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Calgary: BHSc Question: How you think

Short answer; aim for roughly 200-300 words per question (Calgary sets the exact field limits in the live form)

My grandmother manages diabetes, hypertension, and a fear of hospitals, and watching her appointments taught me that a treatment plan only works if it fits the person's actual life. When her doctor switched her to an insulin schedule that ignored her fasting during religious holidays, she simply stopped taking it and told no one. I realized the failure was not hers. The plan had been built for a patient who did not exist. So I started going to her appointments to translate, not just language, but constraints: that she eats one large meal, that she will not use a needle in front of family, that pills she cannot read the labels of end up in a drawer. We rebuilt the schedule around those facts and her numbers improved within two months. I want to study health sciences because that gap, between what is medically correct and what a real person can sustain, is the problem I find most interesting, and I would rather spend my life closing it than pretending it is the patient's fault.
What it’s really asking

This stands in for the BHSc supplementary application's questions, which Calgary describes as having no right or wrong answers and being designed to show how you think and express yourself. The question typically asks you to reflect on an experience, a problem, or how you reason through something.

Why they ask it

Calgary uses these answers to distinguish among applicants whose grades are already strong. They want evidence of genuine thinking, self-awareness, and the ability to express an idea clearly in a tight space, qualities that predict success in a research-and-reasoning-heavy degree.

Three ways in
A wrong turn

A moment when the obvious answer to a problem turned out to be wrong, and what you learned from being wrong.

A real trade-off

A specific time you had to weigh two things you cared about against each other and decide.

An ordinary lens

An ordinary experience (a job, a family situation, a hobby) that quietly changed how you see health, science, or people.

✕  Weak opening

“Ever since I was a child, I have been passionate about helping people and making a difference in healthcare.”

✓  Strong opening

“My grandmother manages diabetes, hypertension, and a fear of hospitals, and watching her appointments taught me that a treatment plan only works if it fits the person's actual life.”

✦ Annotated example · The drawer of unread pills. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
In the back of our pharmacy, there is a blue bin where we put medications patients return unopened. Most weekends I sort it, and I have started to see the bin as a kind of confession. 1One bottle came back nine times under the same name: a blood pressure pill prescribed three times a day. Three times a day is a clinical answer. It is also useless to a man who drives a long-haul truck and cannot stop on a schedule. 2When I mentioned the pattern to the pharmacist, she did not lecture him. She asked when his hands were free, learned it was at fuel stops every twelve hours, and called the doctor to ask for a twice-daily formulation. The tenth bottle did not come back. 3That is the moment I keep returning to. The drug had not failed and the patient had not failed. 4The schedule had failed, and a schedule is something a person can redesign. 5I want to study health sciences because I find that failure point more interesting than any single diagnosis. I would rather spend my career asking why a system keeps handing people instructions they cannot follow than accept a returned bottle as the patient's mistake. 6
  1. 1A concrete, original image (the return bin) opens with the candidate noticing something, which signals how they think rather than what they have achieved.
  2. 2Names the gap between what is medically correct and what a real life can sustain, which is exactly the systems-level thinking Calgary's BHSc rewards.
  3. 3Shows the candidate watching a solution get built around real constraints, demonstrating curiosity and a bias toward closing the gap instead of blaming the patient.
  4. 4A short, deliberate pause that sets up the reframing without padding.
  5. 5The essay's intellectual core, stated plainly. This reframing is the move that shows how the candidate thinks.
  6. 6Ties personal observation to genuine program motivation, ending on intellectual commitment rather than a tidy moral.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is a moment when I changed my mind about something, and what specifically caused the shift?
  • When have I seen the 'correct' answer fail a real person, and what did I do about it?
  • What ordinary part of my life has shaped how I see this field in a way most applicants would not share?
Before you submit
  • Did I answer the actual question asked, rather than recycling a generic personal essay?
  • Does the answer show my reasoning on one specific example, not a list of achievements?
  • Am I comfortably under the word limit with every sentence earning its place?

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