Crafting Your Application: Clarity vs. Personality

When students are crafting their application for graduate school they rightfully recognize the important need to stand out.

Clever students often look for ways to differentiate themselves on the application process. They decide to use expressive colors and creative fonts. The thinking goes, 'if my application is a different color, design, or stylish in some other way I'll stand out from amongst thousands of other applicants as distinctive.'

This strategy is a mistake.

Great applications are clean and free of clutter and distraction from the substance of the application. A clean design and a professional resume format is essential to effective communication.

When you write, you must make your writing tighter, stronger, and more precise, eliminating every element that is not doing useful work. Your writing improves in proportion to the clutter you keep out.

The question that naturally follows, however, is this: 'If I declutter the flourishes of my writing for clarity, how will my personality shine through?'

Personality and style, however, are inevitable. They are organic to the writer. The problem with writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose is that they lose what makes them unique. Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore, the fundamental rule of writing is to be yourself. Relax and have confidence.

Simplify, prune, and strive for order and organization. Do not try to distract from the substance of your application by creative designs or format.

A professional and clean format is about effective communication, not about showcasing your personality. That comes out in your attitude, your experiences, your insights. It also comes out through how deeply you've thought about who you are, where you're going, and the problems you hope to solve. These will naturally and organically express your personality.

This is one of the reasons The Pre-Med Academy was founded.

You cannot creatively write your way into medical school. Telling a great story alone will not do it. A great application is about having formative experiences, well developed thinking that has been refined by conversations with accomplished mentors, and the academic rigor that helps develop your understanding of the sciences. That's what makes you a standout applicant.

A forest green resume cover or Montserrat font simply will not do.