To Infinity and Beyond

As I move towards completing my application for residency, I am asking myself whether I am presenting myself in the most accurate, informative, and profitable manner. I want programs to appreciate who I am and what I want to get out of my three plus years in a pediatrics residency.

In doing this, one runs the line of being a Penelope ("So...I am at the top of my class, absolutely LUUUUUUUVVVV children, and actually invented pediatrics") and expressing appropriate honors and accomplishments.

I had to laugh as I went through my personal statement with my advisor last week. As one who loves to write, act, and feel things strongly, I can get carried away at times when I write. Hyperbole is probably something I get pretty honestly. As my advisor looked at one sentence, he said cautiously, "here, you might want to take out these words at the end...it makes your sentence sound tooo...errrr..."

"Dramatic?"

"Yeah..." he exhaled, relieved that I had said it.

I am pretty sure it said something like "...to become a competent healer of devastating diseases ravishing humankind on Earth in this galaxy within our universe to infinity and beyond..."

I think we managed to tame that sentence down and make a couple other revisions.

As you might be able to tell from my blogging, I am often accused of being "run-on sentence" guy. Though I could write anything for my Honors (you read it right) Honors English teachers, the teachers of nearly every other subject made fun of me for my run-on sentences and utter inability to be concise when communicating to others what I was trying to say within my essays, papers, or projects that were assigned to me, leaving me with less-than-favorable views towards these critics that whether consciously or not were chipping away at the foundation of confidence that I had worked so diligently to build, leaving my ego in the garbage until I hit 4th period English class again. Many years post-highschool, one teacher stopped me in the grocery and told me that she still used my essays in her AP Bio class as an example of what "writing too much" looks like. (Who stops an old student in the bread aisle to tell them that by the way?)

For all of the above reasons, I am having several staffpersons edit my personal statement in an effort to produce the most powerful, cogent essay for my application. If you are skilled in editting essays, please let me know!

To infinity and beyond...