An ERAS personal statement writing service can assist you in many ways, but finding the best one, or even a good one, is no simple task. The Google results are muddled. You’ve heard horror stories about poor or incomplete work. Writers can be expensive!
In this article, I explain why you should hire an independent professional writing service to help with your personal statement and other aspects of your ERAS residency application, and I weigh the pros and cons of your many options.
Please feel free to check out all the services I offer. Reach out to me to request help today!
Table of Contents:
Why You MUST Hire the Best ERAS Personal Statement Writing Service
It may not be easy for you to ask for help for a million reasons.
You’ve already accomplished some incredible things on your own, right? For example, you’ve made it most of the way through medical school and you’ll soon be able to officially call yourself a doctor. That’s an awesome feat, something that less than half of 1% of the United States population can claim.
Then why would you need assistance with writing a 600- to 800-word document about yourself?
Well, you don’t NEED help.
You also don’t NEED to spend extra hours studying in order to achieve that sparkling USMLE Step score that will set you apart from other ERAS applicants. After all, you might still match with an average score.
But who wants an average Step score or an average personal statement?
Your medical residency personal statement is IMPORTANT. If you want it to be the best it can be, hire a writing service who will assist you through the process.
In addition to shaping your personal statement into the best possible version of itself, a professional writer offers you two more crucial things:
1. Peace of mind
Pretend you’re about to perform a surgery for the first time. You’ve watched the instructional videos and you know how you're supposed to proceed, but there’s no supervising physician around to guide you. How confident do you feel?
Now picture a surgeon standing beside you who’s performed this exact surgery hundreds of times. They will be there every step of the way, instructing, advising, overseeing.
Similarly, collaborating with a professional who’s already helped others match and knows what works and what doesn't work removes your uncertainty. It alleviates your stress, and it also ensures you have a much better chance of writing an effective personal statement.
2. Time
Time is precious, and it’s especially valuable to you right now since you’ve got a full plate of rotations, studying, and preparing your mountain of residency application material.
Every extra minute you spend on your personal statement is a minute you aren’t spending elsewhere. Outsourcing is how many successful people get so much done in a day.
Why not apply that practice to your current situation?
Instead of spending exhaustive hours and limited energy researching the rules for writing your personal statement, reading examples, and spinning your wheels with draft after draft, take a shortcut and hire someone who’s done it all before.
Their experience and guidance are not the only things you’re buying. You’re also buying yourself more of our most valuable commodity: TIME.
So, is hiring the best ERAS personal statement writing service worth the money?
Can you put a price on time and peace of mind?
Who Should You Hire?
Let’s look at your most common options:
1. Freelancers
Tons of writers offer their services on places like Fiverr and Upwork. Their expertise varies, but you can dig through profiles and reviews to possibly find someone who will do exemplary work.
Most of the time this is the cheapest route. However, like many things in life, you get what you pay for. I’m sure there are freelancers out there that undervalue themselves and overdeliver to their customers, but they are few and far between.
2. Content mills
These are personal statement writing services that have teams of employees, many of whom are freelancers as described above. The level of work you receive depends on your assigned writer.
Content mills carry larger customer loads and offer varying degrees of impersonal or personal service, typically based on how much you’re willing to pay.
These companies are the fast-food restaurants of ERAS application help: Easy to find, predictable, maybe adequate, rarely as awesome as the commercials. Probably not the fine dining experience your personal statement deserves.
3. Resident or attending physicians who write as a side hustle
You may have seen posts on your favorite Reddit or Facebook group by doctors who offer personal statement and other residency application services. They’ve realized they can leverage their success with the match into a side business.
I use this analogy in my personal statement writing guide:
If you have a sore throat, you don’t go to a writer for medical advice. You go to a doctor. Why then, would you go to a doctor for help with writing?
Just like being a good physician, being a good writer takes dedicated study and practice, especially when it comes to something so specific as an ERAS personal statement.
Additionally, in the many years I’ve been doing this work, I’ve seen dozens of aspiring doctor-writers come and go. They quickly find that writing for others isn’t easy. Neither is it as lucrative as just being a physician.
Thus, they soon move on.
4. Professional writers who are devoted to excelling in this exact niche
I promise this article wasn’t meant to become an advertisement for myself but I’m not going to lie and say I’m upset it turned out this way.
Writing is my career, I am passionate about constantly honing my craft, and I treasure the fulfillment I receive from helping students match into their dream residencies.
Acknowledging my bias, I am certain that hiring me, or a writer like me, is the most direct route to the best version of your personal statement.
Feel free to check out all the services I offer. Reach out to me to request help today!
Is Paying Someone to Help Cheating? What Do Programs Think?
When I first began assisting aspiring residents with their personal statements, I faced a moral dilemma. Many asked that I simply write the entire document for them.
To satisfy those requests, I settled on a collaborative process that worked for us both.
I described the service I offered as “from scratch” writing, but was I doing something wrong? Was I helping people cheat?
Those were tough questions then, and their answers are only getting more complicated with the rise of artificial intelligence and the advent of tools like ChatGPT.
Here’s where I stand on the debate:
I am a consultant who gives an expert opinion on what would be my clients’ optimal personal statement. They provide content, and I assemble it into a compelling and convincing presentation. And, of course, I advise my clients to take what I’ve written and make it their own through thoughtful revision.
I did not come up with the above analogy about whether you’d go to a writer for medical advice or a doctor for writing advice.
A PROGRAM DIRECTOR related that to me when we were discussing what I do for a living.
He then went on to say that he had MORE respect for applicants who sought help with important tasks. “In medicine,” he said, “we always leverage other team members’ strengths. Weakness isn't not knowing something; it's being too prideful to ask for help.”
In addition to working as a physician and leading a residency program, that PD runs multiple flourishing businesses at once. He knows there just aren’t enough hours in the day to become an expert in everything.
So how does he buy more TIME? He hires people to contribute their expertise to his ever-expanding success.
I recommend you do the same.
3 Takeaways
1) Hiring the best ERAS personal statement writing service will help you get closer to the best possible version of your ERAS application. It is also a great way to buy yourself time and peace of mind.
2) There are many options out there, so choose carefully!
3) Hiring a professional who lends you their expertise is just plain smart, and it might ultimately be what gives you the edge over your competition.
Photo credits:
Frustrated woman holding up HELP sign - https://depositphotos.com/portfolio-2631505.html
Three doctors giving the thumbs up together - https://depositphotos.com/portfolio-12982378.html
Man with too many options - https://depositphotos.com/portfolio-1001201.html
Puppy with money - https://depositphotos.com/portfolio-1273690.html