Queen’s Health Sciences: Supplementary Application Essay Examples & Templates 2024/2025

If you are looking for guidance on the Queen’s Health Sciences supplementary application, including application essay examples and templates, then you’ve come to the right place. 

This Application Prep guide is based on the 2024/2025 application.

In the meantime, if you’re serious about getting into Queen’s BHSc, we recommend you schedule a free consultation for our 1-on-1 Youth Coaching services.

IMPORTANT: The 2024/2025 Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application comprises two main components: a written and a video response. Both are crucial for evaluating the students’ abilities. The deadline for the submission of the application is February 15, 2025, at 11:59 PM EST.

Applicants must also ensure they apply via OUAC by January 15, 2025 at 11:59 PM EST.

Before you dive in, it’s important to understand that the admissions committee receives thousands of applications every year. To help you stand out from the crowd, you need to demonstrate a clear sense of self, strong life experience, and exemplary communication skills.

Our ‘full student’ coaching process does exactly that. If you’re not working with a coach, be sure to read our Self-Awareness, Goal-Setting, and Interview Prep Skills Guides.

The Narrative Communication Approach™ is a particularly useful storytelling framework that helps you tell a clear and concise story, while creating an emotional connection with the reader. We typically use this approach for personal/moral essay questions, like those from Queen’s. All of our Queen’s Health Sciences essay examples and templates use this approach. 

However, we know that you’re applying to a Health Sciences program, and you’re probably used to STEM problem-based essays where you make data and evidence the stars, not personal connections. Our Deductive Communication Approach™ will help you write compelling essays that present a straightforward hypothesis and then provide compelling arguments and data to support it. 

You can use either one of these approaches for your essays, but make sure you connect with a coach to make sure you’re choosing the right approach for unique interests and experiences.

For more information about Queen’s Health Sciences, check out this page and don’t miss our Queen’s Health Sciences Program Guide.

2024/2025 Queens Health Sciences (BHSc) Supplementary Application

This year, applicants are required to complete the following:

#	Format	Preparation	Response Time	Length
1	Written	n/a	10 m	335 words
2	Video	2 m	2 m	n/a

The written response should be completed first, followed by the video response.

While there are no official dress code requirements, you should dress appropriately and have a stable internet connection in a quiet, comfortable space.

Accommodations and technical support are available to those who require them (reach out to suppapp@queensu.ca). We recommend you practice with your coach for optimal performance.

Queens Health Sciences Application Evaluation

In the 2024 admissions process, Queen’s is primarily looking at three factors in an applicant (rated across scores of poor, fair, good, great, and excellent) for written responses:

• Initiative: An applicant’s ability to take initiative in addressing a specific challenge and/or seeking assistance for that scenario if appropriate.
• Problem-solving ability: An applicant’s ability to demonstrate problem-solving skills, an ability to work effectively under changing conditions, and embrace change or new ideas.
• Reflection: An applicant’s ability to reflect on their experience and demonstrate personal growth and maturity.

Make sure you review Queen’s evaluation rubric for written and video responses.

In previous years, there’s also been a final evaluation area, called ‘Communication Clarity’, rated either Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory. Improving real-world skills like communication is an essential part of our ‘full student’ coaching methodology. To make sure your submissions have strong Communication Clarity, read our Narrative Communication Approach™ Guide and our Deductive Communication Approach™ Guide.

QUEENS HEALTH SCIENCES CORE COMPETENCIES 

The courses and assessments in the Queen’s Health Sciences (BHSc) program focuses on teaching students a set of 7 key skills (or ‘core competencies’) to help their graduates be better healthcare providers. 

These core competencies are: 

• Collaborator: Work effectively with other health care professionals to provide safe, high-quality, patient-centered care. 
• Communicator: Form relationships with patients and their families that facilitate the gathering and sharing of essential information for effective health care.
• Health Advocate: Contribute their expertise and influence as they work with communities or patient populations to improve health. 
• Leader: Engage with others to contribute to a vision of a high-quality healthcare system and take responsibility for the delivery of excellent patient care through their activities as clinicians, administrators, scholars, or teachers.
• Scholar: Demonstrate a lifelong commitment to excellence in practice through continuous learning and by teaching others, evaluating evidence, and contributing to scholarship.
• Professional: Committed to the health and well-being of individual patients and society through ethical practice, high personal standards of behaviour, accountability to the profession and society, physician-led regulation, and maintenance of personal health.
• Content Expert: Interprets and connects health sciences information, developing a depth and breadth of knowledge of the health sciences.

So, what does this mean for your Queen’s HS application? You want to show your potential in as many of these areas as possible, through your experiences, interests, skills, goals, etc. This will show the admissions committee that your values are aligned with their teaching philosophy and that you have the potential to excel in the program.

For example, when discussing your experiences, you could talk about a time when you had to go above and beyond to collaborate effectively with a team (i.e. the ‘collaboration’ competency), like a group project at school or as the captain of your school’s debate team. Or, you could talk about how you developed your leadership skills (i.e. the ‘leader’ competency) while volunteering at your local hospital and you took the initiative to create a support group for patients and their families on the floor you are working on (i.e. the ‘health advocate’ competency). 

You don’t have to be an expert in all these areas, but the important thing is to show that you’ve thought about them and are already making the effort to develop each core competency. 

Want to learn how to articulate how your unique skills, interests, and experiences are aligned with these evaluation criteria? Connect with a coach for support.

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Written – Possible Questions 2024/2025

Below are Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application questions. The questions you receive will be randomly generated.

As you’ll see, most of the questions prompt you to tie in your own experiences with values of inclusivity and diversity.

Here are a few examples of written questions you might be asked:

• Tell us about a time when a setback led to a change in your priorities or values. Why did this change? Looking back, would you have done anything differently and why?
• Tell me about when you faced a significant challenge or obstacle. How did you approach it, and what did you learn from the experience?
• Tell me about a time when you felt like you let yourself or someone you know down. How did you handle this, and what did you learn from the experience?
• When was a time you had to be resourceful to gain support for a project outside the classroom?

If you’re not sure how to choose an experience, interest, person, or issue (depending on the question you’re asked), focus on options that will help you:

• Highlight key skills that are fundamental to who you are, like leadership, problem-solving, time management etc.
• Draw upon the specific traits that Queen’s looks for like commitment and dedication.
• Showcases your values, like making an impact on the world, or connecting with people around you. 
• Be unique and authentic.
• Discuss how you evolved as a person because of the learning outcome that the experience/person initiated.

Keep reading for breakdowns/tips, templates, and examples for both types of questions. If you have questions about this year’s application and need help writing your essays, connect with a coach for 1-on-1 support.

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Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Written – Tips

Having a clear structure is key for answering questions on a time crunch. Preparation is key, and practicing with your coach will help you break down the possible questions that could arise and prepare responses for them. You can then adjust them based on the actual question being asked. The worst situation is when the clock is counting down and you are fumbling over thoughts and words, leading to an incoherent and chaotic response – “uhhh, soooo”, “umm, maybe this one will work?”. To prevent this, read some of the example questions below and practice some of them with your coach. Make sure to follow a structured approach when answering.

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Written – Breakdown

Queen’s questions are all open-ended and are designed to help the admissions committee learn more about you and your experiences, values, skills, interests, and goals (learn more about how to answer personal questions in our Interview Prep Guide here — these can be used for written or video/in-person questions).

Remember that your reviewers only know surface-level information, like your name and high school grades — they know nothing about who you are as a person, where you come from, and how your experiences have shaped your personality, interests, and goals.

These questions are your chance to make a lasting first impression and show what makes you unique and a perfect fit for the Queen’s BHSc program. 

You need to go beyond the surface and provide deep insight about who you are. The admissions committee wants to see that you know where you’ve come from (and where you want to go). You might not realize it, but displaying your strong self-awareness will help set you apart from other applicants — that’s why we’ve written a whole blog about it here.

If you have completed your Student Identity Blueprint™ and gone through the Discovery phase of our coaching process, these types of questions will be easy for you to answer (if you haven’t, connect with a coach to get started). 

The most important thing to remember when writing these essays is to constantly refer back to the Supplementary Essay Rubric we discussed above.

Using these criteria, the Personal Questions should draw upon a significant life experience, circumstance, or person that helped you form your identity and impacted your life to such an extent you experienced deep learning (Connection) and set yourself on the path to where you are today to accomplish your personal, academic, and career goals (Personal Growth). 

If you need help answering a Personal Question and creating an essay that gets you a “Distinguished” mark in these three criteria, connect with a coach now (and keep reading for templates and examples to help you as you’re writing your essays).

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Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Written – Template

Here’s a Queens Health Sciences Supplementary Application template for the question: “Tell us about an experience that shaped who you are today.”

COACH’S TIP: While each template will change depending on the question, you can easily form your own template by reading our Narrative Communication Approach™ and breaking down the question into the 5 components listed below. Connect with a coach to talk out your storyline and get started on your template and essay.

• Paragraph 1: Context – Initiative (<50 words)
  • Talk about the initiative you took and why, preferably related to a challenge you were experiencing related to this.

• Paragraph 2: Catalyst – Problems Solved (<100 words)
  • This is where you talk about how you had to problem-solve when you were launching the initiative. Incorporate an example of past experiences or skills you leveraged.

• Paragraph 3: Outcome – Resourcefulness (<85 words)
  • This is where you can mention how resourceful you had to be to achieve the outcomes you did.

• Paragraph 4: Reflection – Summary & Learning (<50 words)
  • Summarize and conclude the essay, ensuring your answer is very clear, coherent, and captures any insights or learnings that you want to bring forward for future experiences, such as at Queen’s.

As mentioned above, if you prefer to use a more problem-based approach, use our Deductive Communication Approach™. Before getting started on your essay, connect with a coach to determine which approach is best for your interests, experiences, and goals.

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Written – Sample Response

Here’s a sample Queens Health Sciences essay example response for the question: “Tell us about an experience that made an impact on the world around you.”

REMEMBER: This is an EXAMPLE ONLY and is NOT meant for you to copy. Why? First and foremost, this is plagiarism and is a serious offence. Plagiarizing these essays will result in immediate disqualification from the admissions process. This can be easily detected using technology and application reviewers are usually trained and/or able to spot when an application isn’t original and does not align with an applicant’s background, personality, values, etc.

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Video – Possible Questions

Here are some of the sample questions that applicants might encounter:

• Please tell us about a time when you were working in a group and a compromise was necessary for the benefit of the team. Why did you make this compromise and/or would you have done anything differently? What personal qualities did you use that you can bring to a future group setting?
• Imagine you are working in a group setting with people from diverse backgrounds. Why is it important to consider the perspectives of others in the group in this team environment? What steps would you take to get the most out of your team and help accomplish the team objectives?
• What would you do if you disagreed with someone?
• Imagine you’re working in a group and you unintentionally offend someone’s cultural background, how would you make them feel comfortable and make sure the group stays on task?

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Video – Tips

Before starting your actual video response, try a few of these best practices to get you comfortable sharing your thoughts in this medium:

• Practice your responses in front of the mirror
• Try recording yourself on a phone or computer camera as it is different from speaking directly with other people.
• Watch your recorded responses back. Make note of how you can improve.
• Ideally, when working with your coach, practice by sending them recorded responses to provide feedback on AND practice with them during sessions to maximize feedback and the quality of your response.

Some of the most common mistakes we see students make include:

• Not maintaining eye contact with the camera
• Not speaking with an intentional pace (don’t rush!). Try speeding up and slowing down at strategic moments to emphasize your message
• Saying ‘ummm’ or ‘like’ too often. Instead, try taking a breath or pause to fight these tendencies

Practicing with your coach with this is especially important as they can help you identify areas of improvement from an admissions perspective.

Often students overestimate their interview abilities, but interviewing is a critical skill that requires a ton of practice. Leverage our interview preparation guide, find a mentor, a friend, or work with a coach to make sure that you are prepared to answer any question.

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Video – Evaluation

In the 2024 admissions process, Queen’s is primarily looking at three factors in an applicant (rated across scores of poor, fair, good, great, and excellent) for video responses:

• Flexibility in collaboration: An applicant’s ability to embrace flexibility when working in their team, contributing to team success regardless of their role within the team.
• Conflict resolution: An applicant’s ability to navigate team challenges and/or resolve conflicts.
• Reflection: An applicant’s ability to reflect on their experience and demonstrate personal growth and maturity.

Make sure you review Queen’s evaluation rubric for written and video responses.

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Video – Template

• Section 1: Context – Experience (<30 secs)
  • Introduction to the activity or organization and its foundational principles or goals.

• Section 2: Catalyst – Challenge (<30 secs)
  • A specific challenge or experience faced that highlights the core criteria or theme in focus.

• Section 3: Outcome – Impact (<30 secs)
  • Steps taken and the results achieved, showcasing growth, learning, and impact.

• Section 4: Reflection – Lessons Learned (<30 secs)
  • Reflection on the experience and its broader implications or lessons learned.

Queen’s Health Sciences Supplementary Application: Video – Sample Response

Here’s an example for the question “Discuss a situation where you have fostered a welcoming and safe environment, respecting diverse viewpoints.”

Remember, these examples are purely illustrative and are not meant to be copied. Your authenticity and originality are key to creating a compelling application. As you prepare your application, our coaching process can offer significant support, guiding you through every step and helping you craft an application that truly resonates with the admissions committee. With our expert guidance, you can approach the application process with confidence, knowing you have a dedicated team supporting your journey to success.

To help get you a bit more excited about possibly attending Queen’s Health Sciences, Youthfully Insider, HanShu, created this Day in the Life of a Queen’s Health Sciences student. Check it out below!

If you need help answering a question and creating an essay that gets you an “excellent” mark in the criteria, connect with a coach now.

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