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How hard is it to get into the Mayo Clinic?

It should come as no surprise, then, that admission to Mayo Medical School is extremely competitive, with an acceptance rate of just 4%. Fortunately, our team has nearly 20 years of experience helping students get into Mayo Medical School.

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When is your blood pressure the highest?

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Can turmeric cure prostate?
Can turmeric cure prostate?

Researchers have found that turmeric and its extract, curcumin, may help prevent or treat prostate cancer. The warm, bitter spice contains...

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Question 2: We are all differentiated from or connected to one another by individual inflections that constitute our diversity. Explain how your relationship with your own diversity and to the diversities of others manifests in your personal and professional activities. (500 words) Though the wording of this question might seem slightly strange or confusing, since technically one person cannot themselves be “diverse,” you should approach it just as you would any other medical school diversity essay. The trick here is to make sure you tie whichever unique quality you choose to discuss about yourself to some kind of tangible result or activity in your life. In doing so, make sure to also show how this will make you a great doctor and valuable part of the Mayo Medical School community.

Example:

I was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, a suburban area east of Los Angeles that is highly diverse and has one of the densest concentrations of Asian Americans in the United States. Though my family and I are racial minorities in this country, growing up second-generation Chinese American in the SGV, I rarely felt out of place in my day-to-day life. Whether Asian American like me, or Latinx like about half of my school classmates, many of my peers came from immigrant families like my own. Although the area is about 30 percent Asian American—extremely high for the United States—Asian culture plays an outsized role. This only became apparent to me when I left the Los Angeles area to attend college in the Midwest. There were the obvious things, such as the lack of dim sum, and then there were the more subtle cultural differences that came later. One such surprise came when I twisted my ankle playing soccer and subsequently mentioned to friends that I couldn’t find an acupuncturist in the area, an idea they clearly found strange. Though I grew up going to see a pediatrician as my primary care provider, my family also regularly sought treatment from acupuncturists and Chinese herbalists, of which there were dozens if not hundreds in our local area. As many of my friends’ families had the same practice, I never thought there was anything unusual about it until I moved to a less diverse part of the country. This experience helped me to see how even medical care can be viewed differently along lines of culture and race, not to mention class, gender, sexual orientation, and more. As a result, I’ve come to believe that it is extremely important for doctors to have experience treating many different types of patients so that they can consider all backgrounds with compassion and thoughtfulness. That’s why I’ve made it a point to seek a wide range of clinical and volunteer experiences both in my hometown in California and in my current location in Ohio. I truly believe that working with populations ranging from elderly Midwestern veterans to Chinese-speaking immigrants has helped me cultivate open-mindedness and sensitivity, which I know will in turn lead me to be the best doctor I can be. As a medical student, I will bring these qualities to Mayo, where I hope to continue to broaden my breadth of patient experiences.

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Is dark chocolate better for you than milk chocolate?

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This essay is great for the following reasons:

It discusses diversity from a number of angles. While the author does touch on their minority background and their upbringing in a highly diverse area, for the essay’s main focus, they instead choose to concentrate on the varying cultural approaches to healthcare that they have observed while living in different parts of the country and how that’s shaped their activities and goals. It effectively makes a two-fold argument: not only does it make the case that the author will contribute to Mayo’s own diversity, it also shows that it is important to the author to take into account the diverse backgrounds of others. Here’s another variation on the diversity essay, which may leave you wondering what you should do differently. While Question 2 focuses more on your personal experiences with diversity, this question specifically zeroes in on diversity within learning environments. In order to answer this question, take some time to consider how diversity—or a lack of diversity—has impacted educational experiences that you have had, whether that’s as a student or as a teacher. Then discuss how those experiences have affected your thoughts regarding your future as a medical student and a doctor.

Example:

My childhood was split into two distinct parts. The first part took place in suburban Detroit, where I was born and lived until I was twelve years old. The second part began the summer before seventh grade when my father’s work transferred him to the Bay Area and my family relocated to Berkeley, California. Among the many changes this entailed for me was leaving the primarily white, all-boys Catholic grade school I’d attended since kindergarten for a large, highly multicultural public school in Berkeley. These two environments couldn’t have been more different. Not only did I go from a religious school to a secular one and from a single-gender classroom to a co-ed one, I also went from a situation in which the vast majority of my classmates were white like me to an environment in which I had peers of all races and ethnicities, and where white students were not the majority. A good number of my new classmates also spoke other languages at home, something that I’d had little exposure to back in Michigan. I’ll never forget the first time I went over to a new classmate’s house after moving to Berkeley. His mother was Japanese and his father was Salvadoran American, and we ate pupusas for dinner and mochi for dessert. Over time I came to understand that nothing about this situation was out of the ordinary in my new school. Whereas I’d previously assumed that my version of America—white, Midwestern, and Christian—was normal, I was made to see that normal was relative and that my family’s way of being was just one of an infinite number of possibilities.

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Though starting my life over at a young age certainly had its challenges, I’m grateful for the perspective it gave me. In my experience, participating in a diverse learning environment helped me become more open-minded and inquisitive about ways of life that I was unfamiliar with. On top of this, having spent many years in a more homogenous environment, I’m highly aware of how easy it is to be insensitive to differences when one hasn’t had exposure to them. In my opinion, these same ideas can be applied to medicine, whether that’s in the medical classroom or the examining room. I believe that diversity is an asset because it helps us develop empathy, break down biases, and shows us what we don’t know. As a medical student, I can only imagine that I’ll learn from both my teachers and my peers, who I hope will share experiences and perspectives with me that I would not have access to on my own. For doctors, for whom empathy and sensitivity are musts, I believe that this kind of knowledge is equally essential to the sort that comes from textbooks.

Let’s break down what’s working here:

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