Sample personal statement

The first time I held someone's hand while they were scared, I was sixteen and the person was my grandmother, three days after her stroke. The nurse on her ward, Dana, showed me how to help her sip water and told me, without fuss, exactly what each machine was for. I remember thinking that Dana was the only person in the room who made the fear smaller.

Since then I have finished my prerequisites with a 3.6 GPA while working twenty hours a week at a pharmacy counter, where most of my day is people who are worried about a parent, a bill or a diagnosis. I am not applying because I want to help people in general. I am applying because I have seen what a calm, competent nurse does for a family in the worst week of its life, and I want to be that person for the next family.

The pharmacy taught me the part of nursing that is not in the textbooks. A woman came in last winter for her husband's blood-pressure refill and started crying at the counter because the price had doubled. I could not change the price, but I could call the prescriber about a generic, walk her through the manufacturer's discount form, and write the number of the social worker on the bag. She came back a month later to tell me it had worked. That is the job I want: notice the thing nobody else in the room has time for, and fix the part of it that can be fixed.

My prerequisites were the hardest two years of school I have done, and I am glad of it. Anatomy and physiology gave me a map of the body I now cannot stop using; microbiology turned hand-washing from a rule into a reason; statistics is why I read the studies behind the leaflets we hand out. I earned a B in general chemistry while working full time and caring for my grandmother at home, and I would not trade that semester, because it taught me how to plan a week with no slack in it.

I know what an accelerated program asks. I have worked twelve-hour shifts, I have been the person who stays after close, and I have learned to ask for help early rather than late. I want to spend my career on a medical-surgical floor first, because that is where I will see the widest range of patients, and later in geriatric care, because the people who taught me the most about courage were in their eighties.

Dana retired last year. I never told her that the twenty minutes she spent explaining a monitor to a frightened sixteen-year-old decided what that sixteen-year-old would do with her life. I would like to be that twenty minutes for someone else.