriptions to people who couldn’t easily get out—new mothers, the elderly—not as a business service but as a good neighbor. If rain suddenly threatened, neighbors would bring in each other’s drying laundry. When an empty-nest 50-year-old woman had to be hospitalized suddenly for a near-fatal snakebite, neighbors maintained her veggie patch until she returned. The community embodied constant awareness of others’ needs and circumstances. The community flowed!

Yet, people there lamented that this lifestyle was vanishing; more young people left than stayed or came. And it wasn’t idyllic: I heard about ubiquitous gossip, long-standing personal enmities, busybody-ness. But these very human foibles didn’t dam the flow. This dynamic community organism couldn’t have been more different from my suburban life back home, with its insular nuclear families. We nod hello to neighbors in passing.

This wonderful experience contained a personal challenge. Blond and blue-eyed, I became “the other” for the first time. Except for my dad, I saw no Westerner there. Curious eyes followed me. Stepping into a market or walking down the street, I drew gazes. People swiftly looked away if they accidentally caught my eye. It was not at all hostile, I knew, but I felt like an object. I began making extra sure to appear “presentable” before going outside. The sense of being watched sometimes generated mild stress or resentment. Returning to my lovely tatami room, I would decompress, grateful to be alone. I realized this challenge was a minute fraction of what others experience in my own country. The toll that feeling—and being— “other” takes on non-white and visibly different people in the US can be extremely painful. Experiencing it firsthand, albeit briefly, benignly, and in relative comfort, I got it.

Unlike the organic Niigata community, work teams, and the workplace itself, have externally driven purposes. Within this different environment, I will strive to exemplify the ongoing mutual awareness that fueled the community life in Niigata. Does it benefit the bottom line, improve the results? I don’t know. But it helps me be the mature, engaged person I want to be, and to appreciate the individuals who are my colleagues and who comprise my professional community. I am now far more conscious of people feeling their “otherness”—even when it’s not in response to negative treatment, it can arise simply from awareness of being in some way different.

What did you think of this essay? Does this middle class Midwesterner have the unique experience of being different from the surrounding majority, something she had not experienced in the United States? Did she encounter diversity from the perspective of “the other”?

Here a few things to note about why this diversity essay works so well:

1. The writer comes from “a comfortable, suburban, Wisconsin life,” suggesting that her background might not be ethnically, racially, or in any other way diverse.

2. The diversity “points” scored all come from her fascinating experience of having lived in a Japanese farm village, where she immersed herself in a totally different culture.

3. The lessons learned about the meaning of community are what broaden and deepen the writer’s perspective about life, about a purpose-driven life, and about the concept of “otherness.”

By writing about a time when you experienced diversity in one of its many forms, you can write a memorable and meaningful diversity essay.

Working on your diversity essay?

Want to ensure that your application demonstrates the diversity that your dream school is seeking? Work with one of our admissions experts . This checklist includes more than 30 different ways to think about diversity to jump-start your creative engine.

Dr. Sundas Ali has more than 15 years of experience teaching and advising students, providing career and admissions advice, reviewing applications, and conducting interviews for the University of Oxford’s undergraduate and graduate programs. In addition, Sundas has worked with students from a wide range of countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Pakistan, China, Japan, and the Middle East. Want Sundas to help you get Accepted? Click here to get in touch!

Related Resources:

Different Dimensions of Diversity , podcast Episode 193
What Should You Do If You Belong to an Overrepresented MBA Applicant Group?
Fitting In & Standing Out: The Paradox at the Heart of Admissions , a free guide

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Diversity and Inclusion in Medicine

Resources for underrepresented applicants.

Updated: 1/29/22

Underrepresented minorities surge not only in the applicant pool but in the total number of matriculated students for the class of 2025 who began med school in the summer of 2021. A total of 62,443 students applied to medical school in the summer of 2020 with plans to matriculate in August of 2021. That’s an increase of 17.8% or 9,413 applicants. Read the highlights from this AAMC article Medical School Applicants and Enrollments Hit Record Highs; Underrepresented Minorities Lead the Surge . You can also review the data yourself at the following: 2021 Fall Applicant, Matriculant, and Enrollment Data Tables .

Highlights:

Total applicants for 2021-22: 62,443 as compared to last highest number of 53,370 in 2019-20. That’s an increase of 9,413 students in one year.

Also notable is the 21.1% increase in first time medical school applicants. Normally first time applicants increase between 2-3% each year.

Applicants who self identified as Black or African American rose by 21% in the 2020-21 application cycle.

The total number of matriculated students who self identified as Black or African American went from 9.5% in 2020 to 11.3% in 2021.

Applicants who self identified as Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin rose by 7.1% in the 2020-21 application cycle.

The total number of matriculated students who self identified as Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin went from 12.0% in 2020 to 12.7% in 2021.

Women represented 56.8% of applicants and 55.5% of matriculants.

The senseless killing of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020 threw the US into a state of mourning not only for his life but for the countless lives taken as a result of police brutality and the effects of systemic racism in the US. This AAMC article published on June 1, 2020 written by David J. Skorton, MD, President and CEO of the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) and David A. Acosta, MD, AAMC Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for the AAMC address our collective concerns and call to action: AAMC Statement on Police Brutality and Racism in America and Their Impact on Health

“Our country must unite to combat and dismantle racism and discrimination in all its forms and denounce race-related violence, including police brutality. Enough is enough. As healers and educators of the next generation of physicians and scientists, the people of America’s medical schools and teaching hospitals bear the responsibility to ameliorate factors that negatively affect the health of our patients and communities: poverty, education, access to transportation, healthy food, and health care.”

Now more than ever, the medical community needs to diversify their workforce to mirror our varied patient population in the United States. We need to recognize the barriers that many students face in their path to becoming a doctor and create ways to help students overcome barriers and succeed. The path to become a doctor can take 12+ years so actions we take today may not be realized until 2032. At this juncture, we need to prioritize supporting the next generation of African American male physicians. The documentary Black Men in White Coats outlines significant barriers preventing black men from becoming doctors and why it is so very important as a society to have a physician workforce that represents the people it serves.

Although over the past 10 years, there have been some significant gains in diversifying the medical workforce, there is still much work to be done. Women do outnumber men in medical school today, but we still need to do more to support Hispanic, African American and Native American men and women to pursue a career in medicine. According to the AAMC Table B-3 that summarizes the total medical school enrollment by racial and ethnic characteristics (alone), only 2% of American doctors are black men, only 4% of medical residents are black (2.9% female/1.5%male) and 7% of the American medical school population is black.

All medical schools have wholeheartedly embraced diversity and inclusion as key components to help diversify their medical school communities. They have instituted institution-wide assessments and strategic planning. Many are recruiting more diverse faculty and creating “pipeline programs to increase the number of qualified applicants representing diverse backgrounds,” as explained by the AAMC in their 2019 Fostering Diversity and Inclusion document. The report points out that even with the significant efforts by the medical school community to create programs and policies to address this concern, “the numbers of Black or African American medical school applicants and American Indian or Alaska Native medical school applicants had remained relatively stagnant.” It was even noted in the document, Altering the Course: Black Males in Medicine (2015) that “the number of Black or African American male medical school applicants and matriculants had actually decreased since 1978.” Since that document was published in 2015, there have been some modest gains in the number of African American males matriculating to medical school, but there is still a long, long way to go.

Created in 2015 by 5 Black medical students, the mission of White Coats Black Doctor Foundation is to increase diversity in the medical profession with more black men and women doctors.

Black Men in White Coats is a 2021 documentary exploring the question of why there are so few black men in medicine today (only 2% of American doctors today are black male) and the barriers that still exist that prevent more from entering the profession.

Racism and Health: A Reading List from the AAMC

VOICE: Veterinarians as One Inclusive Community for Empowerment seeks “to increase awareness, respect, and sensitivity to differences among all individuals and communities in the field of veterinary medicine.”

Book list published by the AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association)

Groups To Join, Network and Connect

Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association (APAMSA)

Native American/Indigenous

Association of Native American Medical Students (ANAMS)

Native American representation in medicine crucial to combating public health disparities, report suggests

Community Health Representative (CHR) Program

Rezzies in Medicine: The new adventures of Native physicians

Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA)

Latino Medical Student Association Members Share Advice for Future Physicians article (Sept 2021)

Student National Medical Association (SNMA) : The Student National Medical Association (SNMA) is committed to supporting current and future underrepresented minority medical students, addressing the needs of underserved communities, and increasing the number of clinically excellent, culturally competent and socially conscious physicians.

Mentoring in Medicine (MIM )

Tour 4 Diversity

Free mentoring: Prescribe It Forward

Summer Programs

SHPEP: “ The Summer Health Professions Education Program (SHPEP) is a free summer enrichment program focused on improving access to information and resources for college students interested in the health professions.” Application cycle opens in November 2021 with a deadline of early February 2022. Check the SHPEP website for details.

Public Health Leader Fellowship Program, Summer Program at Morehouse University

University of Michigan Future Public Health Leaders Program (Michigan FPHLP)

Public Policy and International Affairs Program (PPIA)

Vanderbilt University Medical Center Program for LGBTQ Health Summer Internship Program for students interested in LGBTQ health and research.

UCLA Premed Enrichment Program (UCLA PREP) - a 4 week, non-residential program. Deadline: Feb. 28, 2022

For Non-Traditional Students

Texas Academic Fresh Start is a Texas state program aimed at ensuring that a young person who dropped out of college can go back as an adult and "start fresh." College grades and credits more than 10 years old are erased.

Black/African American

Northwestern University maintains resources for students who identify as Black or African American who are applying to graduate school in the health professions. The offer a common question list and

Medical Minority Applicant Registry (Med-MAR) for students historically underrepresented in medicine.

Black Men in White Coats, Documentary Series

We Need More Black Physicians: COVID-19 is threatening an already scarce but essential health care resource

Medical Student Pride Alliance

#QueerinMed

What LGBTQ Applicants Should Know About Med Schools

Advice for LGBTQ+ medical school applicants

Northwestern University has developed substantial resources for LGBTQ+ applicants to health professions graduate school.

LGBTQ Medical School Out Lists

Anti-LGBTQIA+ Hate Speech at Texas A&M Exposes Veterinary Medicine’s Diversity Problem, June 2021, by Dr. Ingrid L. Taylor

“The situation at Texas A&M highlights a wider problem of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in veterinary medicine. For years, veterinary medicine has lagged behind other health professions in promoting DEI. The Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges’ (AAVMC) 2019-2020 Annual Data Report shows that veterinary students are still overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, and female, with 80% of students identifying as straight.”

Under-Represented Applicants

UNC School of Medicine offers a year long program called MED EXCEL (Medical Education Development Early eXperience in Clinical Education and Learning). After successful completion of the program, students are given a conditional acceptance to the school of medicine. Read this article for more specifics and contact for more details: Jeanine Simmons, Senior Executive Director, Medical Education and Alumni Development, at [email protected]

DACA students

PhD: Pre-Health Dreamers

Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine takes the lead and accepts DACA students.

DACA resources for premeds, complied by the Health Professions Advising office at Princeton University

Best Reddit Tips for Diversity Essays in Medical School

Being asked to write a diversity essay as a secondary in med school is something a lot of pre-meds struggle with.

But one of the best places to go for inspiration, especially as it’s nameless and faceless, are communities like Reddit.

There, people seem to feel freer to express their essay ideas. As well as get critique!

Here I’ve distilled through a ton of posts to present some of the best tips I could find on the topic.

Ready to get started with Reddit’s 14 best? Let’s go!

Need detailed writing tips first? Check out this article; How To Write The Best Diversity Essay In Medical School (Explained) .

Tips For Diversity Essays In Medical School (Reddit’s 14 Best)

Open yourself up.

You don’t have to hone in on just one aspect of yourself; you can write about multiple things. – u/scubapollo

An important point to start on. Especially when sitting down to come up with ideas.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you only have to pick one!

It doesn’t need to be overly crazy

It doesn’t need to be some crazy experience. How many doctors do you think are marathon runners? Probably not many. You could write about your challenges and process of running, how you push through the obstacles, what you like about it, and how those qualities will benefit you as a student. What matters is that you transform something you do into a way to reflect on the qualities allow you to do it, what you’ve learned from it, and how that changes your behavior/perspectives in the future. – u/ouganoma

A lot of people get hung up coming up with ideas because they feel their history or story isn’t interesting or exciting enough. That doesn’t need to be the case.

Seemingly run-of-the-mill hobbies can make for interesting subjects.

…Or serious

My diversity essay was very light hearted. I just talked about how much I love gardening. I hadn’t really talked about it much in my primary application, so I thought that it was a good place to add it in. If you feel strongly about your two experiences, it’s totally acceptable to write about them. – u/poopooj

The same goes for activities.

Show passion (or a love for something) in your diversity essay, and you’ll often highlight unexpected parts of yourself. You don’t need to be serious or academic. Adcoms are looking for relatable humans above anything else!

Show you’re a real person who cares about things!

Its not about it being “some objectively cool activity” its about having something you care about. Real people have interests and things they care about. Seriously, I wrote about reading and going on walks with my dog as some of my interests. That’s a pretty average interest, yes, but I care about it. Adcoms are looking for real people who care about things and by doing so, enrich the lives of their classmates, their patients, and their communities. – u/bright_and_peachy

This comment proves exactly that.

Even things as common as reading and dog walking can be used to craft an excellent diversity essay.

Creativity pays.

Diversity Essay White Girl – dilemma solved!

I am an upper middle-class white girl – I wrote my diversity essay on opera. Seriously. And the people who’ve edited my stuff have seemed to like it so I guess I did OK! Step 1: pick a thing you enjoy that is important to you. Step 2: explain how that thing influences the way you think about yourself, other people, and the world. Step 3: relate step 2 to medicine in literally any way (as long as it is true for you). – u/bluemooniris314

One of the biggest sticking points many have with diversity essays is when they’re written from the perspective of someone who’s not typically “diverse”.

But, as this commenter proves, that doesn’t have to be an obstacle.

Again, focus on something that you have a passion or love for.

Diversity Essay White Guy – dilemma solved!

This one was tough for me because I am a white male that grew up in an advantaged family and community. I tackled my diversity essay by describing my experiences and how they helped me to develop a unique perspective and approach to medicine. – u/fruitandnuts

There’s no need to shy away from what you are either.

If you don’t feel you’re particularly diverse, it’s fine to show an understanding of that. What matters is that you show you’ve been on some kind of journey to expand your cultural experiences.

Sell your travel experiences

I wrote about some crazy experiences I had backpacking in Asia for half a year. I spent a decent amount of time in some rural or third world areas and met some amazing folks. I wrote about the perspectives I gain and my philosophy on culture. – anonymous

One way of also overcoming the above is to capitalize on your travel experiences or adventures.

Showing what you’ve learned from travels in other parts of the world; and how they’ve helped develop your character, can be a great way to start coming up with some good ideas.

Talk about your involvement in societies or clubs

I spun my involvement with my school’s Japanese Culture Association as a diversity essay for a couple of schools. I’m not Japanese, but even if I were, even that could be spun as diversity by espousing the virtues of inclusiveness and getting others involved in another culture. – u/Celdurant

Likewise, you don’t need to have necessarily traveled someplace to gain cultural insight.

Involvement in clubs or associations can often deliver important lessons and new understandings.

Consider your history

Some ideas for diversity: do you play an interesting musical instrument? Have an interesting hobby? What is that “wow” factor that people like hearing about you? Have you grown up outside of the U.S? Speak multiple languages? What organizations are you involved in at school? Are you non traditional? I.e. Did you pursue another career path before medicine? Are you studying something really unique outside of basic sciences? – u/serpuoy

Coming up with the best ideas can involve a lot of questions. Prepare to go deep. Prepare to get personal.

Perhaps think about some of these someplace quiet outside in nature.

I know that I’ve had some of my best ideas there!

….and upbringing

I talked about being a first-gen college student and the perspective on education that comes with that as well as the challenges of earning a degree. – u/myboysiddartha

How you were brought up can be just as informative as what happened to you while growing up.

Being the first generation of your family to do anything major can be a great starting point.

It shows courage in the face of adversity!

Consider any past careers

Teaching and tutoring could be a pretty decent diversity essay. You bring the perspective of someone who’s spent time educating, which is a huge part of a practicing physician’s job! – u/alwayspositiveguy

Certain careers pair very well in terms of diverse experience.

Teaching and tutoring are two good examples, often bringing harmony and unity to broken or fractured communities.

Typical pre-med stuff? That can be diverse enough too!

Don’t automatically write off all of your activities as being “typical premed stuff”. If you have unique volunteering/research that you believe has contributed to your character significantly, those traits most certainly have a place in a diversity essay. I like to think of these essays as, “through my various experiences, what qualities/perspectives have I developed that will bring something different to the table in med school.” – u/jayhiller21

And if you’re worried that your extracurriculars may not help you look all that diverse, don’t be.

Just use this advice to help frame them more uniquely.

…including extracurricular research

I wrote one of my diversity essays about my research experience working with people from different cultures. My main points was that everyone was in the lab for different reasons and motives (To get a job in the US, for personal growth, or unknown reason), and despite our differences, we worked together in harmony, while respecting each other’s values. – u/stoyloks

But be careful about your passions

Diversity essays are not where you discuss historical abuse done to underrepresented populations, but rather where you talk about your OWN diversity, what you bring to the school, and the underrepresented populations you have subsequently worked with. Calling out bigotry is good, but not what you would write in a diversity essay. – u/nerdanese

Don’t get too carried away with the politics if you can help avoid it. Passion is good but it can lead you to risky places.

Be careful not to put people (especially Adcoms) on the defensive.

Stay as neutral as you can.

Final Thoughts

I hope hearing real advice and stories from other pre-meds who’ve gone before you might serve as encouragement.

I appreciate the hardest thing is getting started, but sometimes you’ve just got to go do that.

If you need any help structuring your essay or putting your ideas into words, make sure you check out my article; 6 Medical School Diversity Essay Examples (Ranked Best To Worst!)

How To Conclude Your Medical School Personal Statement

Born and raised in the UK, Will went into medicine late (31) after a career in journalism. He’s into football (soccer), learned Spanish after 5 years in Spain, and has had his work published all over the web. Read more .

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Three Proven Strategies to get into Medical School
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COMMENTS

How to Write the Medical School Secondary Diversity Essay
Medical School Secondaries. The AMCAS application opens for the following year's medical school class around the first week of May. Submissions open around the end of May to early June, so you have a month to prepare your primary application. Therefore, if you hope to begin medical school in the fall of 2023, you must apply in the spring of 2022.
r/premed on Reddit: The Dreaded Diversity Essay
For the diversity essay, I'd focus on aspects of you as a person. These don't have to be medical experiences but it can be really anything - a hobby you're passionate about, an EC that you love, perhaps experiences that have opened your eyes/changed who you are as a person. The diversity essay helps med schools see how this individual could ...
6 Medical School Diversity Essay Examples (Ranked Best to Worst!)
First things first, you're incredibly unlikely to get the chance to write this much for a diversity essay. Most of the prompts you'll see from med schools are in the 500 words range. As evidenced in the following article… Related: Medical School Diversity Essay Prompts (21 Examples) What I love about this example here however is the ...
How To Write The Best Diversity Essay in Medical School (Explained)
Medical school diversity essay: Reddit ideas. Reddit's always a great source of real advice from students who've successfully made the transition from pre-med to med. Here are a couple of useful remarks for putting together a good diversity essay… I'm black, low income, first generation, so plenty diverse.
Medical School Diversity Essay: Complete Guide
Medical School Diversity Essay Sample Prompts. Larner College of Med - University of Vermont. Mayo Med School - Mayo Clinic. Stanford University School of Medicine. University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Wake Forest School of Medicine. Medical School Diversity Essay Samples. Sample 1. Sample 2.
Medical School Diversity Essay Examples and Tips
Topics you can discuss on your medical school diversity essay include: Personal background - ethnicity, socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion. Perspectives from your cultural background. Family background and life circumstances with regards to upbringing. Adversity and challenges.
Medical School Secondary Essays: The Complete Guide 2024 (Examples
Diversity essay misconception 2: "I come from an ethnic minority background that's already well represented in medicine, so I have nothing unique to share." ... I'd already completed the vast majority of my coursework in person, including all my premed requirements. However, my post-graduation plans changed dramatically.
Medical School Diversity Essay Prompts (21 Examples)
Diversity essay topics. You'll see the most common topics from these prompts include: Your educational environment. Your cultural and socioeconomic background. Your ethnicity. Your geographic origin. Your lifestyle. Your gender identity. Your sexual orientation.
The Medical School Diversity Essay: Everything You Need to Know
2. Your "diversity" means nothing if it isn't clearly connected to your potential contribution. Sometimes, applicants get too caught up in the ways they are different, that they forget that being different is not an end, but a means to an end. These differences and unique qualities/experiences have to accomplish something.
How to Write About Diversity in Your Secondary Essays
Think about how you would finish the following sentence: "I want to be a doctor and _______.". That second part is likely something that makes you diverse. If it's not something that's going to apply to everyone in medical school, it's diverse. ← How to Write About Your Obstacles, Challenges, and Problems in your Secondary Essays.
Weekly Weigh-in: The Diversity Secondary Essay
Welcome to PDr's Weekly Weigh-in! Each week, we ask medical students and physicians to weigh in on some of our most frequently asked pre-med questions. This week's question: How did you approach "the diversity secondary essay" on your secondary applications? Edward Chang, DGSOM MS3. Honestly I had a pretty tough time with the diversity ...
The 'Diversity' Essay
These are the topics you will have to address to adequately answer the 'diversity' essay on the secondary application. Visit the Diversity and Inclusion office websites of each medical school you are interested in applying. This will give you a good understanding of the school perspective and priorities. They will also highlight research ...
The Secret to Writing an Excellent Secondary Diversity Essay
Here are a few examples of diversity secondary essay prompts: Sample Diversity Secondary Essays. Check out our 3 sample diversity secondary essays below. Written for two different programs, you can see how different diversity essay prompts can be! Diversity Secondary Essay Sample #1. Prompt: "Diversity comes in many forms.
How to Write an Excellent Diversity Essay
How to write about your diversity. Your answer to a school's diversity essay question should focus on how your experiences have built your empathy for others, your embrace of differences, your resilience, your character, and your perspective. The school might ask how you think of diversity or how you will bring or add to the diversity of the ...
Diversity in Medicine: Resources for Underrepresented Applicants
UCLA Premed Enrichment Program (UCLA PREP) - a 4 week, non-residential program. Deadline: Feb. 28, 2022. For Non-Traditional Students. ... Learn More About How to Write the Diversity Essay Newport Premedical Consulting, LLC. Jennifer Nemecek. [email protected] + 1 734 545 4091 EST.
Diversity Essay Advice : r/premed
Diversity Essay Advice. 💀 Secondaries. 'Tis the season for diversity essays. Perusing the New section of r/premed I have seen several questions regarding "should I use {hobby} as the topic of my diversity essay?" Certainly, there are plenty of people who have gotten into medical school using that method.
diversity essay : r/premed
Go to premed r/premed • by sbukid211 ADMITTED-MD View community ranking In the Top 1% of largest communities on Reddit. diversity essay . so if a school says something like they are "dedicated to inclusivity and supporting patients and students from diverse backgrounds. Feel free to share your personal experience or ties to communities from ...
Best Reddit Tips for Diversity Essays in Medical School
Being asked to write a diversity essay as a secondary in med school is something a lot of pre-meds struggle with. But one of the best places to go for inspiration, especially as it's nameless and faceless, are communities like Reddit. ... Don't automatically write off all of your activities as being "typical premed stuff". If you have ...
Advice on diversity essays
Advice on diversity essays - prewriting secondaries. 💀 Secondaries. Back when I applied for the 2022/2023 application, I had a hard time writing my diversity essays for secondaries. I am a white middle/upper class female, with highly educated parents and I was stuck on the idea of how I am diverse, rather than how my experiences can be diverse.
Diversity Essay : r/premed
Also don't mention a specialty of choice in a diversity essay. Like 80% of med students change their minds after completing med school and as coms know that and will look less favorably on someone saying "and that's why this very specific part of medicine is what I wanna do"
Diversity? Yes I know there are 1000 posts about this but I need help
Yes I know there are 1000 posts about this but I need help. This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you. I've read through dozens of posts about diversity essays on sdn, reddit, a bunch of different websites...and I'm still stuck. There are some things I've done that might be considered ...
diversity essay : r/premed
If you leveraged it to write a newsletter or edit a school paper or something then you can talk about that being diversity. This superficially seems the same as "being an English major" but it shows some impact beyond passing the credits in college (which literally any applicant has to do). If you are unable to find something else after talking ...
diversity essay topic help pls : r/premed
This compelled me to do work in raising literacy rates din third world countries in high school and I continued it in college. I could discuss how the whole experience changed my perspective and stuff. Or. 2. I would discuss how being a twin changed my experiences. At first I didn't even want to do medicine because I wanted to do something ...