Different people have a variety of ethical concerns about ChatGPT. In this post, I’m going to focus on whether it can be an effective tool in helping you on your path to medical school.
What does ChatGPT do?
Let's start with what ChatGPT is doing under the hood. It is trained on a massive set of written material to predict (given a prompt or the last word it generated) what is the most likely thing to come next. With this in mind, the essay it’s generating for you is, at every step, the most predictable thing an applicant to medical school would say. Are you starting to see a problem? Imagine the admission committee member leaping from their seat, proclaiming: “We have to interview this person: they have the most predictable personal statement I’ve ever read!”
Getting into the numbers
In 2023, over 50,000 people applied for around 30,000 seats in medical school. Even if the generated personal statement does a good job at being average, the average medical school applicant has a high risk of not being accepted. How do you stand out then?
Show don’t tell, and be specific
(spoiler alert: ChatGPT is not great at this!)
I went ahead and played around with generating medical school personal statements in ChatGPT. The first thing I noticed is that the system likes to announce “I’m good at X” without showing any examples to back that up. One of the first pieces of advice for writing the personal statement is to show, not tell. Share a specific story that is personal to you and that demonstrates a quality you will bring to a career in medicine. ChatGPT doesn’t know your life, so even when it’s not randomly claiming you are X or Y, the stories are going to be very general things that could have happened to any premed.
What if I make the prompt very specific with lots of details?
You can do this, of course. I might ask, if you had to spell out the background, what happened, and what was the outcome, didn’t you sort of….do all the writing yourself already?
What if I just use ChatGTP to polish my essay?
ChatGPT can probably help you rephrase your story and add some more impressive-sounding words and phrases. The question is whether this is an improvement. There are a lot of words and phases out there which can superficially sound nice, but they don’t contribute new ideas or substance. As noted above, ChatGPT doesn’t know your life, so it can’t suggest novel ideas or content. Vomiting the thesaurus all over their writing is something applicants have been doing long before ChatGPT, and that tactic has not gotten any more effective. You have your GPA and MCAT score to show you are smart, so why add all these extra words and use up your character count demonstrating something the admissions committee already knows? 5300 characters is a tiny amount of space to try and communicate who you are and what you will bring to medicine. If you use up those characters putting in nice sounding phrases or extra fancy words, you're throwing away an opportunity to convey additional information. I promise you, somebody else out there is using that opportunity and they will look like a better candidate than you because they shared more of the substance of who they are. When I’m helping people edit, I often cut out swathes of words that aren’t contributing much, which can free up paragraphs-worth of space to share an additional story or personal quality.
Is ChatGPT thinking about underlying structure?
ChatGPT's goal is to generate words. Remember that it’s operating by asking itself at each step, "What it the most likely thing a human writer would say next?" As such, it doesn’t think about the underlying structure of your argument for you.
What argument? I’m arguing?
Oh yes you are.
A lot of people take the assignment of the personal statement as an opportunity to tell an interesting story about your life. This is a mistake. How you can and should use the personal statement is as a persuasive essay to make the case: why you? Why choose you instead of all the other very nice, very qualified applicants who want a place in medical school? The stories you share about yourself are the evidence, the qualities they show you have that will make you an excellent doctor are the paragraph conclusions, and the overall essay conclusion is that the reader must admit you to medical school. The reader should feel very strongly that you belong in medical school after reading your statement.
Many applicants don’t write the kind of personal statement that will get them into medical school - not forming a clear argument is a very common way they fail. ChatGPT was trained on these examples, so it fails in the same way. The essays I generated using ChatGPT did mention qualities that would be important in a physician, but they were scattered all over rather than being linked to a story (evidence) in a logical or convincing manner. Something I end up doing fairly often with the applicants I work with is not just editing the material they give me, but also helping them select which stories to tell in order to share different facets of their character. If they already have one story about showing empathy by caring for patients, maybe they don’t need another about empathy. Instead, they can round out their application by sharing a different story showing how they worked on a team. If they the say in the conclusion that they’ll bring caring and teamwork to a career in medicine, I can believe them because they’ve shown clear examples of that. There should be a readily apparent link between stories shared and qualities claimed in the essay so a reader can not only follow, but also be persuaded. In contrast, ChatGPT won’t evaluate the argument that you are building with the content you give it. The extra words and phrases it might suggest sound pretty, but can obfuscate the core takeaways in a way that weakens the underlying argument and structure of your personal statement.
But what about the terror of the blank page! Surely having something to edit is better than nothing?
I’ve found that once something exists there can be a lot of activation energy required to cut it out and make big changes. If you generate content and it’s not the right content (specific to you, concise, building an argument), it could pose yet another barrier to getting that right content. There are a wealth of other brainstorming and writing strategies out there that have a higher chance of getting you material that is unique to you and in your authentic voice.
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