Anatomy personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

At the Thursday drawing class in our village hall, I spent most of one autumn failing to draw hands. My fingers came out as sausages until the tutor suggested I stop drawing outlines and look for what sits underneath: the knuckles as a curved row, the base of the thumb moving from the wrist rather than the palm. Once I started reading about the carpal bones so that I could draw them, I realised I was more interested in the structure than the sketch. Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish pushed this further. His account of Tiktaalik, and of the same pattern of one bone, then two, then many small bones running from shoulder to fingers in both fish fins and human arms, made anatomy feel like a record of history as well as a map. I want to study Anatomy because I enjoy that combination of careful observation of form and asking why a body is built the way it is. I am keen to learn through dissection and prosection, and to study embryology and neuroanatomy alongside gross anatomy. Alice Roberts' The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being showed me how much adult structure only makes sense once you know how it develops.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying Biology, Chemistry and Art at A level. In Biology, the heart dissection was the practical I enjoyed most. I took longer than my partner because I wanted to trace the chordae tendineae back to the papillary muscles and understand why the valves do not turn inside out when the ventricles contract. Chemistry has been harder for me, but working through enzymes and buffers has helped me see physiology as chemistry in action, and I have improved steadily by redoing past paper questions until the reasoning, not just the answer, is secure. Art may look like the odd one out, yet my coursework portfolio on the hand, built from life studies and annotated drawings of tendons and joints, has trained me to look patiently and record accurately. For my Extended Project I am investigating how the human thumb opposes the fingers, comparing descriptions of our thumb's saddle-shaped joint with those of chimpanzees using published sources and museum images. Organising sources and planning 5,000 words has taught me to separate what is well established from what is still debated, and presenting my progress to the Year 12 Biology society made me explain it clearly. Drawing the structures made me check relationships I had previously assumed from a flat diagram.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Last spring my dad strained his shoulder lifting paving slabs, and his physiotherapist gave him a sheet of exercises. He found the diagrams confusing, so most evenings I read the instructions aloud and checked his position against the pictures. Asking why each movement mattered led me to the rotator cuff, and I was struck that four fairly small muscles do so much to keep such a shallow joint stable. I stuck to exactly what the physiotherapist had set rather than adding ideas of my own, which felt like the right line for someone who had only read about it. On Saturdays I work in a bakery, where serving a queue at eight in the morning and cashing up accurately at closing have made me calmer under pressure and more organised with my time. I also climb at an indoor wall twice a week with friends. Part of the appeal is solving a route, but I became curious about why my forearms tire long before my legs. Reading about the finger flexors and the pulleys that hold their tendons close to the bone made sense of advice about grip that I had been following without understanding. I now sketch the routes I find hardest, noting which holds load my fingers most.