Personal Essay
In this section, write a personal essay that addresses why you selected pharmacy as a career and how the Doctor of Pharmacy degree relates to your immediate and long-term professional goals. Describe how your personal, educational, and professional background will help you achieve your goals.
Do not personalize your essay for a particular pharmacy degree institution. You cannot edit your personal essay after you submit your completed application.
Requirements
- Keep your essay topic general: Follow the prompt to write your statement. Keep the statement general as this essay is sent to all the programs you apply to. If you plan to only apply to one program, we still strongly recommend keeping your statement general in case you later apply to additional programs. Once you submit your application, the statement cannot be edited or changed.
- Do not exceed the maximum length: You can see both the word and character count below the field in the application. The right-hand number shows the maximum number of characters that you can use in your essay. As you type, you can see how many characters are still available and the associated word count. Characters include spaces, carriage returns, and punctuation. You cannot save your essay if it exceeds the 4,500 character limit.
- Use your own words: Plagiarizing any part of your essay is a violation of the Applicant Code of Conduct and may subject you to sanctions. See the Plagiarism section below for more information.
- Use simple formatting: Formatting such as tabs, italics, multiple spaces, etc., will not be saved. To delineate paragraphs, type a double return between each paragraph.
- Copy and paste from Notepad: Some formatting characters used in Microsoft Word (i.e., angled quotes, accents, special characters, bold, underline, or italic text) do not display properly in PharmCAS. We recommend copying and pasting your statement from Notepad, or a similar plain text editor.
Proofreading
Be sure to read over your essay several times to catch any spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc., errors before submitting. Once you submit your application, you cannot edit your essay. If you find an error after submission that you believe could have major effects on your application, we recommend sending a corrected copy directly to the programs you applied to.
Plagiarism
Your personal statement is subject to a similarity review via iThenticate/Turnitin (an online plagiarism checker used by PharmCAS) for detection of plagiarism and other potential violations of the Applicant Code of Conduct. Submitted personal statements and other materials may be used as source documents in the iThenticate/Turnitin for Admissions reference database solely for purposes of detecting plagiarism of such documents.