Happy CASPA Season! Any Hunger Games fans? I just read ‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ the prequel about Hamich’s games, and I keep thinking of the phrase, ‘May the odds be ever in your favor’ for this cycle. Speaking of this cycle, we have an announcement! Caspa has a new essay – it’s in the ‘other information section’ – it’s a ‘life experiences’ essay. I get it, everybody kind of started freaking out, so we’re not going to freak out. We can tackle this together as an opportunity to share more of ourselves with admissions. Here’s the prompt so you know what it says, and then we’ll work through specifics on what you need to do and how you should be approaching this essay. The prompt for the life experiences essay says, explain how your life experiences and or perspectives could contribute to the PA profession. How can these experiences help advance the goal of having healthcare providers who reflect the population of the country. This question provides an opportunity to describe impactful life experiences, especially challenges or adversity in areas such as family background, community setting education, other hardships or life experiences that may not be easily presented in other parts of the application. The experiences described can be from any point in your timeline and do not need to be directly related to the field of medicine or Healthcare. (This question is also intended to provide admissions committees with information to understand the context of your journey better and to assist with mission alignment through holistic review of applicants. This essay space gives you 2500 characters. That’s about three paragraphs including spaces which is not that much space but let’s talk about what you should think about including.
What to Include in Your Life Experiences Essay
One question I’ve seen is ‘should I be rewriting my personal statement, I put a lot of this information in there – should I be taking it out?’ Not necessarily, but I do see this section as a solution to a problem that a lot of applicants have which is they feel like they can’t give the context they need for their situation. So whether that is a unique family situation or your context growing up, areas you’ve worked in, populations you’ve worked with or specific life experiences, challenges, or adversity that you’ve faced. To me, that’s anything that would affect your perspective and your outlook based on your own experiences. Sometimes that can be hard to put into your personal statement because it’s talking about your GPA (?), and it just doesn’t quite fit. So this essay is actually a good thing because it does provide that opportunity. Now if you have Incorporated a lot of that information into your personal statement, and you feel like it’s cohesive or it’s done well, don’t copy and paste – (we don’t want to put multiple essays in the same or in different places on our application but think of this as an opportunity and a place to expand and to include more information. Maybe this could allow for more stories, more specifics that you couldn’t fit into your personal statement. So that’s one way to go about it.
I want you to also think about the part of the prompt that says think about how your life experiences and perspectives contribute to the PA profession. How do these help advance the goal of having health care providers who reflect the population of the country. What have you been through and experienced that will help you relate to patients that you are going to be taking care of? Nobody is exactly the same as the person sitting next to them. We all have different life experiences. Highlight and celebrate yours. This is your time to share how that will impact you as a provider and as someone dealing with patients. What will you contribute? What have you been through? I know sometimes applicants struggle – they feel like I’m not diverse, I don’t have anything to contribute, but I just don’t think that’s true. I think we all have things that we’ve been through that give us perspectives going into patient care.
I know personally for me, growing up my sister had some unknown medical stuff going on that definitely impacts how I take care of patients. I don’t write patients off or parents when they’re concerned or telling me something weird is going on. I will try to figure out what’s happening and get other opinions and do as much as I can because I saw providers do that for my sister. I think about my dad going through a cancer diagnosis and how he received his test results on a Friday afternoon when the office was closed and as a non-medical person he had no way to interpret that or understand what the pet scan showed which was that he had cancer. I think about those experiences and how that impacts how I take care of patients so those are two of my personal medical perspectives. I think about growing up in Georgia in a suburban area and coming into contact with a lot of people who live in rural settings and aren’t as inclined to maybe seek medical care or have some reluctance to seek medical care. I worked as a CNA in a rehab hospital, and I worked with an elderly population and how that experience and being in that setting working as a CNA really showed me the teamwork approach for healthcare. It showed me how being alert, being aware, speaking up and advocating for patients is very important. I could go on and on about these experiences. That being said, you have to deep dive and figure out for yourself what that means to you and what you’re bringing to the table. If that’s something that you’ve never really thought about, you should be! This life experiences essay is encouraging you to do that – and it’s great to say we want to help people, we want to help patients, but it’s got to be more specific than that. How do you want to help them, how are you going to help them, what do you bring to the table, what are you going to share with your classmates to help them understand their patients better.
Another question I’ve gotten with this essay for this first cycle is ‘how are schools going to use this – are they going to look at it or are they not?’ and that’s probably going to be school specific. Schools may look at this and it may become a big part of their application process. Other schools may not look at it very much and may rely on the personal statement and the supplementals. We don’t know, so it’s best just to go ahead and put a response so that they have that information if they are looking at it. We’ll see what happens moving forward. Yes there is some overlap with the personal statement, there is some overlap with supplemental, but the difference in essay and supplementals is that your supplementals can be much more school specific–so there you can talk about a school’s specific Mission, their values, location, that kind of thing. This essay is more general and about you.
I hope that helps and gives you maybe a little insight into the life experiences essay. Don’t be scared of it. I saw one question that asked whether or not this question be should answered. Yes, it it is optional, so you don’t have to answer it, but I think for the PA School application process, anytime you’re given an opportunity to share more of your story and who you are – take it. Take advantage of this opportunity to just share more about your experiences and giving a bigger picture or a more complete look at who you are. Hopefully they’ll want to bring you in for an interview and then accept you so you become a PA! That’s the goal, right? So think about it! If you have questions, let me know, always happy to help try to clear some stuff up or give you my perspective. And again, moving forward, we’ll see what happens with the life experiences essay.If you’re feeling stumped and not sure what to do, we have a couple options – we have a pre-pa counseling session where you can talk to an advisor and flush it out, get an outline going,and talk through this. We also can help with edits for this, personal statements or your supplementals – so that’s an option as well. If you need any other help, we’re answering tons of questions in the Facebook group, sending emails out with resources on Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube and the website. So get your questions to us and get them answered. Learn from each other. I’m here to help. I feel confident that you can do this. It’s not scary….. well it’s a little scary but it’ll be okay. And we’ll all be fine. Remember you can do this! –And may the odds be ever in your favor!
