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The University of Chicago The Law School

In their own words: admissions essays that worked.

Throughout this issue, countless examples show why we are so proud of the students at the law school. One might think that we get lucky that the students the admissions office chose for their academic accomplishments also turn out to be incredible members of our community, but it’s really all by design. Our students show us a great deal more in their applications than just academics—and we care about a lot more than their numbers. In these pages, meet five of our students in the way we first met them: through the personal statements they wrote for their law school applications. And through their photos, meet a sixth: Andreas Baum, ’12, the talented student photographer who took these pictures for us.

Tammy Wang, ’12

EDUCATION: Johns Hopkins University, BA in International Relations, concentration East Asian Studies, with honors (2007) WORK EXPERIENCE: AsianFanatics.net LAW SCHOOL ACTIVITIES: University of Chicago Law Review, Immigrant Child Advocacy Project Clinic, APALSA, Admissions Committee, Law School Film Festival I fell in love for the first time when I was four. That was the year my mother signed me up for piano lessons. I can still remember touching those bright, ivory keys with reverence, feeling happy and excited that soon I would be playing those tinkling, familiar melodies (which my mother played every day on our boombox) myself. To my rather naïve surprise, however, instead of setting the score for Für Elise on the piano stand before me, my piano teacher handed me a set of Beginner’s Books. I was to read through the Book of Theory, learn to read the basic notes of the treble and bass clefs, and practice, my palm arched as though an imaginary apple were cupped between my fingers, playing one note at a time. After I had mastered the note of “C,” she promised, I could move on to “D.” It took a few years of theory and repetition before I was presented with my very first full-length classical piece: a sonatina by Muzio Clementi. I practiced the new piece daily, diligently following the written directives of the composer. I hit each staccato note crisply and played each crescendo and every decrescendo dutifully. I performed the piece triumphantly for my teacher and lifted my hands with a flourish as I finished. Instead of clapping, however, my teacher gave me a serious look and took both my hands in hers. “Music,” she said sincerely, “is not just technique. It’s not just fingers or memorization. It comes from the heart.” That was how I discovered passion. Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn: the arcs and passages of intricate notes are lines of genius printed on paper, but ultimately, it is the musician who coaxes them to life. They are open to artistic and emotional interpretation, and even eight simple bars can inspire well over a dozen different variations. I poured my happiness and my angst into the keys, loving every minute of it. I pictured things, events, and people (some real, some entirely imagined— but all intensely personal) in my mind as I played, and the feelings and melodies flowed easily: frustration into Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, wistfulness into Chopin’s nocturnes and waltzes, and sheer joy into Schubert. Practice was no longer a chore; it was a privilege and a delight. In high school, I began playing the piano for church services. The music director gave me a binder full of 1-2-3 sheet music, in which melodies are written as numbers instead of as notes on a music staff. To make things a bit more interesting for myself—and for the congregation—I took to experimenting, pairing the written melodies with chords and harmonies of my own creation. I rarely played a song the same way twice; the beauty of improvisation, of songwriting, is that it is as much “feeling” as it is logic and theory. Different occasions and different moods yielded different results: sometimes, “Listen Quietly” was clean and beautiful in its simplicity; other times, it became elaborate and nearly classical in its passages. The basic melody and musical key, however, remained the same, even as the embellishments changed. The foundation of good improvisation and songwriting is simple: understanding the musical key in which a song is played—knowing the scale, the chords, the harmonies, and how well (or unwell) they work together—is essential. Songs can be rewritten and reinterpreted as situation permits, but missteps are obvious because the fundamental laws of music and harmony do not change. Although my formal music education ended when I entered college, the lessons I have learned over the years have remained close and relevant to my life. I have acquired a lifestyle of discipline and internalized the drive for self-improvement. I have gained an appreciation for the complexities and the subtleties of interpretation. I understand the importance of having both a sound foundation and a dedication to constant study. I understand that to possess a passion and personal interest in something, to think for myself, is just as important.

Josh Mahoney, ’13

EDUCATION: University of Northern Iowa, BA in Economics and English, magna cum laude (2009) LAW SCHOOL ACTIVITIES: Student Admissions Committee, flag football, Tony Patiño Fellow The turning point of my college football career came early in my third year. At the end of the second practice of the season, in ninety-five-degree heat, our head coach decided to condition the entire team. Sharp, excruciating pain shot down my legs as he summoned us repeatedly to the line to run wind sprints. I collapsed as I turned the corner on the final sprint. Muscle spasms spread throughout my body, and I briefly passed out. Severely dehydrated, I was rushed to the hospital and quickly given more than three liters of fluids intravenously. As I rested in a hospital recovery room, I realized my collapse on the field symbolized broader frustrations I felt playing college football. I was mentally and physically defeated. In South Dakota I was a dominant football player in high school, but at the Division I level my talent was less conspicuous. In my first three years, I was convinced that obsessively training my body to run faster and be stronger would earn me a starting position. The conditioning drill that afternoon revealed the futility of my approach. I had thrust my energies into becoming a player I could never be. As a result, I lost confidence in my identity. I considered other aspects of my life where my intellect, work ethic, and determination had produced positive results. I chose to study economics and English because processing abstract concepts and ideas in diverse disciplines was intuitively rewarding. Despite the exhaustion of studying late into the night after grueling football practices, I developed an affinity for academia that culminated in two undergraduate research projects in economics. Gathering data, reviewing previous literature, and ultimately offering my own contribution to economic knowledge was exhilarating. Indeed, undergraduate research affirmed my desire to attend law school, where I could more thoroughly satisfy my intellectual curiosity. In English classes, I enjoyed writing critically about literary works while adding my own voice to academic discussions. My efforts generated high marks and praise from professors, but this success made my disappointment with football more pronounced. The challenge of collegiate athletics felt insurmountable. However, I reminded myself that at the Division I level I was able to compete with and against some of the best players in the country.While I might never start a game, the opportunity to discover and test my abilities had initially compelled me to choose a Division I football program. After the hospital visit, my football position coach—sensing my mounting frustrations—offered some advice. Instead of devoting my energies almost exclusively to physical preparation, he said, I should approach college football with the same mental focus I brought to my academic studies. I began to devour scouting reports and to analyze the complex reasoning behind defensive philosophies and schemes. I studied film and discovered ways to anticipate plays from the offense and become a more effective player. Armed with renewed confidence, I finally earned a starting position in the beginning of my fourth year. My team opened the season against Brigham Young University (BYU). I performed well despite the pressures of starting my first game in front of a hostile crowd of 65,000 people. The next day, my head coach announced the grade of every starting player’s efforts in the BYU game at a team meeting: “Mahoney—94 percent.” I had received the highest grade on the team. After three years of A’s in the classroom, I finally earned my first ‘A’ in football. I used mental preparation to maintain my competitive edge for the rest of the season. Through a combination of film study and will power, I led my team and conference in tackles. I became one of the best players in the conference and a leader on a team that reached the semi-finals of the Division I football playoffs. The most rewarding part of the season, though, was what I learned about myself in the process. When I finally stopped struggling to become the player I thought I needed to be, I developed self-awareness and confidence in the person I was. The image of me writhing in pain on the practice field sometimes slips back into my thoughts as I decide where to apply to law school. College football taught me to recognize my weaknesses and look for ways to overcome them. I will enter law school a much stronger person and student because of my experiences on the football field and in the classroom. My decision where to attend law school mirrors my decision where to play college football. I want to study law at the University of Chicago Law School because it provides the best combination of professors, students, and resources in the country. In Division I college football, I succeeded when I took advantage of my opportunities. I hope the University of Chicago will give me an opportunity to succeed again.

Osama Hamdy, '13

EDUCATION: University of California, Berkeley, BA in Legal Studies, AB in Media Studies (2010) LAW SCHOOL ACTIVITES: BLSA, Intramural Basketball I was a shy thirteen-year-old who had already lived in six locations and attended five schools. Having recently moved, I was relieved when I finally began to develop a new group of friends. However, the days following September 11, 2001, were marked with change. People began to stare at me. Many conversations came to a nervous stop when I walked by. However, it wasn’t until one of my peers asked if I was a terrorist that it really hit me. Osama, my name is Osama. I went from having a unique name that served as a conversation starter to having the same name as the most wanted man in America. The stares and the comments were just the beginning. Eventually I received a death threat at school. I remember crying alone in my room, afraid to tell my parents in fear that they might not let me go to school anymore. My experience opened my eyes up to racial and religious dynamics in the United States. I started to see how these dynamics drove people’s actions, even if some were not aware of the reasons. The more I looked at my surroundings with a critical eye, the more I realized that my classmates had not threatened me because of hate, but because of fear and ignorance. This realization was extremely empowering. I knew that mirroring their hostility would only reinforce the fear and prejudice they held. Instead, I reached out to my peers with an open mind and respect. My acceptance of others served as a powerful counter example to many negative stereotypes I had to face.With this approach, I was often able to transform fear into acceptance, and acceptance into appreciation. I chose not to hide my heritage or myself, despite the fear of judgment or violence. As a result, I developed a new sense of self-reliance and self-confidence. However, I wasn’t satisfied with the change that I had brought about in my own life. I wanted to empower others as well. My passion for equality and social justice grew because I was determined to use my skills and viewpoint to unite multiple marginalized communities and help foster understanding and appreciation for our differences and similarities alike. The years following September 11th were a true test of character for me. I learned how to feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations. This allowed me to become a dynamic and outgoing individual. This newfound confidence fueled a passion to become a leader and help uplift multiple minority communities. During the last two summers I made this passion a reality when I took the opportunity to work with underprivileged minority students. All of the students I worked with came from difficult backgrounds and many didn’t feel as though college was an option for them. I learned these students’ goals and aspirations, as well as their obstacles and hardships. I believed in them, and I constantly told them that they would make it. I worked relentlessly to make sure my actions matched my words of encouragement. I went well above the expectations of my job and took the initiative to plan several additional workshops on topics such as public speaking, time management, and confidence building. My extra efforts helped give these students the tools they needed to succeed. One hundred percent of the twenty-one high school juniors I worked with my first summer are now freshmen at four-year universities. I feel great pride in having helped these students achieve this important goal. I know that they will be able to use these tools to continue to succeed. Inspired by my summer experience, I jumped at the opportunity to take on the position of Diversity Outreach Ambassador for the San Francisco Bar Association Diversity Pipeline Program. In this position, I was responsible for helping organize a campus event that brought educational material and a panel of lawyers to UC Berkeley in order to empower and inform minority students about their opportunities in law school. In this position I was able to unite a diverse group of organizations, including the Black Pre-Law Association, the Latino Pre-Law Society, and the Haas Undergraduate Black Business Association. Working in this position was instrumental in solidifying my desire to attend law school. The lawyers who volunteered their time had a significant impact on me. I learned that they used their legal education to assist causes and organizations they felt passionate about. One of the lawyers told me that she volunteered her legal services to a Latino advocacy association. Another lawyer explained to me how he donated his legal expertise to advise minority youth on how to overcome legal difficulties. Collaborating with these lawyers gave me a better understanding of how my passion for law could interact with my interest in social justice issues. My experiences leading minority groups taught me that I need to stand out to lead others and myself to success. I need to be proud of my culture and myself. My experiences after September 11th have taught me to defeat the difficulties in life instead of allowing them to defeat me. Now, whether I am hit with a racial slur or I encounter any obstacles in life, I no longer retreat, but I confront it fearlessly and directly. I expect law school will help give me the tools to continue to unite and work with a diverse group of people. I hope to continue to empower and lead minority communities as we strive towards legal and social equality.

Eliza Riffe, '13

EDUCATION: University of Chicago, AB in Anthropology, with honors (2006) WORK EXPERIENCE: Sarbanes-Oxley coordinator and financial analyst, ABM Industries Harper Library, situated at the center of the main quadrangle at the University of Chicago, resembles a converted abbey, with its vaulted ceilings and arched windows. The library was completed in 1912, before Enrico Fermi built the world’s first nuclear reactor, before Milton Friedman devised the permanent income hypothesis, and well before Barack Obama taught Constitutional Law. Generations of scholars have pored over Adam Smith and Karl Marx in the main reading room, penned world-class treatises at the long wooden tables, and worn their coats indoors against the drafts in the spacious Gothic hall. Abiding over all of these scholars, and over me when I was among them, is an inscription under the library’s west window that has served as my guiding intellectual principle: “Read not to believe or contradict, but to weigh and consider.” Per this inscription, which is an abridgement of a passage by Sir Francis Bacon, we readers ought to approach knowledge as a means of enhancing our judgment and not as fodder for proclamations or discord. The generations of scholars poring over Marx, for example, should seek to observe his theories of economic determinism in the world, not immediately begin to foment a riot in the drafty reading room at Harper. The reader may contend, though, that too much weighing and considering could lead to inertia, or worse, to a total lack of conviction. The Harper inscription, however, does not tell its readers to believe in nothing, nor does it instruct them never to contradict a false claim. Instead it prescribes a way to read. The inscription warns us to use knowledge not as a rhetorical weapon, but as a tool for making balanced and informed decisions. On the cruelest days in February during my undergraduate years, when I asked myself why I had not chosen to pursue my studies someplace warmer, I would head to Harper, find a seat from which I would have a clear view of the inscription, and say to myself: “That is why.” On such a day in February, seated at a long Harper table with my coat still buttoned all the way up, I discovered how much I appreciated Carl Schmitt’s clarity and argumentation. I marveled at the way his Concept of the Political progressed incrementally, beginning at the most fundamental, linguistic level. As an anthropology student, I wrongfully assumed that, because Schmitt was often positioned in a neo-conservative tradition, I could not acknowledge him. That day in February, I took the Bacon inscription to heart, modeled its discipline, and was able to transcend that academic tribalism. I added the kernel of The Concept of the Political , Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” dichotomy, to an ever-growing array of images and ideas that I had accumulated, among them Marx’s alienation, C. S. Peirce’s indexicality, and Pierre Bourdieu’s graphical depiction of social space. This patchwork of theories and descriptive models, when weighed and considered, informs my understanding of new ideas I encounter. The academic dons who decided to place the Bacon quote under the western window intended that the idea would transcend the scholastic realm of its readers. Indeed, in my work as a financial analyst for a publicly traded company, it is often a professional touchstone. Though each day in the world of corporate finance is punctuated with deadlines and requests for instantaneous information, I am at my best as an analyst when I consider all of the data thoroughly and weigh the competing agendas. Like emulsified oil and vinegar that separate over time when left undisturbed, the right answer will emerge from among all of the wrong answers when I take the time to consider all of the possibilities. An extra hour spent analyzing an income statement can reveal even more trends than could a cursory glance. Moreover, the more I weigh and consider when I have the opportunity, the more I enhance the judgment I will need to make quick decisions and pronouncements when I do not have time.With inner vision sharpened by years of consideration, I am able to “see into the life of things,” as Wordsworth described in writing of “Tintern Abbey.” Wordsworth’s memory of the abbey provided him much-needed transcendence in moments of loneliness or boredom. The memory of the inscription under the west window at Harper—“Read not to believe or contradict, but to weigh and consider”—has a similar function. For Wordsworth, Tintern alleviated emotional anguish; for me, the Bacon inscription reaffirms a sense of intellectual purpose. The words under the window, their meaning, and the very curvature of the letters in the stone are fixed in my mind and will continue to be as I enter the life of the law. What intrigues me most about legal education is the opportunity to engage simultaneously in the two complementary processes the Harper inscription inspires in me—building a foundation of theories and descriptive models while enhancing my judgment with practice and patience.

Evan Rose, '13

EDUCATION: University of Otago (New Zealand), BA in Philosophy (1999) WORK EXPERIENCE: Ski and Snowboard Schools of Aspen/Snowmass, Eurospecs Limited (NZ) LAW SCHOOL ACTIVITIES: LSA 1L Representative, BLSA, Student Admissions Committee As I tumble through the air, time seems to slow. I have fallen hard many times before, but even before I hit the ground I can tell this fall is different. I complete one and a half back flips and slam shoulders-first into the slope. As I lie on the hill, the snow jammed into the hood of my jacket begins to melt, and icy water runs down my back. I do not yet know that the impact has broken my neck. I grew up only a short drive from some of New Zealand’s best ski resorts, but my family could never afford ski vacations. My first opportunity to try snowboarding came on a trip with my university flatmate.With expectations shaped purely by the media, I left for the trip assuming snowboarding was a sport for adrenaline junkies, troublemakers, and delinquents. Much to my surprise, I instead found that it provided me with a sense of peace that defied these preconceptions. Anxiety had been a constant companion throughout much of my childhood. I had not always been this way, but years of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of my stepfather had taken their toll. My once carefree demeanor had changed, leaving me fearful, panicky, and timid. On a snowboard these feelings faded into the background for the first time in years, and the difference was profound. I never truly realized the pain I had endured until riding gave me the opportunity to escape it. I sought out every possible opportunity to go riding, and through the sport I pushed the limits of both my physical and mental courage. Snowboarding became a vehicle for regaining the confidence and self-worth that had been taken from me through the injustice of abuse. Even as I began to ride competitively in boardercross racing and halfpipe, launching myself into the air over sixty-foot jumps, the sense of peace I gained during my first day on a snowboard stayed with me. It did, at least, until that April afternoon. As I lay in a hospital bed a few hours after my accident, an overwhelming sense of fear replaced any confidence that snowboarding had instilled in me. I faced the prospect of a lengthy and complicated surgery, with no certainty about the outcome. I knew my shattered vertebrae could easily leave me paralyzed. I was lucky to be alive, but any sense of luck eluded me as pain sent me in and out of consciousness. Two days later, surgeons worked for seven hours to rebuild my neck. I awoke to learn that I had escaped any serious nerve damage. However, I would need to be immobilized by a brace twenty-four hours a day, and for over three months, before I could even contemplate rehabilitation. Those months passed slowly. When I was finally able to start the process of rehabilitation, I made recovery my full-time job. I quickly learned that pain was to become the central reality of that year. The first day I could walk to my mailbox marked a significant achievement. Determined to return to full health, and even hoping to eventually return to riding, I gritted my teeth through the daily therapy sessions. At each subsequent visit, my doctor expressed his surprise at the progress of my recovery. Only twelve months after my injury, he cleared me to make a few careful runs on an easy, groomed slope. While I made it through those first few runs safely, they left me shaking with fear. Since then, I have again found joy in riding, but no amount of determination will allow me to ride the way I had before. I won’t be attempting double back flips again any time soon. Rather than focusing on my own riding, I now direct my energy into coaching. My experiences showed me the transformative power of courage and self-confidence, and taught me to build these qualities in others. At the Aspen Skiing Company, I develop and implement teaching curricula for more than two hundred snowboard instructors. My goal is for my fellow coaches to recognize that snowboarding can offer much more than just a diversion. It has the potential to have a profound and inspiring impact on their students’ lives. In the ample time my recovery allowed for reflection, I found solace in the fact that the abuse in my childhood fostered in me not bitterness, but an enduring dedication to fairness and justice. As a college student, this dedication led me to seek out classes in ethics and morality. As a manager and leader, I strive to display both courage and enduring fairness. My interest in the legal profession stems from my belief that laws represent the concrete expressions of justice and fairness in our society. After discovering the salvation it held for me, I believed that I was reliant on snowboarding. Yet, being forced to face the grueling process of rehabilitation without it allowed me to take the final step to recovery from the trauma of my childhood. I realized I am much stronger and more resilient than I had previously believed. I realized that courage is not something that snowboarding gave me but something that has always been within me. These realizations have prepared me to broaden the scope of my dedication to justice. Secure in the knowledge that the courage and determination I have shown will help shape my future success, I am now ready to take on this new challenge: the study and practice of law.  

Law School Optional Essays: What to Know

Write optional essays only if they contribute to your case for admission.

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A classic mistake applicants make is to write as much as allowed, hoping that something will stick. Applicants can best show their professionalism, communication skills and respect for the reader by writing efficiently and purposefully.

Every law school requires applicants to submit a personal statement, typically limited to two or three double-spaced pages, along with a resume typically limited to two pages. These two documents provide applicants with their chief opportunities to detail their interests, goals and path to law school.

Beyond those core documents, many law schools allow other essays, usually optional but sometimes required. Most prominent is a type of essay that used to be called a diversity statement. 

Diversity, Perspective or Background Statements

Until recently, almost every law school offered an optional diversity statement. Prompts for diversity statements varied among law schools, but typically concerned an applicant’s identity and background, past hardships or potential to contribute to a diverse and inclusive campus environment.

After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed race-conscious admissions policies in June 2023, law schools adapted diversity statements in different ways, which will likely continue to evolve over future admissions cycles.

Currently, most law schools offer one or more optional essay prompts that give applicants an opportunity to discuss their perspective, identity, personal adversity, experience interacting with diverse viewpoints or other topics related to diversity.

While it’s hard to generalize about all these essay prompts, they still differ from personal statements in many ways. They are more reflective, looking backward rather than forward. They often have tighter page or word limits.

The purpose of these optional statements is not solely for applicants to detail their unique background. Everyone is atypical in some ways . Rather, these optional essays are intended to free applicants from having to weave together their background and interests within the same two-page statement.

For example, imagine an Armenian American inspired by the trauma of the Armenian genocide to become an international human rights lawyer. This would make a great topic for a personal statement.

But what if that applicant actually feels most passionate about securities law? It would be counterproductive to force such a candidate to awkwardly cram genocide and securities law into the same essay. This is why schools allow applicants space to tell more complicated stories. 

Other Optional Law School Admission Essays

Beyond personal and diversity statements, some law schools also allow or require extra short essays. Most commonly, a school might ask about why an applicant would be a good fit for the school, often called a “Why this law school?” essay . These are almost always worthwhile to write.

Some schools have short-answer questions on topics like an applicant’s career goals or how an applicant aligns with the school’s values. A few schools, like Stanford University Law School in California and Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., have offbeat essay prompts that tend to vary from year to year.

Finally, some law schools provide dedicated space for applicants wishing to explain issues often covered by an addendum , like underperformance on standardized tests or in their transcripts. 

Are Optional Essays Worth Writing?

A classic mistake applicants make is to write as much as allowed , hoping that something will stick. Many law school applicants fear that if they fail to maximize every possible opportunity to write about themselves, they will appear lazy or disinterested. Therefore, they sabotage themselves by padding their application with redundant and repetitive text.

Applicants can best show their professionalism, communication skills and respect for the reader by writing efficiently and purposefully. Admissions officers have a limited amount of time, perhaps a matter of minutes, to review your application. Anything you write that does not contribute to a coherent argument for your admission risks wasting that time.

Thus, an optional essay is unnecessary if its key points are already adequately communicated through the personal statement or other materials. Optional essays should be used strategically to build your argument for admission. Don’t simply talk about yourself to fill space.

For example, if an optional essay prompt asks for your favorite book, there is no need to lie and claim that it is "The Common Law" by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

On the other hand, before you write about your love of "Harry Potter," consider whether and how that would bolster your application. Unless you can trace your interest in justice to Hermione’s efforts to emancipate house elves, you might be better off choosing another book or skipping the essay altogether.

In sum, optional essays should convey or emphasize something about you that your personal statement and other materials fail to address. If you cannot think of anything else that would strengthen your case, then forgo the essay. Like a lawyer, show meticulousness and fine judgment with restraint, not verbosity.

20 Law Schools That Pay Off

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About Law Admissions Lowdown

Law Admissions Lowdown provides advice to prospective students about the law school application process, LSAT prep and potential career paths. Previously authored by contributors from Stratus Admissions Counseling, the blog is currently authored by Gabriel Kuris, founder of Top Law Coach , an admissions consultancy. Kuris is a graduate of Harvard Law School and has helped hundreds of applicants navigate the law school application process since 2003. Got a question? Email [email protected] .

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18 Law School Personal Statement Examples That Got Accepted!

This blog contains law school personal statement examples written by applicants who were successfully accepted to multiple law schools after working with our admissions experts as part of our  application review programs . Your  law school personal statement  is one of the most important parts of your application and is your best opportunity to show admissions officers who you are behind your numbers and third-party assessments. Because of its importance, many students find the personal statement to be daunting and demanding of the full scope of their skills as writers. Today we're going to review these excellent law school personal statement examples from past successful applicants and provide some proven strategies from a former admissions officer that can help you prepare your own stellar essay. 

>> Want us to help you get accepted? Schedule a free strategy call here . <<

Article Contents 44 min read

Law school personal statement example #1.

When I was a child, my neighbors, who had arrived in America from Nepal, often seemed stressed. They argued a lot, struggled for money, and seemed to work all hours of the day. One day, I woke early in the morning to a commotion outside my apartment. Police officers were accompanying my neighbors out of the building. They were being deported. In my teens, I was shocked to see that our kind, friendly neighbors had exhausted their last chance to stay in America as they lost a court appeal. 

Since that time, I have worked closely with the many immigrant families in my neighborhood, and now university town. I began by volunteering at a local community center. Together with social workers, I served food and gave out clothes to new arrivals. My diligent work ethic led to more responsibility, and I received training in basic counseling techniques, first aid skills and community services. Soon, I was tasked with welcoming new community members and assessing their health and social needs. I heard the many difficult stories of those who had traveled thousands of miles, often through several countries, risking everything to reach a safe, welcoming country. I was proud to contribute in some small way to making America welcoming for these individuals.

The community center is where I had my first formal contact with legal aid lawyers, who were a constant source of knowledge and support for those who needed assistance. I was struck by the lawyers’ ability to explain complex legal processes to nervous and exhausted incomers: law, I realized, was about more than procedure. I decided that I, too, would strive to balance a wealth of technical knowledge with my caring, compassionate personality.

As soon as I enrolled in university, I knew I had the chance to do so. In my very first week, I signed up to volunteer at the university’s legal aid center, where I worked closely with law professors and students on a range of cases. Academically, I have focused on courses, such as a fourth-year Ethics seminar, that would help me develop rigorous critical reasoning skills. More importantly, I knew that, given my experience, I could be a leader on campus. I decided to found a refugee campaign group, Students4Refugees. Together with a group of volunteers, we campaigned to make our campus a refugee-friendly space. I organized a series of events: international student mixers, an art installation in our student commons, and concerts that raised over $5,000 for the charity Refugee Aid. I am proud to say that my contributions were recognized with a university medal for campus leadership.

I have seen time and again how immigrants to the United States struggle with bureaucracy, with complex legal procedures, and with the demands of living in a foreign and sometimes hostile climate. As I plan to enter law school, I look back to my neighbors’ experiences: they needed someone who knew the law, who could negotiate with the authorities on their behalf, who could inform them of their rights—but they also needed someone who would provide a caring and compassionate outlet for their stresses. I know that Townsville University’s combination of academic rigor, legal aid services, and history of graduates entering labor and non-profit sectors will allow me to develop these skills and continue making contributions to my community by advocating for those in need.

• Thematic consistency: It focuses on just one theme: justice for immigrants. Each paragraph is designed to show off how enthusiastic the student is about this area of law. Personal statements—including those for law school—often begin with a personal anecdote. This one is short, memorable, and relevant. It establishes the overall theme quickly. By constraining their essay’s focus to a single general theme, the writer can go into great depth and weave in emotional and psychological weight through careful and vivid description. The personal statement isn’t a standard 3-paragraph college essay with a spotlight thesis statement, but it conveys similar impact through presenting a central focus organically, without resorting to simply blurting out “the point” of the piece.   
• Shows, rather than tells: Connected to this, this statement focuses on showing rather than telling. Rather than simply telling the reader about their commitment to law, the applicant describes specific situations they were involved in that demonstrate their commitment to law. “Show don’t tell” means you want to paint a vivid picture of actions or experiences that demonstrate a given quality or skill, and not simply say "I can do X." Make it an experience for your reader, don't just give them a fact. 
• Confident, but not arrogant: Additionally, this personal statement is confident without being boastful—leadership qualities, grades, and an award are all mentioned in context, rather than appearing as a simple list of successes. 
• Specific to the school: It ends with a conclusion that alludes to why the applicant is suitable for the specific school to which they’re applying and points to their future career plans. Thoroughly researching the law school to which you’re applying is incredibly important so that you can tailor your remarks to the specific qualities and values they’re looking for. A law essay writing service is really something that can help you integrate this aspect effectively. 

What Should a Law School Personal Statement Do?

1.      be unique to the school you’re applying to.

Students are always asking how to write a personal statement for law school, particularly one that stands out from all the rest. After all, advice from most universities can often be quite vague. Take this zinger from the  University of Chicago : “Write about something personal, relevant, and completely individual to you… Just be yourself.” Every school will have different requirements or content they want to see in a personal statement. This is why it’s a good idea to review specific guidelines for the school to which you’re applying. For example, you can read Yale Law School personal statement examples , Stanford Law personal statement examples , and an NYU personal statement to get an idea of what these schools look for.

2.      Demonstrate your skills and capabilities

For motivated students with the world at their fingertips, it’s a tough ask to narrow your character down into a few hundred words! But this is exactly the point of such generic guidelines—to challenge aspiring law students to produce something unique and convincing with minimal direction by the university. Law is, after all, a profession that demands your language to be persuasive, and the personal statement is merely one of many exercises where you can demonstrate your language skills. 

3.      Meet basic requirements

While the law school personal statement is about far more than just following essay directions, you still need to keep basic formatting and length restrictions in mind. Most law schools ask for a 2-page personal statement, but lengths can range from 2-4 pages. Georgetown Law School , for instance, recommends a 2-page personal statement but explicitly states that there is no official minimum or maximum. In general, length does not make a personal statement better. Rambling, meandering sentences and tiresome descriptions will only hurt the impact of your ideas, especially considering how many thousands of pages admissions committees have to churn through each year.  

In short, keep to 2 double-spaced pages, and only go below or above this is if you absolutely have to, and if the school to which you're applying allows it. You want to keep things as widely applicable as possible while drafting your personal statement, meaning that you don't want to draft a 4 page letter for the one school that allows it, and then have to significantly rewrite this for your other schools. Stick to 2 pages. 

4.      Embody what the school is looking for

Lastly, many law schools won’t offer hyper-specific prompts, but will give you general law school admissions essay topics to follow. For instance, the University of Washington’s law school provides a number of topics to follow, including “Describe a personal challenge you faced” or “Describe your passions and involvement in a project or pursuit and the ways in which it has contributed to your personal growth and goals.” These topics may feel specific at first, but as you begin drafting, you’ll likely realize you have dozens of memories to choose from, and numerous ways of describing their impact. While drafting, try to explore as many of these options as possible, and select the best or most impactful to use in your final draft.  

Want to write the perfect law school personal statement? Watch this video:

Law School Personal Statement Example #2

In my home community, the belief is that the law is against us. The law oppresses and victimizes. I must admit that as a child and young person I had this opinion based on my environment and the conversations around me. I did not understand that the law could be a vehicle for social change, and I certainly did not imagine I had the ability and talents to be a voice for this change. I regularly attended my high school classes because I enjoyed the discussions and reading for English and history, and writing came easily to me, but I wasn’t committed to getting good grades because I felt I had no purpose. My mindset changed as I spent time with Mark Russell, a law student who agreed to mentor and tutor me as part of a “high school to law school” mentorship program. Every week, for three years, Mark and I would meet. At first, Mark tutored me, but I quickly became an “A” student, not only because of the tutoring, but because my ambitions were uncorked by what Mark shared with me about university, the law, and his life. I learned grades were the currency I needed to succeed. I attended mock trials, court hearings, and law lectures with Mark and developed a fresh understanding of the law that piqued an interest in law school. My outlook has changed because my mentor, my teachers, and my self-advocacy facilitated my growth. Still, injustices do occur. The difference is that I now believe the law can be an instrument for social change, but voices like mine must give direction to policy and resources in order to fight those injustices.

Early in my mentorship, I realized it was necessary to be “in the world” differently if I were to truly consider a law career. With Mark’s help and the support of my high school teachers, I learned to advocate for myself and explore opportunities that would expand my worldview as well as my academic skills. I joined a Model UN club at a neighboring high school, because my own school did not have enough student interest to have a club. By discussing global issues and writing decisions, I began to feel powerful and confident with my ability to gather evidence and make meaningful decisions about real global issues. As I built my leadership, writing, and public speaking skills, I noticed a rift developing with some of my friends. I wanted them to begin to think about larger systemic issues outside of our immediate experience, as I was learning to, and to build confidence in new ways. I petitioned my school to start a Model UN and recruited enough students to populate the club. My friends did not join the club as I’d hoped, but before I graduated, we had 2 successful years with the students who did join. I began to understand that I cannot force change based on my own mandate, but I must listen attentively to the needs and desires of others in order to support them as they require.

While I learned to advocate for myself throughout high school, I also learned to advocate for others. My neighbors, knowing my desire to be a lawyer, would often ask me to advocate on their behalf with small grievances. I would make phone calls, stand in line with them at government offices, and deal with difficult landlords. A woman, Elsa, asked me to review her rental agreement to help her understand why her landlord had rented it to someone else, rather than renewing her lease. I scoured the rental agreement, highlighted questionable sections, read the Residential Tenancies Act, and developed a strategy for approaching the landlord. Elsa and I sat down with the landlord and, upon seeing my binder complete with indices, he quickly conceded before I could even speak. That day, I understood evidence is the way to justice. My interest in justice grew, and while in university, I sought experiences to solidify my decision to pursue law.

Last summer, I had the good fortune to work as a summer intern in the Crown Attorney’s Office responsible for criminal trial prosecutions. As the only pre-law intern, I was given tasks such as reviewing court tapes, verifying documents, and creating a binder with indices. I often went to court with the prosecutors where I learned a great deal about legal proceedings, and was at times horrified by human behavior. This made the atmosphere in the Crown Attorney’s office even more surprising. I worked with happy and passionate lawyers whose motivations were pubic service, the safety and well-being of communities, and justice. The moment I realized justice was their true objective, not the number of convictions, was the moment I decided to become a lawyer.

I broke from the belief systems I was born into. I did this through education, mentorship, and self-advocacy. There is sadness because in this transition I left people behind, especially as I entered university. However, I am devoted to my home community. I understand the barriers that stand between youth and their success. As a law student, I will mentor as I was mentored, and as a lawyer, I will be a voice for change.

What’s Great about this Second Law School Personal Statement?

• It tells a complete and compelling story: Although the applicant expressed initial reservations about the law generally, the statement tells a compelling story of how the applicant's opinions began to shift and their interest in law began. They use real examples and show how that initial interest, once seeded, grew into dedication and passion. This introduction implies an answer to the " why do you want to study law? ” interview question.
• It shows adaptability: Receptiveness to new information and the ability to change both thought and behavior based on this new information. The writer describes realizing that they needed to be "in the world" differently! It's hard to convey such a grandiose idea without sounding cliché, but through their captivating and chronological narrative, the writer successfully convinces the reader that this is the case with copious examples, including law school extracurriculars . It’s a fantastic case of showing rather than telling, describing specific causes they were involved with which demonstrate that the applicant is genuinely committed to a career in the law. 
• Includes challenges the subject faced and overcame: This law school personal statement also discusses weighty, relatable challenges that they faced, such as the applicant's original feeling toward law, and the fact that they lost some friends along the way. However, the applicant shows determination to move past these hurdles without self-pity or other forms of navel-gazing.  Additionally, this personal statement ends with a conclusion that alludes to why the applicant is suitable for the specific school to which they’re applying and points to their future career plans. The writer manages to craft an extremely immersive and believable story about their path to the present, while also managing to curate the details of this narrative to fit the specific values and mission of the school to which they’re applying.

What’s Great About This Third Law School Personal Statement? 

• Description is concise and effective: This writer opens with rich, vivid description and seamlessly guides the reader into a compelling first-person narrative. Using punchy, attention-grabbing descriptions like these make events immersive, placing readers in the writer's shoes and creating a sense of immediacy. 
• Achievements are the focus: They also do a fantastic job of talking about their achievements, such as interview team lead, program design, etc., without simply bragging. Instead, they deliver this information within a cohesive narrative that includes details, anecdotes, and information that shows their perspective in a natural way. Lastly, they invoke their passion for law with humility, discussing their momentary setbacks and frustrations as ultimately positive experiences leading to further growth. 

Want more law school personal statement examples from top law schools?

• Harvard law school personal statement examples
• Columbia law school personal statement examples
• Cornell law school personal statement examples
• Yale law school personal statement examples
• UPenn law school personal statement examples
• Cambridge law school personal statement examples

Law School Personal Statement #4

What’s great about this fourth law school personal statement.

• Engaging description: Like the third example above, this fourth law school personal statement opens with engaging description and first-person narrative. However, the writer of this personal statement chooses to engage a traumatic aspect of their childhood and discuss how this adversity led them to develop their desire to pursue a career in law.  
• Strong theme of overcoming adversity: Overcoming adversity is a frequent theme in personal statements for all specialties, but with law school personal statements students are often able to utilize uniquely dramatic, difficult, and pivotal experiences that involved interacting with the law. It may be hard to discuss such emotionally weighty experiences in a short letter but, as this personal statement shows, with care and focus it's possible to sincerely demonstrate how your early struggles paved the way for you to become the person you are now. It's important to avoid sensationalism, but you shouldn't shy away from opening up to your readers about adverse experiences that have ultimately pointed you in a positive direction. 

Why "show, don't tell" is the #1 rule for personal statements:

Law School Personal Statement Example #5

What’s great about this fifth law school personal statement  .

• Highlights achievements effectively: This writer does a fantastic job of incorporating their accomplishments and impact they had on their community without any sense of bragging or conceit. Rather, these accomplishments are related in terms of deep personal investment and a general drive to have a positive impact on those around them—without resorting to the cliches of simply stating "I want to help people." They show themselves helping others, and how these early experiences of doing so are a fundamental part of their drive to succeed with a career in law.   
• Shows originality: Additionally, they do a great job of explaining the uniqueness of their identity. The writer doesn't simply list their personal/cultural characteristics, but contextualizes them to show how they've shaped their path to law school. Being the child of a Buddhist mother and a Hindu father doesn’t imply anything about a person’s ability to study/practice law on its own, but explaining how this unique aspect of their childhood encouraged a passion for “discussion, active debate, and compromise” is profoundly meaningful to an admissions panel. Being able to express how fundamental aspects of law practice are an integral part of yourself is a hugely helpful tactic in a law school personal statement. 

If you\u2019re heading North of the border, check out list of  law schools in Canada  that includes requirements and stats on acceptance. ","label":"Tip","title":"Tip"}]" code="tab2" template="BlogArticle">

Law School Personal Statement Example #6

What’s great about this sixth law school personal statement .

• Weaves in cultural background: Similar to the writer of personal statement #5, this student utilizes the cultural uniqueness of their childhood to show how their path to law school was both deeply personal and rooted in ideas pervasive in their early years. Unlike the writer of statement #5, this student doesn't shy away from explaining how this distinctiveness was often a source of alienation and difficulty. Yet this adversity is, as they note, ultimately what helped them be an adaptable and driven student, with a clear desire to make a positive impact on the kinds of situations that they witnessed affect their parents.  
• Describes setbacks while remaining positive: This writer also doesn't shy away from describing their temporary setbacks as both learning experiences and, crucially, springboards for positively informing their plans for the future. 

What’s Great About This Seventh Law School Personal Statement? 

• The writer takes accountability: One of the hardest things to accomplish in a personal statement is describing not just early setbacks that are out of your control but early mistakes for which you must take responsibility. The writer of this personal statement opens with descriptions of characteristics that most law schools would find problematic at best. But at the end of this introduction, they successfully utilize an epiphany, a game-changing moment in which they saw something beyond their early pathological aimlessness, to clearly mark the point at which they became focused on law.  
• The narrative structure is clear: They clearly describe the path forward from this moment on, showing how they remained focused on earning a law degree, and how they were able to work through successive experiences of confusion to persist in finishing their undergraduate education at a prestigious university. Of course, you shouldn't brag about such things for their own sake, but this writer makes the point of opening up about the unique feelings of inadequacy that come along with being the first person in their family to attend such a school, and how these feelings were—like their initial aimlessness—mobilized in service of their goal and the well-being of others. Their statement balances discussion of achievement with humility, which is a difficult but impactful tactic when done well. 

Law School Personal Statement Example #8

What’s great about this eighth law school personal statement .

• Shows commitment to the community: Commitment to one’s community is a prized value in both law students and law professionals. This writer successfully describes not only how they navigated the challenges in their group environments, such as their internship, the debate team, etc., but how these challenges strengthened their commitment to being a positive part of their communities. They don’t simply describe the skills and lessons they learned from these challenging environments, but also how these challenges ultimately made them even more committed to and appreciative of these kinds of dynamic, evolutionary settings.  
• Avoids negative description: They also avoid placing blame or negatively describing the people in these situations, instead choosing to characterize inherent difficulties in terms neutral to the people around them. In this way, you can describe extremely challenging environments without coming off as resentful, and identify difficulties without being accusatory or, worse yet, accidentally or indirectly seeming like part of the problem. This writer manages to convey the difficulty and complexity of these experiences while continually returning to their positive long-term impact, and though you shouldn’t seek to “bright-side” the troubles in your life you should absolutely point out how these experiences have made you a more capable and mature student. 

Watch this for more law school personal statement examples!

Law School Personal Statement Example #9

What’s great about this ninth law school personal statement  .

• The writer effectively describes how their background shaped their decision to pursue law: Expressing privilege as adversity is something that very few students should even attempt, and fewer still can actually pull it off. But the writer of this personal statement does just that in their second paragraph, describing how the ease and comfort of their upbringing could have been a source of laziness or detachment, and often is for particularly well-off students, but instead served as a basis for their ongoing commitment to addressing the inequalities and difficulties of those less comfortable. Describing how you’ve developed into an empathic and engaged person, worked selflessly in any volunteer experiences, and generally aimed your academic life at a career in law for the aid of others—all this is incredibly moving for an admissions board, and can help you discuss your determination and understanding of exactly why you desire a career in law.  
• The student shows adaptability, flexibility, and commitment: Additionally, this writer is able to show adaptability while describing their more prestigious appointments in a way that’s neither self-aggrandizing nor unappreciative. One of the big takeaways from this statement is the student’s commitment and flexibility, and these are both vitally important qualities to convey in your law school personal statement.  

Law School Personal Statement Example #10

What’s great about this tenth law school personal statement .

Shows passion: If you’re one of the rare students for whom service to others has always been a core belief, by all means find a novel and engaging way of making this the guiding principle of your personal statement. Don’t overdo it—don’t veer into poetry or lofty philosophizing—but by all means let your passion guide your pen (well…keyboard). Every step of the way, this student relates their highs and lows, their challenges and successes, to an extremely earnest and sincere set of altruistic values invoked at the very beginning of their statement. Law school admissions boards don’t exactly prize monomania, but they do value intense and sustained commitment.  

Shows maturity: This student also successfully elaborates this passion in relation to mature understanding. That is, they make repeated points about their developing understanding of law that sustains their hopefulness and emotional intensity while also incorporating knowledge of the sometimes troubling day-to-day challenges of the profession. Law schools aren’t looking for starry-eyed naivete, but they do value optimism and the ability to stay positive in a profession often defined by its difficulties and unpredictability. 

Every pre-law student blames their lack of success on the large number of applicants, the heartless admissions committee members, or the high GPA and LSAT score cut offs. Check out our blog on  law school acceptance rates  to find out more about the law school admission statistics for law schools in the US . Having taught more than a thousand students every year, I can tell you the REAL truth about why most students get rejected: 

Need tips on your law school resume?

8 Additional Law School Personal Statement Examples

Now that you have a better idea of what your law school personal statement should include, and how you can make it stand out, here are five additional law school personal statements for you to review and get some inspiration:

Law school personal statement example #11

According to the business wire, 51 percent of students are not confident in their career path when they enroll in college. I was one of those students for a long time. My parents had always stressed the importance of education and going to college, so I knew that I wanted to get a tertiary education, I just didn’t know in what field. So, like many other students, I matriculated undecided and started taking introductory courses in the subjects that interest me. I took classes from the department of literature, philosophy, science, statistics, business, and so many others but nothing really called out to me.

I figured that maybe if I got some practical experience, I might get more excited about different fields. I remembered that my high school counselor had told me that medicine would be a good fit for me, and I liked the idea of a career that involved constant learning. So, I applied for an observership at my local hospital. I had to cross “doctor” off my list of post-graduate career options when I fainted in the middle of a consultation in the ER.

I had to go back to the drawing board and reflect on my choices. I decided to stop trying to make an emotional decision and focus on the data. So, I looked at my transcript thus far, and it quickly became clear to me that I had both an interest and an aptitude for business and technology. I had taken more courses in those two fields than in any others, and I was doing very well in them. My decision was reaffirmed when I spent the summer interning at a digital marketing firm during my senior year in college and absolutely loved my experience. 

Since graduating, I have been working at that same firm and I am glad that I decided to major in business. I first started as a digital advertising assistant, and I quickly learned that the world of digital marketing is an incredibly fast-paced sink-or-swim environment. I didn’t mind it at all. I wanted to swim with the best of them and succeed. So far, my career in advertising has been challenging and rewarding in ways that I never could have imagined. 

I remember the first potential client that I handled on my own. Everything had been going great until they changed their mind about an important detail a day before we were supposed to present our pitch. . I had a day to research and re-do a presentation that I’d been preparing for weeks. I was sure that I’d be next on the chopping block, but once again all I had to was take a step back and look at the information that I had. Focusing on the big picture helped me come up with a new pitch, and after a long night, lots of coffee, and laser-like focus, I delivered a presentation that I was not only proud of, but that landed us the client. 

Three years and numerous client emergencies later, I have learned how to work under pressure, how to push myself, and how to think critically. I also have a much better understanding of who I am and what skills I possess. One of the many things that I have learned about myself over the course of my career is that I am a fan of the law. Over the past three years, I have worked with many lawyers to navigate the muddy waters of user privacy and digital media. I often find myself looking forward to working with our legal team, whereas my coworkers actively avoid them. I have even become friends with my colleagues on the legal team who also enjoy comparing things like data protection laws in the US and the EU and speculating about the future of digital technology regulation. 

These experiences and conversations have led me to a point where I am interested in various aspects of the law. I now know that I have the skills required to pursue a legal education and that this time around, I am very sure about what I wish to study. Digital technology has evolved rapidly over the last decade, and it is just now starting to become regulated. I believe that this shift is going to open up a more prominent role for those who understand both digital technology and its laws, especially in the corporate world. My goal is to build a career at the intersection of these worlds.

Law school personal statement example #12

The first weekend I spent on my undergrad college campus was simultaneously one of the best and worst of my life. I was so excited to be away from home, on my own, making new friends and trying new things. One of those things was a party at a sorority house with my friend and roommate, where I thought we both had a great time. Both of us came from small towns, and we had decided to look out for one another. So, when it was time to go home, and I couldn't find her, I started to worry. I spent nearly an hour looking for her before I got her message saying she was already back in our dorm. 

It took her three months to tell me that she had been raped that night. Her rapist didn't hold a knife to her throat, jump out of a dark alleyway, or slip her a roofie. Her rapist was her long-term boyfriend, with whom she'd been in a long-distance relationship for just over a year. He assaulted her in a stranger's bedroom while her peers, myself included, danced the night away just a few feet away. 

I remember feeling overwhelmed when she first told me. I was sad for my friend, angry on her behalf, and disgusted by her rapist's actions. I also felt incredibly guilty because I had been there when it happened. I told myself that I should have stayed with her all night and that I should have seen the abuse - verbal and physical harassment- that he was inflicting on her before it turned sexual. But eventually, I realized that thinking about what could, should, or would've happened doesn't help anyone. 

I watched my friend go through counseling, attend support groups, and still, she seemed to be hanging on by a thread. I couldn't begin to imagine what she was going through, and unfortunately, there was very little I could do to help her. So, I decided to get involved with the Sexual Assault Responders Group on campus, where I would actually be able to help another survivor. 

My experience with the Sexual Assault Responders Group on campus was eye-opening. I mostly worked on the peer-to-peer hotline, where I spoke to survivors from all walks of life. I was confronted by the fact that rape is not a surreal unfortunate thing that happens to a certain type of person. I learned that it happens daily to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends. I also learned that most survivors try to manage this burden on their own, afraid of judgment and repercussions and fearful of a he-said-she-said court battle.

I am proud to say that I used my time in college to not only earn an education, but also to advocate for survivors of sexual assault. I protested the university's cover-up of a gang rape that took place in one of the fraternity houses on campus. I spearheaded a 'no means no' campaign to raise awareness about consent on campus. I also led several fundraising campaigns for the Sexual Assault Responders Group that allowed us to pay for legal and mental health counselors for the survivors who came to us for support. 

One of the things that this experience helped me realize is that sexual assault survivors often do not know where to turn when the system tries to tell them that it'd be best to just keep quiet and suffer in silence. My goal is to become one of those people that they can turn to for counsel and support. I believe that a law degree would give me the knowledge and tools that I need to advocate for survivors on a more significant scale. 

Need tips for your law school optional essays? Check out this infographic:

Law school personal statement example #13

I grew up in two different worlds. My world at home was full of people of various skin tones and accents. It was small, loud, and often chaotic in the best ways. I remember walking home and getting to experience music from across the world before I got to my apartment building. Loud reggaeton and afrobeat were always playing somewhere in the distance. Aunties and uncles usually stopped by unannounced and slipped money in your palm when they hugged you goodbye. And the smell of fried plantains was almost always present. 

My other world was in school. It was a much quieter, more organized world with white hallways, navy blazers, and plaid skirts. It was full of people who did not look or sound like me and teachers who thought my hair was "interesting." It was also full of great books and engaging debates about everything from foreign policy to the influence of Jazz on hip hop. 

I lived in these two worlds because I was born and raised in Xtown, but I went to a private school in a much richer neighborhood. I loved both of my worlds, but I hated that I had to act differently in both of them. When in school, I had to "code switch" to sound like I belonged there. When I was at home, all the people who shared the interests I was developing in school were either working or in college, so I had no one to talk to about them. 

My words never felt more divided until I started considering a career in law. I remember telling one of my uncles that I wanted to become a lawyer and his response was, "So you want to become the man, huh?" 

I wasn't surprised by his response, or at least I shouldn't have been. One of the things that I know for sure about the first world I lived in is that many of its inhabitants do not trust the law. I had believed this for so long simply because of the conversations that I would hear around me. However, in my second world, I was learning about all of these great freedoms and rights that the law was designed to give all Americans, and I wanted to bring those to my community. 

I started working on this during the summer before my final year of high school. I got an internship with the legal aid office in my neighborhood and spent three months learning from people who, like me, had grown up in Xtown and wanted to help people. During my time in the legal aid office, I understood that the people in my community did not trust the law for two main reasons: 1. They did not understand a lot of it, and 2. It had been used against people like us many times. 

I remember one particular case that Ms. Sharma - the lawyer I was learning from then and who still mentors me today - handled that summer. It was the case of a young mother who had received a notice of eviction from her landlord two days after refusing his advances. The man claimed that she violated her contract because she made homemade shea butter that she sold on Etsy. Ms. Sharma had me look through her rental agreement. After she confirmed that I was right in determining that the young mother had not violated her contract, she contacted the landlord to advise him that what he was doing was intimidation and sexual harassment. 

My experiences in the legal aid office with Ms. Sharma opened my eyes to the disgusting behavior of human beings, but it also gave me the opportunity to see that the law was my opportunity to use what I learned in my second world to help the community that I was raised in. I returned to school with a new motivation that followed me to college. In addition to completing my bachelor's degree in sociology and African American studies, I spent most of my college years participating in legal internships and community outreach programs. 

I believe that these experiences have given me the foundation I need to be a successful law student and, eventually, a lawyer who can truly be an advocate for members of his community. 

Law school personal statement example #14

One day, my parents noticed that the other children in my age group had been speaking and communicating, but I had not. At first, they thought that my lack of speech was just me being shy, but eventually, they realized that on the rare occasions that I did speak, my words were practically incomprehensible. It wasn't long before they took me to a specialist who diagnosed me with a severe phonological disorder that hindered my ability to verbalize the basic sounds that make up words.

I started going to speech therapy when I was three years old. I saw numerous speech therapists, many of whom believed that I would never be able to communicate effectively with others. Lucky for me, my parents did not give up on me. I went to speech therapy thrice a week until the 8th grade, and I gave every single session my all. I also spent a lot of time in my room practicing my speech by myself. My efforts paid off, and even though I didn't become a chatterbox overnight, I could at least communicate effectively. 

This was a short-lived victory, though. A year later, my speech impediment was back, and my ability to articulate words was once again severely limited. This complicated matters because it was my freshman year of high school, and I was in a brand-new school where I did not know anyone. Having been bullied in middle school, I knew first-hand how vicious kids can be, and I didn't want to be the butt of any more jokes, so I didn't try to speak at school. I knew that this was preventing me from making new friends or participating in class and that it was probably not helping my impediment, but I was not ready to face the fact that I needed to go back to speech therapy. 

Eventually, I stopped resisting and went back to speech therapy. At the time, I saw it as accepting defeat, and even though my speech improved significantly, my self-confidence was lower than it had ever been. If you ask any of my high school classmates about me, they will likely tell you that I am very quiet or timid – both of which are not true, but they have no way of knowing otherwise. I barely spoke or interacted with my peers for most of high school. Instead, I focused on my studies and extracurricular activities that didn't involve much collaboration, like yearbook club and photography. 

It was only when I was getting ready for college that I realized that I was only hurting myself with my behavior. I knew I needed to become more confident about my speech to make friends and be the student I wanted to be in college. So, I used the summer after my high school graduation to get some help. I started seeing a new speech therapist who was also trained as a counselor, and she helped me understand my impediment better. For example, I now know that I tend to stutter when stressed, but I also know that taking a few deep breaths helps me get back on track. 

Using the confidence that I built in therapy that summer, I went to college with a new pep in my step. I pushed myself to meet new people, try new things, and join extracurricular organizations when I entered college. I applied to and was accepted into a competitive freshman leadership program called XYZ. Most of XYZ's other members were outgoing and highly involved in their high school communities. In other words, they were the complete opposite of me. I didn't let that intimidate me. Instead, I made a concerted effort to learn from them. If you ask any of my teammates or other classmates in college, they will tell you that I was an active participant in discussions during meetings and that I utilized my unique background to share a different perspective.

My experience with XYZ made it clear to me that my speech disorder wouldn't hold me back as long as I did not stand in my own way. Once I understood this, I kept pushing past the boundaries I had set for myself. I began taking on leadership roles in the program and looking for ways to contribute to my campus community outside of XYZ. For example, I started a community outreach initiative that connected school alumni willing to provide pro bono services to different members of the community who were in need. 

Now, when I look back at my decision to go back to speech therapy, I see it as a victory. I understand that my speech impediment has shaped me in many ways, many of which are positive. My struggles have made me more compassionate. My inability to speak has made me a better listener. Not being able to ask questions or ask for help has made me a more independent critical thinker. I believe these skills will help me succeed in law school, and they are part of what motivates me to apply in the first place. Having struggled for so long to speak up for myself, I am ready and eager for the day when I can speak up for others who are temporarily unable to. 

“ You talk too much; you should be a lawyer.” 

I heard that sentence often while growing up because Congolese people always tell children who talk a lot that they should be lawyers. Sometimes I wonder if those comments did not subconsciously trigger my interest in politics and then the law. If they did, I am grateful for it. I am thankful for all the experiences that have brought me to this point where I am seeking an education that will allow me to speak for those who don’t always know how to, and, more importantly, those who are unable to. 

For context, I am the child of Congolese immigrants, and my parents have a fascinating story that I will summarize for you: 

A 14-year-old girl watches in confusion as a swarm of parents rush through the classroom, grabbing their children, and other students start running from the class. Soon she realizes that she and one other student are the only ones left, but when they both hear the first round of gunshots, no one has to tell them that it is time to run home. On the way home, she hears more gunshots and bombs. She fears for her survival and that of her family, and she starts to wonder what this war means for her and her family. Within a few months, her mother and father are selling everything they own so that they can board a plane to the US.

On the other side of the town, a 17-year-old boy is being forced to board a plane to the US because his mother, a member of parliament and the person who taught him about the importance of integrity, has been executed by the same group of soldiers who are taking over the region. 

They met a year later, outside the principal’s office at a high school in XXY. They bonded over the many things they have in common and laughed at the fact that their paths probably never would have crossed in Bukavu. Fast forward to today, they have been married for almost two decades and have raised three children, including me. 

Growing up in a Congolese household in the US presented was very interesting. On the one hand, I am very proud of the fact that I get to share my heritage with others. I speak French, Lingala, and Swahili – the main languages of Congo – fluently. I often dress in traditional clothing; I performed a traditional Congolese dance at my high school’s heritage night and even joined the Congolese Student Union at Almamatter University. 

On the other hand, being Congolese presented its challenges growing up. At a young age, I looked, dressed, and sounded different from my classmates. Even though I was born in the US, I had picked up a lot of my parents’ accents, and kids loved to tease me about it. Ignorant comments and questions were not uncommon. “Do you speak African?” “You’re not American! How did you get here?” “You don’t look African” “My mom says I can’t play with you because your parents came here to steal our jobs”. These are some of the polite comments that I heard often, and they made me incredibly sad, especially when classmates I considered my friends made them. 

My parents did not make assimilating any easier. My mother especially always feared I would lose my Congolese identity if they did not make it a point to remind me of it. She often said, “Just because you were born in America doesn’t mean that you are not Congolese anymore.” On one occasion, I argued that she always let me experience my Congolese side, but not my American side. That was the first time she told me I should be a lawyer. 

Having few friends and getting teased in school helped me learn to be comfortable on my own. I Often found refuge and excitement in books. I even started blogging about the books I read and interacting with other readers online. As my following grew, I started to use my platform to raise awareness about issues that I am passionate about, like climate change, the war in Congo, and the homeless crisis here in XXY. I was able to start a fundraising campaign through my blog that raised just under $5000 for the United Way – a local charity that helps the homeless in my city. 

This experience helped me understand that I could use my skills and the few tools at my disposal to help people, both here in America and one day, maybe even in Congo. I realized that I am lucky enough to have the option of expanding that skillset through education in order to do more for the community that welcomed my grandparents, uncles, aunties, and parents when they had nowhere else to go. 

The journey was not easy because while I received immense support and love from my family for continuing my education, I had to teach myself how to prepare and apply to college. Once there I had to learn on my own what my professors expected of me, how to study, how to network, and so much more. I am grateful for those experiences too, because they taught me how to be resourceful, research thoroughly, listen carefully, and seek help when I need it. 

All of these experiences have crafted me into who I am today, and I believe that with the right training, they will help me become a great attorney.

Law School Personal Statement Example #16

During my undergraduate studies, in the first two years, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do with my career. I enjoyed doing research, but I found that I became more interested in presenting the research than the process of contributing to it. I spoke to most of my science professors to ask if I could participate in their research. I worked in biology labs, chemistry labs, and in psychology classrooms working on a variety of projects that seemed meaningful and interesting. I gained new perspectives on study habits and mental health; the influence of music on the human mind; and applications of surface tension. I noticed that I was always taking the lead when we were presenting our findings to peers and research groups. I enjoyed yielding questions and addressing the captivating the audience with engaging gestures and speech. This was what led me to consider a career in law.

I always thought that I would become a scientist, so when I discovered that there were aspects of law that could be considered “scientific”, I was all ears. Still during my second year of undergraduate studies, I wanted to join an environmental awareness group, but noticed there weren’t any active. So, I took it upon myself to create my own. I wanted to do cleanup projects across the city, so I mapped out parks and areas that we could walk or drive to. I advertised my project to other students and eventually gained approximately fifteen students eager to help out. I was struck by the pollution in the water, the negligence of park maintenance. I drafted a letter to the municipal government and petitioned for a stricter environmental compliance approach. I wanted to advertise fines to hold polluters accountable, as there were hardly any to enforce the rules. A letter was returned to me stating that the government would consider my request. I felt a sense of gratification, of purpose; I discovered that I had the ability to enact change through policy. This drew me closer to the prospect of building a future in law, so I looked at other avenues to learn more.

I still wanted to find a way to bring together my love of science and discourse/communication. As a science student, I had the privilege of learning from professors who emphasized critical thinking; and they gave me a chance to learn that on my own. I took an internship as an environmental planner. There, I helped present project ideas to various groups, updating demographic/development information, and managing planning processes. I engaged in analytical thinking by looking at maps and demographic information to develop potential plans for land use. It was also the experience I was looking for in terms of a balance between science and oral communication. Using data analysis, I spoke to other planners and review boards to bring ideas together and execute a plan.

Through science, I learned how to channel my curiosity and logical thinking; as an advocate, I learned how to be creative and resourceful. Presenting research findings and being questioned in front of a group of qualified researchers, having to be sharp and ready for anything, taught me how to be more concise in speech. Developing an advocacy group dedicated to improving my community showed me what it lacked; it opened my eyes to the impact of initiative and focused collaboration. I was eager to begin another science project, this time with the environment in mind. It was titled “determining and defining the role of sociodemographic factors in air pollution health disparities”. I compiled and summarized relevant research and sent it over to a representative of the municipal government. In a couple of weeks, my request to increase advertising of fines in public areas was agreed to.

This Juris Doctor/Master in Environmental Studies program will allow me to continue deepening my knowledge of environmental law. With my goal of developing a career in environmental affairs, overseeing policies that influence land protection/use, I know that this program will give me the tools I need to succeed. With my experience working with large groups, I also believe I will fit into the larger class sizes at your institution. I understand the value of working together and how to engage in healthy discourse. With your Global Sustainability Certification, I will equip myself the expertise I need to produce meaningful change in environmental policy.

Here's how a law school advisor can help you with your application:

Law School Personal Statement #17

Growing up in a poor neighborhood, what my friends used to call “the ghetto”, I was always looking for my way out. I tried running away, but I always ended up back home in that tiny complex, barely enough room to fit all my brothers and sisters with my parents. My dad was disabled and couldn’t work, and my mother was doing her best working full-time as a personal-support worker. There was nothing we could do to get out of our situation, or so it seemed. It wasn’t until years later when I started my undergraduate degree that ironically, after I found my way out, that I began looking for a way to come back. I wanted to be a voice for people living in those bleak conditions; hungry, without work. Helpless.

Getting my degree in social work was one of the best decisions of my life. It gave me the tools to lobby for solutions to problems in poor communities. I knew my neighborhood better than anyone because I grew up there. I had the lived experience. I started working with the local government to develop programs for my clients; the people living in those same neighborhoods. We worked to provide financial assistance, legal aid, housing, and medical treatment—all things sorely lacking. My proudest moment was securing the funds and arranging surgery for my father’s bad hip and knees. I’m currently working on a large project with one of the community legislators to lobby for a harm reduction model addressing addiction in our communities.

With five years of experience as a social worker, I knew it was time for a career change when I learned that I could have more influence on public opinion and legislative decisions as a social-security disability lawyer. I knew firsthand that people victimized from racism, poverty, and injury needed more help than they were currently allotted. I knew that, from becoming and advocate and communicating with influential members of the local government, that I could do more with a law degree helping people attain basic needs like disability benefits, which are often denied outright.

This desire to help people get the help they need from local programs and government resources brought me to Scarborough, a small town outside of Toronto. I was aware of some of the issues afflicting this community, since I’d handled a few clients from there as a children’s disability social worker. Addiction and homelessness were the two main ones. I worked with children with ADHD or other physical/mental disabilities impairing their ability to attend school and function normally. I helped many of them get an IEP with the details of the special services they require, long overdue. I made sure each child got the care they needed, including special attention in school. Also noticing that so many of these families lacked proper nutrition, I organized a report detailing this finding. In it, I argued that the community needed more funds targeting lowest income families. I spoke directly with a legislator, which eventually got the city on board with developing a program more specifically for the lowest income families with residents under 18.

My goal has always been to be a voice for the inaudible, the ignored, who’ve been victimized by inadequate oversight from the ground up. Many of these groups, as I’ve witnessed firsthand, don’t have the luxury of being their own advocates. They are too busy trying to support their families, to put food on the table for their children. I’ve realized that it isn’t quite enough to work directly with these families to connect them with resources and ensure they get the support they need. Sometimes the support simply doesn’t exist, or it isn’t good enough. This is why I’m motivated to add a law degree to my credentials so I can better serve these people and communities. As a future social-security disability lawyer, I want to work with local governments to assist clients in navigating an assistance system and improving it as much as possible. This program will give me the access to a learning environment in which I can thrive and develop as an advocate.

Law School Personal Statement #18

“You’re worthy and loved”, I said to a twelve-year-old boy, Connor, whom I was supervising and spending time with during the Big Brother program at which we met. A few tears touched my shoulder as I pulled him into me, comforting him. He was a foster child. He didn’t know his parents and never stayed in one place longer than a few months; a year if he was lucky. I joined the program not expecting much. I was doing it for extra credit, because I wanted to give back to the community somehow and I thought it would be interesting to meet people. He confided in me; he told me that his foster parents often yelled at each other, and him. He told me he needed to escape. I called Child Protective Services and after a thorough investigation, they determined that Connor’s foster parents weren’t fit for fostering. He was moved, yet again, to a different home.

I wrote an op-ed detailing my experience as a Big Brother. I kept names anonymous. I wanted people to know how hard it was for children in the welfare system. Many of them, like Connor, were trapped in a perpetual cycle of re-homing, neglect, and even abuse. He and other children deserve stability and unconditional love. That should go without saying. I sent the op-ed to a local magazine and had it published. In it, I described not only the experience of one unfortunate kid, but many others as well who saw their own stories being told through Connor. I joined a non-profit organization dedicated to improving access to quality education for young people. I started learning about disparities in access; students excluded by racial or financial barriers. I was learning, one step at a time, how powerful words can be.

With the non-profit organization, I reached out to a few public schools in the area to represent some of our main concerns with quality of education disparities. Our goal was to bring resources together and promote the rights of children in education. We emphasized that collaboration between welfare agencies and schools was critical for education stability. Together, we created a report of recommendations to facilitate this collaboration. We outlined a variety of provisions, including more mechanisms for child participation, better recruitment of social service workers in schools, risk management and identification strategies, and better support for students with child protection concerns.

The highlight of that experience was talking to an assembly of parents and school faculty to present our findings and recommendations. The title of the presentation was “The Power of Words”. I opened with the story I wrote about in the op-ed. I wanted to emphasize that children are individuals; those trapped in the welfare system are not a monolith. They each have unique experiences, needs, and desires they want to fulfill in life. But our tools to help them can be improved, more individualized. I spoke about improving the quality of residential care for children and the need to promote their long-term development into further education and employment. Finally, I presented a list of tools we created to help support a more financially sustainable and effective child welfare system. The talk was received with applause and a tenuous commitment from a few influential members of the crowd. It was a start.

Although I lost contact with Connor, I think about him almost every day. I can only hope that the programs we worked on to improve were helping him, wherever he was. I want to continue to work on the ground level of child welfare amelioration, but I realize I will need an education in law to become a more effective advocate for this cause. There are still many problems in the child welfare system that will need to be addressed: limited privacy/anonymity for children, service frameworks that don’t address racism adequately, limited transportation in remote communities, and many more. I’ve gained valuable experience working with the community and learning about what the welfare system lacks and does well. I’m ready to take the next step for myself, my community, and those beyond it.

Assuredly, but this length varies from school to school. As with all important details of your law school application, thoroughly research your specific schools’ requirements and guidelines before both writing and editing your personal statement to ensure it fits their specifics. The average length is about 2 pages, but don’t bother drafting your statement until you have specific numbers from your schools of choice. It’s also a good idea to avoid hitting the maximum length unless absolutely necessary. Be concise, keep economy of language in mind, and remain direct, without rambling or exhaustive over-explanation of your ideas or experiences.

You should keep any words that aren’t your own to a minimum. Admissions committees don’t want to read a citation-heavy academic paper, nor do they respond well to overused famous quotes as themes in personal statements. If you absolutely must include a quote from elsewhere, be sure to clearly indicate your quote’s source. But in general, it’s best to keep the personal statement restricted to your own words and thoughts. They’re evaluating you, not Plato! It’s a personal statement. Give them an engaging narrative in your own voice. 

Admissions committees will already have a strong sense of your academic performance through your transcripts and test scores, so discussing these in your personal statement is generally best avoided. You can contextualize these things, though—if you have an illuminating or meaningful story about how you came to receive an award, or how you enjoyed or learned from the work that won you the award, then consider discussing it. Overall though, it’s best to let admissions committees evaluate your academic qualifications and accomplishments from your transcripts and official documents, and give them something new in the personal statement. 

When you first sit down to begin, cast a wide net. Consider all the many influences and experiences that have led you to where you are. You’ll eventually (through editing and rewriting) explain how these shape your relationship to a career in law, but one of the best things you can give yourself during the initial drafting phase is a vast collection of observations and potential points for development. As the New England School of Law points out in their, “just write!” Let the initial draft be as messy as it needs to be, and refine it from there. It’s a lot easier to condense and sharpen a big draft than it is to try to tensely craft a perfect personal statement from nothing.  

Incredibly important, as should be clear by now! Unlike other specialties, law schools don’t usually conduct interviews with applicants, so your personal statement is in effect your one opportunity to speak with the admissions committee directly. Don’t let that gravity overwhelm you when you write, but keep it in mind as you edit and dedicate time to improving your initial drafts. Be mindful of your audience as you speak with them, and treat writing your personal statement as a kind of initial address in what, hopefully, will eventually turn into an ongoing dialogue.  

There are a variety of factors that can make or break a law school personal statement. You should aim to achieve at least a few of the following: a strong opening hook; a compelling personal narrative; your skills and competencies related to law; meaningful experiences; why you’re the right fit for the school and program.

Often, they do. It’s best for you to go to the schools you’re interesting in applying to so you can find out if they have any specific formatting or content requirements. For example, if you wanted to look at NYU law or Osgoode Hall Law School , you would find their admissions requirements pages and look for information on the personal statement.

There are lots of reasons why a personal statement might not work. Usually, applicants who don’t get accepted didn’t come up with a good strategy for this essay. Remember, you need to target the specific school and program. Other reasons are that the applicant doesn’t plan or proofread their essay. Both are essential for submitting materials that convince the admissions committee that you’re a strong candidate. You can always use law school admissions consulting application review to help you develop your strategy and make your essay stand out.

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How long should a Personal Statement be? Is there any rule on that?

BeMo Academic Consulting

Hello V! Thanks for your question. Some schools will gave very specific word limits, while some will not. If you do not have a limit indicated, try to stick to no more than a page, 600-800 words. 

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Excellent Law School Personal Statement Examples By David Busis Published May 5, 2019 Updated Feb 10, 2021

We’ve rounded up five spectacular personal statements that helped students with borderline numbers get into T-14 schools. You’ll find these examples to be as various as a typical JD class. Some essays are about a challenge, some about the evolution of the author’s intellectual or professional journey, and some about the author’s identity. The only common thread is sincerity. The authors did not write toward an imagined idea of what an admissions officer might be looking for: they reckoned honestly with formative experiences.

Personal Statement about a Career Journey

The writer of this personal statement matriculated at Georgetown. Her GPA was below the school’s 25th percentile and her LSAT score was above the 75th percentile. She was not a URM.

* Note that we’ve used female pronouns throughout, though some of the authors are male.

I don’t remember anything being out of the ordinary before I fainted—just the familiar, heady feeling and then nothing. When I came to, they were wheeling me away to the ER. That was the last time I went to the hospital for my neurology observership. Not long after, I crossed “doctor” off my list of post-graduate career options. It would be best, I figured, if I did something for which the day-to-day responsibilities didn’t make me pass out.

Back at the drawing board, I reflected on my choices. The first time around, my primary concern was how I could stay in school for the longest amount of time possible. Key factors were left out of my decision: I had no interest in medicine, no aptitude for the natural sciences, and, as it quickly became apparent, no stomach for sick patients. The second time around, I was honest with myself: I had no idea what I wanted to do.

My college graduation speaker told us that the word “job” comes from the French word “gober,” meaning “to devour.” When I fell into digital advertising, I was expecting a slow and toothless nibbling, a consumption whose impact I could ignore while I figured out what I actually wanted to do. I’d barely started before I realized that my interviewers had been serious when they told me the position was sink or swim. At six months, I was one toothbrush short of living at our office. It was an unapologetic aquatic boot camp—and I liked it. I wanted to swim. The job was bringing out the best in me and pushing me to do things I didn’t think I could do.

I remember my first client emergency. I had a day to re-do a presentation that I’d been researching and putting together for weeks. I was panicked and sure that I’d be next on the chopping block. My only cogent thought was, “Oh my god. What am I going to do?” The answer was a three-part solution I know well now: a long night, lots of coffee, and laser-like focus on exactly and only what was needed.

Five years and numerous emergencies later, I’ve learned how to work: work under pressure, work when I’m tired, and work when I no longer want to. I have enough confidence to set my aims high and know I can execute on them. I’ve learned something about myself that I didn’t know when I graduated: I am capable.

The word “career” comes from the French word “carrière,” denoting a circular racecourse. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me then, that I’ve come full circle with regards to law school. For two college summers, I interned as a legal associate and wondered, “Is this for me?” I didn’t know if I was truly interested, and I was worried that even if I was, I wouldn’t be able to see it through. Today, I don’t have those fears.

In the course of my advertising career, I have worked with many lawyers to navigate the murky waters of digital media and user privacy. Whereas most of my co-workers went to great lengths to avoid our legal team, I sought them out. The legal conversations about our daily work intrigued me. How far could we go in negotiating our contracts to reflect changing definitions of an impression? What would happen if the US followed the EU and implemented wide-reaching data-protection laws?

Working on the ad tech side of the industry, I had the data to target even the most niche audiences: politically-active Mormon Democrats for a political client; young, low-income pregnant women for a state government; millennials with mental health concerns in a campaign for suicide prevention. The extent to which digital technology has evolved is astonishing. So is the fact that it has gone largely unregulated. That’s finally changing, and I believe the shift is going to open up a more prominent role for those who understand both digital technology and its laws. I hope to begin my next career at the intersection of those two worlds.

Personal Statement about Legal Internships

The writer of this essay was admitted to every T14 law school from Columbia on down and matriculated at a top JD program with a large merit scholarship. Her LSAT score was below the median and her GPA was above the median of each school that accepted her. She was not a URM.

About six weeks into my first legal internship, my office-mate gestured at the window—we were seventy stories high in the Chrysler Building—and said, with a sad smile, doesn’t this office just make you want to jump? The firm appeared to be falling apart. The managing partners were suing each other, morale was low, and my boss, in an effort to maintain his client base, had instructed me neither to give any information to nor take any orders from other attorneys. On my first day of work, coworkers warned me that the firm could be “competitive,” which seemed to me like a good thing. I considered myself a competitive person and enjoyed the feeling of victory. This, though, was the kind of competition in which everyone lost.

Although I felt discouraged about the legal field after this experience, I chose not to give up on the profession, and after reading a book that featured the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, I sent in an internship application. Shortly after, I received an offer to work at the office. For my first assignment, I attended a hearing in the federal courthouse. As I entered the magnificent twenty-third-floor courtroom, I felt the gravitas of the issue at hand: the sentencing of a terrorist.

That sense of gravitas never left me, and visiting the courtroom became my favorite part of the job. Sitting in hearings amidst the polished brass fixtures and mahogany walls, watching attorneys in refined suits prosecute terror, cybercrime, and corruption, I felt part of a grand endeavor. The spectacle enthralled me: a trial was like a combination of a theatrical performance and an athletic event. If I’d seen the dark side of competition at my first job, now I was seeing the bright side. I sat on the edge of my seat and watched to see if good—my side—triumphed over evil—the defense. Every conviction seemed like an unambiguous achievement. I told my friends that one day I wanted to help “lock up the bad guys.”

It wasn’t until I interned at the public defender’s office that I realized how much I’d oversimplified the world. In my very first week, I took the statement of a former high school classmate who had been charged with heroin possession. I did not know him well in high school, but we both recognized one another and made small talk before starting the formal interview. He had fallen into drug abuse and had been convicted of petty theft several months earlier. After finishing the interview, I wished him well.

The following week, in a courtroom that felt more like a macabre DMV than the hallowed halls I’d seen with the USAO, I watched my classmate submit his guilty plea, which would allow him to do community service in lieu of jail time. The judge accepted his plea and my classmate mumbled a quiet “thank you.” I felt none of the achievement I’d come to associate with guilty pleas. In that court, where hundreds of people trudged through endless paperwork and long lines before they could even see a judge, there were no good guys and bad guys—just people trying to put their lives back together.

A year after my internship at the public defender’s office, I read a profile of Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and my former boss. In the profile, he says, “You don’t want a justice system in which prosecutors are cowboys.” The more I saw at the public defender’s office, the more I rethought my experience at the USAO. When I had excitedly called my parents after an insider trading conviction, I had not thought of the defendant’s family. When I had cheered the conviction of a terrorist, I hadn’t thought about the fact that a conviction could not undo his actions. As I now plan on entering the legal profession—either as a prosecutor or public defender—I realize that my enthusiasm momentarily overwrote my empathy. I’d been playing cowboy. A lawyer’s job isn’t to lock up bad guys or help good guys in order to quench a competitive thirst—it’s to subsume his or her ego in the work and, by presenting one side of a case, create a necessary condition for justice.

Personal Statement about Cultural Identity

The writer of this essay was offered significant merit aid packages from Cornell, Michigan, and Northwestern, and matriculated at NYU Law. Her LSAT score was below the 25th percentile LSAT score and her GPA matched the median GPA of NYU.

By the age of five, I’d attended seven kindergartens and collected more frequent flier miles than most adults. I resided in two worlds – one with fast motorcycles, heavy pollution, and the smell of street food lingering in the air; the other with trimmed grass, faint traces of perfume mingling with coffee in the mall, and my mom pressing her hand against my window as she left for work. She was the only constant between these two worlds – flying me between Taiwan and America as she struggled to obtain a U.S. citizenship.

My family reunited for good around my sixth birthday, when we flew back to Taiwan to join my dad. I forgot about the West, acquired a taste for Tangyuan, and became fast friends with the kids in my neighborhood. In the evenings, I’d sit with my grandmother as she watched soap operas in Taiwanese, the dialect of the older generation, which I picked up in unharmonious bits and pieces. Other nights, she would turn off the TV, and speak to me about tradition and history – recounting my ancestors, life during the Japanese regime, raising my dad under martial law. “You are the last of the Li’s,” she would say, patting my back, and I’d feel a quick rush of pride, as though a lineage as deep as that of the English monarchy rested on my shoulders.

When I turned seven, my parents enrolled me in an American school, explaining that it was time for me, a Tai Wan Ren (Taiwanese), to learn English – “a language that could open doors to better opportunities.” Although I learned slowly, with a handful of the most remedial in ESL (English as a Second Language), books like The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows opened up new worlds of captivating images and beautiful stories that I longed to take part in.

Along with the new language, I adopted a different way to dress, new mannerisms, and new tastes, including American pop culture. I stopped seeing the neighborhood kids, and sought a set of friends who shared my affinity for HBO movies and  Claire’s Jewelry . Whenever taxi drivers or waitresses asked where I was from, noting that I spoke Chinese with too much of an accent to be native, I told them I was American.

At home, I asked my mom to stop packing Taiwanese food for my lunch. The cheap food stalls I once enjoyed now embarrassed me. Instead, I wanted instant mashed potatoes and Kraft mac and cheese.

When it came time for college, I enrolled in a liberal arts school on the East Coast to pursue my love of literature, and was surprised to find that my return to America did not feel like the full homecoming I’d expected. America was as familiar as it was foreign, and while I had mastered being “American” in Taiwan, being an American in America baffled me. The open atmosphere of my university, where ideas and feelings were exchanged freely, felt familiar and welcoming, but cultural references often escaped me. Unlike my friends who’d grown up in the States, I had never heard of Wonder Bread, or experienced the joy of Chipotle’s burrito bowls. Unlike them, I missed the sound of motorcycles whizzing by my window on quiet nights.

It was during this time of uncertainty that I found my place through literature, discovering Taiye Selasi, Edward Said, and Primo Levi, whose works about origin and personhood reshaped my conception of my own identity. Their usage of the language of otherness provided me with the vocabulary I had long sought, and revealed that I had too simplistic an understanding of who I was. In trying to discover my role in each cultural context, I’d confined myself within an easy dichotomy, where the East represented exotic foods and experiences, and the West, development and consumerism. By idealizing the latter and rejecting the former, I had reduced the richness of my worlds to caricatures. Where I am from, and who I am, is an amalgamation of my experiences and heritage: I am simultaneously a Mei Guo Ren and Taiwanese.

Just as I once reconciled my Eastern and Western identities, I now seek to reconcile my love of literature with my desire to effect tangible change. I first became interested in law on my study abroad program, when I visited the English courts as a tourist. As I watched the barristers deliver their statements, it occurred to me that law and literature have some similarities: both are a form of criticism that depends on close reading, the synthesis of disparate intellectual frameworks, and careful argumentation. Through my subsequent internships and my current job, I discovered that legal work possessed a tangibility I found lacking in literature. The lawyers I collaborate with work tirelessly to address the same problems and ideas I’ve explored only theoretically in my classes – those related to human rights, social contracts, and moral order. Though I understand that lawyers often work long hours, and that the work can be, at times, tedious, I’m drawn to the kind of research, analysis, and careful reading that the profession requires. I hope to harness my critical abilities to reach beyond the pages of the books I love and make meaningful change in the real world.

Personal Statement about Weightlifting

The writer of this essay was admitted to her top choice—a T14 school—with a handwritten note from the dean that praised her personal statement. Her LSAT score was below the school’s median and her GPA was above the school’s median.

As I knelt to tie balloons around the base of the white, wooden cross, I thought about the morning of my best friend’s accident: the initial numbness that overwhelmed my entire body; the hideous sound of my own small laugh when I called the other member of our trio and repeated the words “Mark died”; the panic attack I’d had driving home, resulting in enough tears that I had to pull off to the side of the road. Above all, I remembered the feeling of reality crashing into my previously sheltered life, the feeling that nothing was as safe or certain as I’d believed.

I had been with Mark the day before he passed, exactly one week before we were both set to move down to Tennessee to start our freshman year of college. It would have been difficult to feel so alone with my grief in any circumstance, but Mark’s crash seemed to ignite a chain reaction of loss. I had to leave Nashville abruptly in order to attend the funeral of my grandmother, who helped raise me, and at the end of the school year, a close friend who had helped me adjust to college was killed by an oncoming car on the day that he’d graduated. Just weeks before visiting Mark’s grave on his birthday, a childhood friend shot and killed himself in an abandoned parking lot on Christmas Eve. I spent Christmas Day trying to act as normally as possible, hiding the news in order not to ruin the holiday for the rest of my family.

This pattern of loss compounding loss affected me more than I ever thought it would. First, I just avoided social media out of fear that I’d see condolences for yet another friend who had passed too early. Eventually, I shut down emotionally and lost interest in the world—stopped attending social gatherings, stopped talking to anyone, and stopped going to many of my classes, as every day was a struggle to get out of bed. I hated the act that I had to put on in public, where I was always getting asked the same question —“I haven’t seen you in forever, where have you been?”—and always responding with the same lie: “I’ve just been really busy.”

I had been interested in bodybuilding since high school, but during this time, the lowest period of my life, it changed from a simple hobby to a necessity and, quite possibly, a lifesaver. The gym was the one place I could escape my own mind, where I could replace feelings of emptiness with the feeling of my heart pounding, lungs exploding, and blood flooding my muscles, where—with sweat pouring off my forehead and calloused palms clenched around cold steel—I could see clearly again.

Not only did my workouts provide me with an outlet for all of my suppressed emotion, but they also became the one aspect of my life where I felt I was still in control. I knew that if it was Monday, no matter what else was going on, I was going to be working out my legs, and I knew exactly what exercises I was going to do, and how many repetitions I was going to perform, and how much weight I was going to use for each repetition. I knew exactly when I would be eating and exactly how many grams of each food source I would ingest. I knew how many calories I would get from each of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. My routine was one thing I could count on.

As I loaded more plates onto the barbell, I grew stronger mentally as well. The gym became a place, paradoxically, of both exertion and tranquility, a sanctuary where I felt capable of thinking about the people I’d lost. It was the healing I did there that let me tie the balloons to the cross on Mark’s third birthday after the crash, and that let me spend the rest of the afternoon sharing stories about Mark with friends on the side of the rural road. It was the healing I did there that left me ready to move on.

One of the fundamental principles of weightlifting involves progressively overloading the muscles by taking them to complete failure, coming back, and performing past the point where you last failed, consistently making small increases over time. The same principle helped me overcome my grief, and in the past few years, I’ve applied it to everything from learning Spanish to studying for the LSAT. As I prepare for the next stage of my life, I know I’ll encounter more challenges for which I’m unprepared, but I feel strong enough now to acknowledge my weaknesses, and—by making incremental gains—to overcome them.

Personal Statement about Sexual Assault

The writer of this essay was accepted to many top law schools and matriculated at Columbia. Her LSAT score matched Columbia’s median while her GPA was below Columbia’s 25th percentile.

My rapist didn’t hold a knife to my throat. My rapist didn’t jump out of a dark alleyway. My rapist didn’t slip me a roofie. My rapist was my eighth-grade boyfriend, who was already practicing with the high school football team. He assaulted me in his suburban house in New Jersey, while his mom cooked us dinner in the next room, in the back of an empty movie theatre, on the couch in my basement.

It started when I was thirteen and so excited to have my first real boyfriend. He was a football player from a different school who had a pierced ear and played the guitar. I, a shy, slightly chubby girl with a bad haircut and very few friends, felt wanted, needed, and possibly loved. The abuse—the verbal and physical harassment that eventually turned sexual—was just something that happened in grown-up relationships. This is what good girlfriends do, I thought. They say yes.

Never having had a sex-ed class in my life, it took me several months after my eighth-grade graduation and my entry into high school to realize the full extent of what he did to me. My overall experience of first “love” seemed surreal. This was something that happened in a Lifetime movie, not in a small town in New Jersey in his childhood twin bed. I didn’t tell anyone about what happened. I had a different life in a different school by then, and I wasn’t going to let my trauma define my existence.

As I grew older, I was confronted by the fact that rape is not a surreal misfortune or a Lifetime movie. It’s something that too many of my close friends have experienced. It’s when my sorority sister tells me about the upstairs of a frat house when she’s too drunk to say no. It’s when the boy in the room next door tells me about his uncle during freshman orientation. It’s a high school peer whose summer internship boss became too handsy. Rape is real. It’s happening every day, to mothers, brothers, sisters, and fathers—a silent majority that want to manage the burden on their own, afraid of judgement, afraid of repercussions, afraid of a he-said she-said court battle.

I am beyond tired of the silence. It took me three years to talk about what happened to me, to come clean to my peers and become a model of what it means to speak about something that society tells you not to speak about. Motivated by my own experience and my friends’ stories, I joined three groups that help educate my college community about sexual health and assault: New Feminists, Speak for Change, and Sexual Assault Responders. I trained to staff a peer-to-peer emergency hotline for survivors of sexual assault. I protested the university’s cover-up of a gang-rape in the basement of a fraternity house two doors from where I live now. As a member of my sorority’s executive board, I have talked extensively about safety and sexual assault, and have orchestrated a speaker on the subject to come to campus and talk to the exceptional young women I consider family. I’ve proposed a DOE policy change to make sexual violence education mandatory to my city councilman. This past summer, I traveled to a country notorious for sexual violence and helped lay the groundwork for a health center that will allow women to receive maternal care, mental health counseling, and career counseling.

Law school is going to help me take my advocacy to the next level. Survivors of sexual assault, especially young survivors, often don’t know where to turn. They don’t know their Title IX rights, they don’t know about the Clery Act, and they don’t know how to demand help when every other part of the system is shouting at them to be quiet and give up. Being a lawyer, first and foremost, is being an advocate. With a JD, I can work with groups like SurvJustice and the Rape Survivors Law Project to change the lives of people who were silenced for too long.

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Law School Admissions Reddit

Law school admissions on reddit is a forum for people who are interested in law school admissions, table of contents.

• Why Reddit?
• 5 things you should know
• Positivity and community
• Reliable information
• Common knowledge and common sense
• Obsession and neuroticism

Related Articles

Writer's note: I love r/lsa and spent endless hours there while applying. The subreddit holds a special place in my heart. Despite the concerns I bring up in this article, I still think it's one of the beautiful hidden corners of the internet that one occasionally stumbles upon.

Law School Admissions on Reddit is a forum for people who are interested in law school admissions. The law school admissions subreddit, r/lawschooladmissions or r/LSA, is the main social media location that law school applicants visit to learn about law school and share ups and downs with fellow applicants.

It is a place where people can ask questions and get advice from others who are applying or have recently applied. The subreddit allows people to share their experiences and stories about law school admissions. At LSD we are working on providing as many of the big points as possible so you have a trusted point of truth, but r/lawschooladmissions is still a great place to find old posts (since LSD chat only goes back 200 posts) and find some of those less common questions.

Why do people use Law School Admissions Reddit subreddit?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best way to use Law School Admissions Reddit (or any other online forum) will vary depending on your individual needs and goals. However, if you are seeking advice on your law school applications, then Law School Admissions Reddit can be an excellent resource. It can also be a little draining because people will be ahead of you in the process and doing more than you. Which might make you feel like you aren't doing enough.

Here are the top 5 things you should know before you check out the Law School Admissions Reddit page.

These will help keep you sane and make sure that you get the most from the subreddit..

• It can be a source of positivity and community
• r/LSA isn’t reliable as a source of authoritative truth
• Law school admissions is a black box
• The average user doesn’t know how the admissions committee thinks
• There is value to common knowledge
• It’s easy to obsess and get neurotic (oh boy is it easy)

People lie on the internet

It can be a source of positivity and community. getting support from others going through the same thing is the best of reddit.

r/lsa is a great source of positivity and community because it allows users to connect with others who share similar interests and are going through the same law school application process. It gives users a place to share their thoughts and feelings on a variety of topics. In addition, the community is generally (like 99% of the time) very supportive and helpful. If you ever need advice or want to discuss something, you can be sure to find someone on Reddit who will be more than happy to help you out.

Do not rely on r/LSA as a source of authoritative truth.

Law school admissions is a black box. The average applicant doesn’t know how the admissions committee (adcom) thinks. Even someone with adcom experience doesn’t know what it is like at every school. We know that GPA, LSAT score, and personal statement are important factors in the admissions process. But we don’t know exactly what the committee is looking for when they read applications, and we never will. Once someone leaves the adcom, the mentality necessarily changes, so even advice from a prior HLS adcom member is outdated and partially irrelevant. Someone writing on the law school admissions Reddit page is unlikely to have the same mindset as a current adcom.

Adcoms are made up of law school staff and faculty who evaluate applications. They are a diverse group of people who have their own opinions and biases. They might be looking for a certain type of student, or they might be trying to fill a quota. The bottom line is that there is no single correct answer to many important questions. Someone who speaks confidently on the topic may be speaking with the best intentions and experience, but very likely are not 100% correct.

The lack of transparency in the application process is something that all applicants go through and is super frustrating. It's hard to know what to do to improve your chances of getting into law school. r/LSA is a great place to commiserate and share your frustrations and successes. It is not necessarily the place to find definitive answers because those answers may not exist at all. The best thing to do for your YLS application, might hurt your chances at Ole Miss Law School.

Despite some reservations of fact, there is value to common knowledge

Despite the last section, knowledge on r/LSA is not completely unreliable. In fact, there is a lot of value in common knowledge and common sense. Some questions do have a correct answer. For example, should I seek out the personal phone number of the head of admissions to plead my case and strengthen my app? The answer to this question is no. No, you should not. And Reddit will make sure you know that this is a terrible idea

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the quagmire of applications and do silly things. r/LSA’s shared knowledge can serve as a touchstone and as a source of common sense. Even though it may not be 100% reliable, common sense is still incredibly valuable. Especially when you have been reading the PowerScore bible for 4 days straight and your brain is mush. But it’s unlikely that a Reddit user will be able to tell you the exact personal statement topic you should write about in order to be admitted to Harvard Law School.

Additionally, Reddit isn't built to be a comprehensive source of truth because posts get buried over time. If you want to find information about law school admissions on Reddit, you have to be willing to dig through a lot of old posts to find what you're looking for.

r/LSA is a great community and a wonderful place to interact with other applicants. However, when it comes to data and information, Reddit is often not the best resource. If you're looking for something specific, it’s probably better to look elsewhere.

It’s easy to obsess and get neurotic

The law school application process is notorious for being competitive and stressful. It's easy to get caught up in the details and obsess over every little thing. With instant access to an entire community of other applicants (as well as over a decade of people who already went through it), it's easy to obsess and get neurotic. The pressure to get into a good law school can be intense, and it's easy to get caught up in the race to have the perfect application. Every little detail can feel like make-or-break, and it's easy to get caught up in the anxiety of it all.

You might start to feel like you're not good enough or that you're not doing enough to get into law school. This can lead to a lot of anxiety and stress. It's important to remember that everyone is different and that there is no one right way to get into law school. Take a break from reddit (and LSD for that matter) if you start to feel like you're getting stressed out. Talk to your friends/family/therapist (hell, feel free to email us), and get some perspective.

It's important to remember that the application process is just one part of your journey to becoming a lawyer. Please don't let the perspective of others get to you. Stay focused and keep your eye on the prize.

Many people lie on the internet. People may exaggerate their GPA, LSAT score, or work experience. They may pretend to have expertise or intimate knowledge of the workings of admissions committees. They may understate their GPA when they say they got into a T-14 to feel special. They might not have gotten in at all but can go ahead and post that they got into HLS with a 158 and a 3.3 and then proceed to tell you exactly how they did it.

At the risk of sounding like we are trying to be your Mom: Please use your best judgment when taking advice from others on the internet and take everything with a grain of salt.

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Tech-focused creator of LSD.Law. I built LSD while applying to law school. I saw unequal access to knowledge and built LSD to level the playing field and help applicants make thoughtful, well-informed decisions in the application process.

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Podcast: Dean Z on Underrated/Overrated Law School Admissions Advice + Answering Reddit Questions (Part 1)

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey , Mike has a conversation with Dean Sarah Zearfoss (also known as "Dean Z"), who in her role as Senior Assistant Dean at the University of Michigan Law School has overseen the admissions office for the past 23 years. Dean Z also hosts the popular law school admissions podcast A2Z with Dean Z .

In the interview, Mike and Dean Z discuss whether popular law school admissions advice is "overrated or underrated," including applying early, retaking the LSAT, making choices based on the new rankings, visiting law schools, and typos in applications (they agree about most, but engage in some debate about others). Then they answer some questions from Reddit about "Why X" essays, addressing "why law" in your application, applying as an international student, LSAT scores from 5+ years ago, second bachelor's degrees, and leaving application questions bank.

Mike and Dean Z mention My Rank in this episode, a free tool for applicants to make their own customized law school rankings—you can use My Rank here .

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , YouTube , and Google Podcasts .

We also wanted to briefly elaborate on one topic—in this episode, Mike and Dean Z discuss whether and how to incorporate "why law" into one's application. Most applicants probably shouldn't write their personal statement with the intention of trying to answer "why law," since most often this results in explaining a series of different experiences they've had and classes they've taken to explain their reasons for wanting to attend law school, which typically ends up relatively generic/non-differentiating. However, that is not to say that it's not prudent to have clarity about why you want to go to law school—at bare minimum for yourself, but also, from an admissions strategy standpoint, so that you can answer that very common interview question. You may also incorporate part(s) of your "why law" in your personal statement or elsewhere in your application, but we don't encourage most applicants to write their personal statement as an answer to the prompt, "Why do you want to go to law school?"

Full transcript:

Mike: I am joined today with Dean Z, Dean Sarah Zearfoss, of Michigan Law School. She's been the longstanding—how many years, Dean Z?

Dean Zearfoss: This is 22—sorry, 23!

Mike: 22-ish years. “Legend” is a strong word, but I would say one of the most prominent people in the field. And we've done a few podcasts before. What we at Spivey Consulting like is that Dean Z doesn't spin, she doesn't sell her school, and she tells it like it is. And some of that telling like it is, is, even if she's like, “no, Spivey you’re wrong”—and we do this offline too from time to time—we'll have fun discussions, and we're going to do it. This is Part 1, and then we're going to do Part 2, where we're going to talk about rethinking admissions.

Dean Zearfoss: That is my goal. I want to have that conversation with you. Now is the time to be thinking about these things. A lot of changes in the world of admissions.

Mike: Definitely, another huge one coming in the next two or three or four weeks.

Dean Zearfoss: Sometimes between now and June 30.

Mike: Yeah, we’ll do Part 2 maybe right after that, we can talk about rethinking admissions vis-à-vis the U.S. News changes, the SCOTUS decision. So since it's the start of a new cycle, we thought we would do something where we talk about common admissions questions. And then I'm going to pose to Dean Z whether the common lore is overrated. Let me just give the starting example. When you submit your application, submitting it early, is the myth that that's important overrated or underrated? And we'll both chime in. Why? So let's start off, timing of submitting in September and October, some people make a huge deal of it. In fact, some consultants and even admissions officers have made a huge deal of it. Others don't. What do you think? Overrated or underrated?

Dean Zearfoss: Wildly overrated. Wildly. There isn't an advantage to applying sooner rather than later. But by sooner, I mean, I always think of it before January 1st. And that's usually because many schools take off in between Christmas and New Year’s and are closed down. So they get back after the New Year and are faced with a week and a half worth of mail, so things just really slow down. And it's an advantage to the applicants to get their answer earlier but the amount of difference it makes in terms of your outcome is very marginal. And certainly, there is no advantage to applying in September or October, as opposed to November or December.

Mike: Yeah, we're so we're in agreement here. I would say not only is it wildly overrated, when a consulting firm said, “if you don't apply in September, don’t apply at all,” I think that's almost malpractice if you think about the time, value of money. I can see your face, you're agreeing.

Dean Zearfoss: Yep.

Mike: The way I think of it is, yeah, if your best possible application, test scores, GPA, and buttoned up, sincere application are ready in September, sure. There's no reason to hold up.

Dean Zearfoss: There's no reason to hold up. And there’s certainly a sense of relief in checking a box when you submit. But there's no point in rushing in order to meet some made-up deadline that you arbitrarily pulled out of the ether.

Mike: And sometimes the ether is actually people saying wrong things online. So submit your best application. And if it's ready in September, great. If it's ready in November, literally what we see on our end, no difference. If you control for the fact that if they’re submitting in September, they’re probably done taking the LSAT, they're happy with their score. Their application is ready. So every time I post online, “there's no real difference between applying in September and October and November, December, as far as your application strength” someone will say, “well, I have two friends who applied in September, and they got into their dream schools.” Yeah, they had strong applications.

Dean Zearfoss: I like to think that there are people who apply in February who get into their dream school. I certainly admit people who apply in February and I hope Michigan is some people's dream school. I want to make one distinction here. There's a question of outcomes. Does applying earlier make it more likely you get admitted? Which I think is what you are focusing on with this question. And I completely agree that this is wildly, as I said, overrated. However, then there is also the question of when you get your answer. And because law schools are rolling, you’ll get your answer earlier if you apply in November than if you apply in February and many schools have deadlines that are April. So there's an advantage to you just to apply, as I said, a little bit on the earlier end, so that you can get your answer more quickly and figure out your options. But in terms of whether you get in or not, this is at best a marginal advantage if you apply earlier.

Mike: Okay, so we can close the door on that one. That's because we’re not debating it. I am curious, were you at the LSAC conference?

Dean Zearfoss: I was.

Mike: Okay, also 22, 23 years of doing this, what percentage of Deans of Admissions would agree, that's a huge myth that you need to apply?

Dean Zearfoss: I don't know all admissions deans, even though I've been doing this a million years. And the ones I talk to, everybody agrees with this. You said, it's not just consultants giving this advice but some admissions officers. I've never heard anybody do that.

Mike: It's outliers. And I think it's oftentimes either brand new Deans of Admission without much admissions experience or early data is great from the admissions side. So of course, they would rather get the data early. You would probably say they'd also rather get the best application later.

Dean Zearfoss: For sure.

Mike: Very small number of admissions officers, and it’s mostly just an online myth that hopefully we just killed.

Dean Zearfoss: And I hope so. I don't think we will, and there are many online myths that I have been endeavoring to crush over the course of my career. So far, not really seeing a big turn of the tide, but this could be it, Spivey.

Mike: I got it. But here's one that's most wouldn’t crush, retaking the LSAT and we'll even nuance it further. Retaking it till you get the score that you think is the score that puts you in the game you want to be in. Overrated or underrated?

Dean Zearfoss: I think that's overrated, but of course this is one that is a little more challenging because there's a wide range of LSAT scores. So depending on are you looking to get a 180 or are you looking to get a 160? Those are very different propositions, and are you off by one point from what you think your ideal score is, or are you off by 20 points? Those are different. And then this is one that I always think, “do you have any reason for thinking that this score is not reflective of your true score?” Are you seeing very different results in practice tests? And if so, are you sure that you are timing yourself correctly? But if you're not, I like to think that the best route is to make your peace with what that score is. And make all the other parts of your application over which you have considerable control the best they could possibly be.

Mike: This is one we're going to diverge; I’ll say underrated. It certainly was underrated when applicants thought schools literally took all LSAT scores, took out a calculator, averaged them, and reported the average to the ABA. Which they did many years ago as you know?

Dean Zearfoss: Yes, not even that long ago during my career, so please.

Mike: Twelve years ago is around when they changed?

Dean Zearfoss: Yeah, in fact, the person who was, I believe, Chair of the LSAC board when that change was made was your friend and mine Kent Syverud, Chancellor at Syracuse. And LSAC used to calculate the average for us and that was the one we had to use. But yes, now that we can use the highest score that definitely changes the calculus. So you say your defense and then I want a rebuttal.

Mike: I guess my point would be a couple things. One, the standard measurement of error for the LSAT, they haven’t released it in a long time. Which is interesting because LSAC usually, if they have a correlation report, LSAT versus first-year performance and they’re strong, you get that almost the date it spews out. But if something isn’t favorable, then you see these long interludes between the releases, but the last release of the standard measurement of errors was 2.6. So a 160 could be a 163 or a 157. Even the standard measurement of error on a given day could make for the difference between an admit or a deny or $100,000 of merit aid if there's a six-point swing. So that's number one.

Number two for me is I have found in doing this that people, not everyone, tend to feel more comfortable and less anxiety. And this is where people have to be introspective. But if you said yourself, if I put myself in a great set of mind, if I keep taking practice tests and hammering away, and I objectively think I can turn my 165 into 168, I don't see any downside to trying that in that range up to three times. It's when people with a 175 or 174 retake, where I think it looks really bad on their application.

Dean Zearfoss: Yes, okay. So I agree it depends on the range. I agree with if the person objectively thinks do you have a reason for thinking that or is it just a feeling, that makes a huge difference. There is the specter of you made the point about three scores. And that's I think a pretty good rule of thumb. I just think in general, if I'm looking at four or five scores, even if it’s that they score something tremendously strong, if there are four scores before that are quite weak, it really diminishes the value of that extremely high score. And one wonders, as if you see five scores, like why did it take so long to get the score that you wanted? What was going on there? And I also want to say I don't think there's any downside to taking it twice, if you feel like you really want to. But if you have taken it two or three times, what is preventing you from getting the score that you think you deserve or you can earn? And whatever that is, fix it, don't keep repeating the error.

Mike: Yeah, and it's often anxiety on test day. I’m not an LSAT prep expert, but one thing we try to get our clients to do is set conditions on their diagnostic test as stressful as they can. Even to the point where we say give yourself two and a half less minutes.

Dean Zearfoss: That makes total sense. That's great advice I’d say. Yes, I totally get the point of anxiety. But I guess that's the point. Do something to address it. Taking it over and over may diminish it a little bit. But if you have anxiety about taking the test, that’s the issue you want to deal with by some way better than just repeating it.

Mike: And I would say if for the person that takes it three, four, or five times, you better have a pretty nice concise but reasonable addendum. Here's an example. I worked with someone who was in Korea and his wife was in New York City. He really, really, really needed to be in New York City because his wife was in New York City. So he took it until he could get the score that got him admitted to a school in New York City. And on his fifth test, he got a great score and he got admitted to Columbia and NYU, but the addendum that he wrote made sense, strong reasons.

Dean Zearfoss: I think it's just helpful for the applicants to recognize that if an admissions officer is seeing a long litany of scores, it raises a question mark and it's best to address the question.

Mike: Yeah, a 165 three times and then a 175, you're going to pay a lot of attention to everything in that application versus a 173 and a cancellation.

Dean Zearfoss: Yeah, I feel like we've run this into the ground probably. I totally agree.

Mike: So U.S. News changes and there's two parts of this. There's the static changes that happen every year. So the volatility. And we can talk about this more maybe on this podcast. And then when we talk about rethinking admissions maybe the bigger change to me which was having what they call selectivity as the admissions metrics of GPA and LSAT. GPA is now 4% of U.S. News weight. LSAT is now 5% of U.S. News weight. Selectivity stayed at one. I don't think anyone really anticipated this, because they had already diminished them a little bit a few years prior. So U.S. News changes.

Dean Zearfoss: I know I should know this. But it was 25% total before, right?

Mike: Correct. And now it's 10%.

Dean Zearfoss: So big, big, big decrease.

Mike: We’ll take the first one first. One or two-year volatility, I’m not going to name any schools. But the school you've been dreaming to go to, oh wow, they went from 20 to 31st. Hopefully, there's no specific school that did that, because I don't mean to be naming them. Oh my gosh, are they a worse school? Underrated or overrated?

Dean Zearfoss: Totally overrated. Because of course, that could be a mistake in data or there are a million reasons why a school might change for one year in terms of its ranking. But institutions do not change quickly. Those of us who work in institutions sometimes lament that, you know, you may want a quick change in something or other and it is extremely hard to do that.

So for example, let's say, what would be something that would make a school change for the worse and that would be reflected in rankings at some level. Let's say 10 faculty left and the school can't replace them. That would be a significant, substantive diminution in the quality of an institution. And it would take a long time for that to stay out in the rankings. Part of that is the reputation that a school has, it would diminish that. But it takes a long time for people to change their minds about the perception of an institution. Bottom line, if a school changes dramatically in one year, the chances are it is some one-off cube, it has nothing to do with something that has actually changed in the school.

Mike: Yeah, a classic example would be a school sends a lot of people to one state for the bar. And that bar decides they're going to test 14 subject areas instead of 8 like they did the year before. The bar passes gets lower, and they take a huge U.S. News hit, you brought up a good distinction. Can a school get better or worse? Absolutely. Can rankings in a one-year slice of the timeline reflect that? Absolutely not. They don't. The faculty leaving is an interesting example. When I was at Vanderbilt, we hired Kip Viscusi and his whole team from Harvard Law. So he had three tenure-ships, law, political science, and economics, highest paid faculty member of Vanderbilt. He brought his entire law and economics team down with him. Did we get better as a school? Heck yeah, he's the second-most cited economist in the world and he does amazing things. Our assessment ranking got worse the next year and our running joke was every school ranked us the same except for Harvard who dinged the hell out of us. So things that matter are often not reflected at all in the rankings. Which is why we don't need one media source telling us, “hey, this is how you should value things.” A diffuse ranking system to me is the coveted goal out of all this rankings nonsense, have multiple ranking systems.

Dean Zearfoss: I totally agree. Everybody will emphasize different things, will draw out different strengths and they can get creative because there is so much more data available. Those ranking organizations can get creative about what they're actually going to pay attention to. I actually had a very fun conversation with our Director of Financial Aid during the odyssey of when they released the rankings, but then didn't release them, etc.

Anyway, he and I were like, what would we be ranking, if we were going to design a ranking system? And it was a ton of fun. He's great. He's very good with data. So it was a lot of fun. So that will be my next gig coming up with my own rankings.

Mike: My firm has one that’s free for – it’s not free for me. It's a lot of data entry so we have to pay and pay to get the data. It's myrankbyspivey.com. And the reason why we like it, although I hope U.S News does it better, with a better interface, is you could pick what matters to you.

Dean Zearfoss: I love that.

Mike: We'll put in the show notes the link to it. So the second part we can talk about on Part 2, because it's probably a long conversation, although I tend to agree with you, the change in higher education, legal education happens slowly. In this part of our Part 2 anyways, is admissions going to change with this de-emphasis on selectivity and that’s a long answer.

Dean Zearfoss: That is. I would say it certainly is possible that there will be individual institutions who under particular circumstances are going to say, “this year, I'm not going to worry as much. There are institutional reasons why an LSAT of one point lower than last year's LSAT, three LSATs, works for us institutionally.” Maybe because they don't want to give out less aid. Or they want to increase the size of the class or whatever it is. And so that's a trade-off that will now have slightly fewer consequences for our school. Whereas in past years, keeping your same medians or improving has been a constant pressure for schools.

So the pressure will be decreased slightly. But schools have all sorts of reasons why they still value metrics. They're the two objective indicia of your ability to succeed. It's not responsible as an admissions office to cling too tightly to medians in a mechanical and unthinking way. That is poor admissions practice. But we believe the LSAT and we believe the GPA do have the potential to indicate something about your future academic capacity. So there's all kinds of incentives that have nothing to do with the rankings. When I applied to law school a little bit before there were U.S. News rankings that involved LSAT scores.

Mike: Were you on the 1 to 40?

Dean Zearfoss: 48. I think it's 10 to 48. But I knew that the LSAT was very important. Everybody knew that, even though there were no rankings.

Mike: So my very short answer and then we'll discuss ad libitum on part two, would be how could it hurt you to have your best possible GPA and your best possible LSAT as an applicant?

Dean Zearfoss: GPA is trickier. I do lament the idea that you're taking classes for the sake of getting a particular GPA that you might not take a class that you’re interested in because you want to maximize your GPA. That seems like a less than ideal way to go through the educational process. So there is a little downside to focusing too highly on your GPA.

Mike: Well we'll brawl about that on Part 2.

Dean Zearfoss: Okay.

Mike: In short term, my personal takeaway is have a strong GPA, have a strong LSAT if you can. Neither is going to hurt you. Those are good aspirations and we'll deal with all the nuances on Part 2 of the U.S. News changes. Visiting campus in person, you know, that was shut down for a while, overrated or underrated now? Visiting the law school, not the campus.

Dean Zearfoss: Yes. Overrated pre-admit.

Mike: It's fascinating.

Dean Zearfoss: I think there are reasons why people want to check out a campus, but the cost of applying, the effort in applying to each additional school is pretty minimal. And I think that if you are visiting before you're admitted, you're not asking the same sorts of questions, you're not really kicking the tires to the same extent. You don't know if you're going to get in or not. And it costs a lot of money to do all these visits. So I would wait to see what schools you are admitted to, and then I think it is extremely important before you enroll at a school if you possibly can visit it.

Mike: Because you think fit is one of the most important, and the media keeps saying to me, “okay, in a world without U.S. News, how should people choose what law school to go?” Of course to me, fit and debt reduction and all those things that aren’t reflected in rankings are the most important.

Dean Zearfoss: That and I do think career opportunities are extremely important as a thing to weigh. But it allows you to dig in and it allows you to ask tough questions about the numbers or just get a sense of who are these people? Do I click with this community? This is the fit piece. Or do I get the sense that they are spinmeisters, right? Or do I see the substance when I go? There's a lot of things you could pick up in a visit and actually getting to meet people. Student happiness. You get to see other students, current students, do they seem content? Do they seem like they for the most part think positively of their institution? That's I think an important indicator.

Mike: Yeah, in-person student feedback is so much better than online, because online is usually the unhappy people that make posts. I could hug someone this morning on Reddit, someone asked about our services and this person was like, “there’s good things and bad things and there's also fake reviews.” And we can spot the fake reviews pretty quickly because they'll say things that we don't do. I think more and more people have the wherewithal that a student might be upset with X school and then they might make up a whole litany of fake things they’re upset about just because they have a grudge against one faculty member or the dean.

Or in a more extreme example, student gets denied, I hate the word rejected, so gets denied from a school, and then a year later this happened. “Oh yeah, I went to the school and I transferred out because it was miserable.” No, they're just in a maladaptive way trying to vent off what felt like a super-sized rejection.

Dean Zearfoss: Yes, that certainly happens. Every school and of course, you’re going to have some people who are unhappy, law school is hard. And it's a big group of people and there's no group of 500 to 1000 people anywhere where you're not going to get people who are unhappy. However, you do want to sort of get the context and see the extent of their unhappiness and judge it for yourself.

But to go before you're admitted, I don't know of any law school that rigorously tracks that kind of engagement and uses it as an important part of their assessment. I don't know of any school that does that.

Mike: Well, I think some do. It’s almost yield protect measures. Like the law school asks, “why our school? We’ll say Princeton Law School. Why do you choose Princeton Law School? We’ll say you lived in New Jersey or New York City, and you're able to take the train for $5 to Princeton Law School. And you can say, “X professor invited me into their classroom and even let me ask a question,” or “two students said, hey, you look like you're visiting. Do you have any questions?” “The campus was amazing. The fit felt beautiful for me at Princeton Law. So for reasons that have nothing to do with your flashy website, but how comfortable I felt being on your campus, this is what brings me to Princeton Law School.”

Dean Zearfoss: Yes, I just think that there are ways to get content for a ‘Why Princeton Law School’ essay that don't require a visit. And if it's easy to do it, sure, no biggie. But people spend a lot of money flying to different places in order to check them out at the front end. I feel like that's the wrong place to put that investment.

Mike: So we're going down on the record. I think it's underrated. You think it's overrated and people are going to listen to you over me. So United Airlines is going to be upset with you, not me.

Dean Zearfoss: Oh my god, I hope not. I have to fly United later this month. Next week and I've never flown it before.

Mike: I'm in Denver, it's their hub.

Dean Zearfoss: That's where I'm flying actually. I'm flying to Aspen.

Mike: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So AI in admissions, as you are probably more aware than I am, I imagine this was brought up at the LSAC conference, people are going to see more and more applications that are not done by the applicant but are done by a bot.

Dean Zearfoss: There was a good session on this. I mean, I think about it all the time. What’s the specific question?

Mike: There are companies out there now that say, “hey, we are AI driven in helping particularly down at the undergrad level, helping you with your application.” Is that helpful do you think to the applicant? So if it's helpful, it would be underrated or is it harmful and then it would be overrated?

Dean Zearfoss: I think I'll say overrated with an asterisk there. When we're reading essays at Michigan and at schools like Michigan, we're really hoping to get a strong sense of who we think you are in non-academic ways, right? What's your character? What’s your personality? What drives you? What motivates you? What kind of student are you going to be? The essays are very useful for telling us all about that. And we aren't going to be admitting any bots to law school. If you're leaning heavily on ChatGPT or some other AI instrument, it’s going to be hard for you to really insert yourself into that document. And I think that's a danger. Like the bland, anodyne essays where I don't get a sense of human life there, they already existed before ChatGPT existed. Those people don't get admitted.

I just came up with an example or an idea about how hard this is. So the idea would be that you're writing your essay, you give it a prompt just to get a rough draft. And then you edit it up and insert yourself in. That might be the way people want to use ChatGPT.

And when I first started in this job, my predecessors had a very different communication style than I do. And it probably took me a decade to thoroughly review all our correspondence and put my voice in there, the way I wanted it to be. It just took a long time, many, many iterations of editing to make that happen. And so if your intent is to get the rough draft in ChatGPT and then make it your own, I think that might be harder than people think it is. And by the time you do all the editing that will be necessary to do that, you might as well have just written it yourself.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I see this as a huge win for our business. Because what do we do? We try to get to know our clients, find out what matters to them in life. Derek Meeker, who you know well, calls them the MWECs, Moments Where Everything Changed. I just say, you're sitting on the couch and you're thinking about your life, what makes your hair stand up or makes you just get up with excitement about an obstacle you overcame. To date, I can’t imagine ChatGPT can come up with that form of sincerity.

So as you alluded to, the common, banal, redundant essays that they would come up, you'll be the canary in the coal mine not us. But I think you'll see pretty quickly that these don’t have a theme to them. They're going to seem similar. There's an LLM personal statement that's going around that someone wrote in China, some admissions firm in China, is essentially the same personal statement with small permutations throughout that goes out to so many law schools. And when they see it, they deny the applicant because it's not their personal statement. You could almost see picking up on bot-created applications and default towards, “wow, I'm really distrustful of this person.”

Dean Zearfoss: One thing law schools in my experience try to avoid is taking risks. You don’t want to admit people who are actually not going to be successful in law school, not going to thrive. There are a lot of ways we look for what might be risky. And having a personal statement that seems to have been written by a bot is one of those risks I think people will want to avoid.

I also will say that for many years, I paid almost no attention to the LSAT writing sample because it was handwritten, it was impossible to decipher mostly. It's always a prompt that doesn't grab you. So I really paid very little attention to it. But then when it started being typed as it is now, I started paying a little bit more attention. We are definitely going to be paying more attention to the LSAT writing sample going forward.

I have developed a rule but I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it is certain things that we're going to be looking for that I developed in conjunction with one of our writing faculty about just very quick ways to get a sense of, “is this a strong writer or a weak writer?” So maybe like a 90-second evaluation of that writing sample.

Mike: Have you come across anyone who's typed in in the writing sample? “If you're still reading this...”?

Dean Zearfoss: Yes, all the time. It hurts our feelings.

Mike: It's amazing to me the risks people take in the admissions process. Like the stakes are so high in their minds, in many applicants’ minds which I would argue the stakes aren’t even as high as people make them out to be because most schools are really good. But given that the stakes are so high that people would also take risks like doxing themselves online, bad talking a school online. You can read every user's comments and it’s not hard for an admissions office to figure out who someone is. Or in the case we're bringing up, why would you ever take a writing sample and start talking halfway through, “I know you're not reading this so my cat fluffy is the greatest creature on the earth, hahaha fluffy.”

Dean Zearfoss: I don't know. I do want to clear up one thing because you know that I do not go online. Some people in my office like to go online and see what the mood is, but we have a pretty firm rule, “Don't go and try and figure out who it is.” Because I do think it is possible to do it, often probably easy, because sometimes people put their actual name in there so that's easy. But I think there's the higher chance of making a mistake on our end and painting someone with someone else's sins. So we don’t do that.

But you’re right. Many schools do, it is entirely possible that will happen and it’s silly. Some people call my office and are rude and they’ve left their name. That's strange. You think I don't talk to the person who answers our phones? I’m not going to admit someone who's rude to the person who answers our phone.

Mike: Yeah, I was a Dean of Career Services during the Great Recession and jobs were not being handed out and I can think of a few students who had jobs in hand and then were rude to the front office people at the firms and got their jobs rescinded. You just killed the start of your career by being a jerk.

Dean Zearfoss: Yeah.

Mike: There's no win. And this could be a next question, being upbeat and ebullient and kind in the admissions process, to me that is so underrated. We could almost data mine this. Like if there were a metric as construct to measure ebullience, the people who don't let one denial get them down, who still approach the world, not just admissions offices, with kindness, they almost always seem to win at the end of the cycle.

Dean Zearfoss: Yeah, it's not just your rational, it's not just like, I like to be around nice people because this is my personal predilection. No, it does indicate a certain amount of confidence and certain ability to succeed. Like your ability to engage with negative events and still keep going is a very strong indicator of success in life. And yes, I care about that a lot. Let’s talk about that in Part 2. That's one of the things I think about as a potential problem, the content of that is, but to be continued on that.

Mike: So we'll do one last overrated and underrated and then we'll get to a couple of questions people had asked online for you. They don’t care about my answers. Several typos or mistakes.

Dean Zearfoss: One typo is fatal. Just one.

Mike: Exactly.

Dean Zearfoss: No, that's a joke. Don't believe me. That was a joke.

Mike: So there's a lot of anxiety. I just submitted my application and I saw five typos in a 12-page application and I'm doomed. What do I do? So overrated, underrated, is that a mistake?

Dean Zearfoss: It's a mistake. So it's totally overrated. Now there are typos that are worse than others.

Mike: Like wrong school name.

Dean Zearfoss: Actually, that one I try not to worry about the wrong school name too much. Usually makes me laugh more than be outraged. It's in the very first line if you've got a missing word or a big misspelling or something like that, you just set the tone in the very first line. It's harder to come back from that.

Mike: “It was a dark and calm night,” instead of ‘stormy’.

Dean Zearfoss: Right. So you really want to proofread that first sentence, that's my big advice there.

Mike: And also not use, “It was a dark and stormy night,” as your first sentence.

Dean Zearfoss: Yes, don't use that. But yeah, five typos over the course of the whole thing, I just think it’s petty to worry about that. And when I practiced law, I don't think I ever turned in a brief when I went back and re-read it after submitting it and didn't find some typos. I don't like it either. I hate finding typos. But it isn’t the thing that's going to make the court rule against you.

Mike: Yeah. So you know much more than I. But I can remember when I was in admissions, I would say roughly 98 or 99 of every 100 applications had typos in them.

Dean Zearfoss: Again, as I say, sometimes they're particularly hilarious you know, because someone used the wrong word so that gets your attention. Often people will use a word that means the opposite of what they mean. Or when it's in the first sentence it just sets a tone and it’s not the tone you want the admissions office to have when they're reviewing your application. But I've actually tried lots of ways in the last few years to tell people like, “don't worry about it. Please don't worry about it.”

I have an annotated application on our website, I don't know if you’ve ever seen that. Where I give tips and tricks about this is what we're trying to elicit with this question. And in there, I specifically have, you know, a comment that says, “do not worry about small errors.” And then people write to us and tell us, “page three, I made this error, and I'd like to correct it.” We always write back and say, “we'll happily add this to your application. But please don't worry about this.”

Mike: Yeah and, “Dear office of emissions,” even that one I would get once a year and I would laugh. Let's shift gears. That was good, right? We're agreed and disagreed and that's always fun. There were a couple of questions for you. When answering the ‘why law’ question on applications, how specific do schools expect you to be?

Dean Zearfoss: That's a great question. I would say, first of all, when you say ‘expect’, I don't expect that everybody's going to have specific reasons that are unique to Michigan for why they want to apply to Michigan. Because again, it's hard to get to know a school from the outside. But if you don't have them, the utility of that essay really diminishes. If you could substitute in the name of five other law schools for Michigan, in your ‘why Michigan’ essay, it's probably not going to be helping you very much. So maybe at least for Michigan, my advice would be that's why we give you nine different prompts, pick a different prompt that will show me that you’re engaged, that will show me that you're making an effort and you don't need to blow smoke about how great Michigan is to get my attention.

And if you have a specific reason, I really find that winning. I do like that. If someone says, “this is what I know about your institution, this is why it appeals to me,” you name specific courses or specific professors or something about the area or some of your connection to the area. There’s a lot of different things that people can be specific about. And that does move the needle in a way that a bland one will not move the needle. It won’t count against you, it just doesn't really give the value-added as the business school people like to say.

Mike: The things in the category of ‘it doesn’t count against you’, I always think of as some negative though because the whole part of admissions is you have these objective numbers after you submit your application, obviously you can retake the LSAT. But a decision is going to be rendered based on two buckets, objective data and all these tiny things you can stack up. So if you're not stacking up these tiny things, I don't try to over-hype this, maybe it's 1%, but if you stack up 20 of those, it really can make the difference.

Dean Zearfoss: Could not agree more strongly. Yes, it's just wasted territory. You know an opportunity that you didn't take, if you have an essay that you've written and it doesn't move the needle.

Mike: Just for anyone listening, how to approach every application is every word matters. And we can talk about this on Part 2. I love the schools that ask, “here's six questions, pick one or two. There also might have been a second question which is, and I think this one's overrated. So many applicants think that they have to address why they're applying to law school, my default when I read applications was, if you're applying to law school, you've addressed why you want to go to law school.

Dean Zearfoss: I assume you know what you're doing. Yes, I’m assuming that there’s a reason.

Mike: Some schools like it more than others.

Dean Zearfoss: I think it depends on the reason. For me, like some people do have very specific reasons grounded in certain experiences that are interesting stories. But most people are applying to law school for fairly general reasons that don’t make an interesting story, “And I'm imagining this sort of career. I'm interested in this sort of type of issue. I like writing,” whatever it is. Those aren't too compelling. So if you have a compelling reason, great. But if you don't, lots of other topics that will be much more engaging and get the attention.

Mike: The worst possible opening line to a personal statement would be, “It was a dark and calm night and all my life I've wanted to be a lawyer.”

Dean Zearfoss: There we go. My vote to the worst start is always the Robert Frost, the road less traveled. I don't believe in starting with quotes from someone else.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, anything that doesn't differentiate can be as bad, and starting with a quote is not differentiating as so many people do. “I really want some insights regarding international applications, especially non-GPA!” Exclamation point. There's a big one, pressure’s on. “I believe Dean Z discussed this topic briefly during one of our application readings. In general, what is the most important aspect that adcomms want to see from international applicants? Is it a stronger ‘why law’?” We talked about that, “Or ‘why US law motivation’ and considering the non-GPA context, does it become more important in such circumstances?”

Dean Zearfoss: So I think the thing that I might have addressed in our A-to-Z episode is that if you don't have a GPA, if you know you were foreign-educated and it doesn't translate into a GPA for the Law School Admission Council purposes, then the only metric, we can see your transcript and we can understand mostly whether you performed well or didn't perform well. So we'll substantively know how you did.

But the one metric, the one data point we will have is the LSAT. So without a GPA and without a ton of knowledge about any individual non-US school, because we will obviously get many fewer applications from any non-US schools. We don't have the same base of foundation or information about it. Your LSAT takes on a lot more weight. That's just something to think about. If you have a zero for GPA, we’ll be looking more closely at your LSAT score to make sure that we think that you could do the work.

And then in terms of other things that you can do, even though we just talked about, you don't have to explain ‘why law’, there's exceptions to every rule. So sometimes if someone is really changing careers, then I am more, a little interested in seeing a ‘why law’ essay. Like you've done 15 years in this one thing, and now you want to be a lawyer and that's a big change. So I'm obviously curious about that. What would make you want to do that?

And by the same token, if you're an international applicant and you want to come to the United States to study law, that’s a huge undertaking and upheaval in life, so I might be more curious about that. I’m curious if you agree with this. I think the undertaking when you're putting an application together is to step back and think, what questions are going to be raised in the mind of someone who doesn't know me when they look at these materials and how can I address those questions. Whether directly, you know, with an addendum or indirectly by my essays or by letters of rec writers who might speak on my behalf. That sort of thing.

Mike: If you're curious if I agree with it, I would say the foundation of our 12-year running firm, is it's impossible with no admissions experience. It's not impossible, because some people actually have really good instincts and you can see it. But it's easy to do an application the way you think you should do it. It’s incredibly difficult to put yourself not in your shoes, but “hey, this Dean of Admissions has been reading applications for 23 years. She's read 80,000. How do I put myself in their shoes?”  That's not just admissions. That's part of life. It's trying to see perspective. It's very difficult as an applicant to see things from an admissions perspective. And because there's so much false noise out there, you see it all the time. I'm sure people tell you about it, then it becomes even harder.

Dean Zearfoss: I agree. And I also think there is by some applicants an unfortunate reluctance to listen to the signal, right. Sometimes people ask me advice and I will give it to them, and it's not the advice they wanted and they will either argue with me or just walk away clearly having rejected it, which is certainly their prerogative. You know, there’s no piece of advice that is universally true. Like I have different points of view from you. We both have different points of view from other admissions officers and so forth. So I'm not claiming that any advice I give is certainly correct. But you understand what I'm saying. There are people who have particular ideas in their head and it's very hard to sway them regardless of what kind of good advice they might get.

Mike: Yeah, like the expression, ‘Thou doth protest too much’, there’s a great book, Think Again.

Dean Zearfoss: I have that. I love that book.

Mike: Adam Grant, is that?

Dean Zearfoss: Yes. You probably recommend that to me! Somebody recommended it to me. Since you're saying it now, I’m guessing it was you.

Mike: All I do is recommend books so it's possible. He talked about at the very beginning, people who changed their test scores on standardized tests actually do better than people who say, “my gut instinct was option A, so I'm going to stick with option A.” So they've studied this at the macro data level.

Dean Zearfoss: Interesting.

Mike: So based on, this is not Mike Spivey or Dean Z speaking, but based on Adam Grant's research, if you have time and you’re thinking about a question, and you think your answer was wrong, you should change it. The macro-level data is trust those instincts. Just a side note.

Now we have do schools see LSAT scores that are older than five years old. Do those scores matter?

Dean Zearfoss: The answer is no, we do not see those. In the olden days and some point in the past, I believe we did. And LSAC has now changed it so we just don't see those.

Mike: So I remember when you could see them back from eternity.

Dean Zearfoss: I was thinking, so I didn't just imagine that?

Mike: No, it was like that. It’s an interesting change. Oh, I know why they did it. I bet because of LSAT Flex and how it changed from three sections to…

Dean Zearfoss: I think it's also because they put a lifetime limit on how many times you can take the test.

Mike: Okay. So they had the reasons for doing it. So the answer is no, that was a simple one. “Hey, Spivey, any chance you can ask Dean Z how admissions generally views second bachelor's degrees?” Just the broad idea as second bachelor's degrees aren't exactly common in the United States.

Dean Zearfoss: Yeah. As a practical matter, the initial bachelor's degree you earn is going to be the GPA that we use for our data and we will use as part of our assessment of whether or not we think you can do the work. Because that is the piece of data that LSAC uses for all of its correlation studies. And it's the piece of data that the ABA wants us to declare when we’re giving our data. So the first bachelor's degree will have more importance than the second. It's quite rare that anybody applies with two bachelor's degrees. And it's one of those things, it just raises a question I mean for me, why did this happen? Why did you go back and get a second bachelor’s? So I would think if that's your situation, it would be smart to just give me two or three sentences about that and it's like additional information. It's useful information. So it seems like a positive as a general proposition, but again, I'd want to know why did we go this route?

Mike: Yeah, my heuristic is generally don't leave a question unanswered. By the way, just filling in ‘Yes’ ‘No’s’ in the applications, just don’t leave anything blank if you can answer it.

Dean Zearfoss: Yes, when we're putting the application together, you know, we can say, this is required or this is not required if we're giving the question. And when you're designing an application, you want to, you don't want to make someone have to answer a question that they might not have an answer to.

So for example, we ask for information about up to two parents or guardians. Some people may only have one parent or guardian. So I don't want to force you to answer a question about a second parent when that may not be your situation. But then again, it really raises an eyebrow for me if someone only lists one parent and then elsewhere in the application makes it clear that they have two parents and talk about two parents. And I think why did you not give me that other parents' information, such a small thing? And it just makes me think, this is someone who is cutting corners.

Mike: Right.

Dean Zearfoss: It's a very small little bit of info, but as you said earlier, yes, these small bits of information add up to getting in or not.

Mike: No, I would say this is a good note to end on, cutting corners in any part of the admissions process is overrated. You don't want to do it. So be thorough. Proofread, don't rush. Don't submit on an arbitrary deadline. Always put forth your best foot on every nth nuanced degree.

Dean Zearfoss: And to the extent you can, do step back and think if someone doesn't know me, how does this application look to them? What kind of person appears to be applying to law school based on these bits of writing and this resume and these bits of data.

Mike: Yeah, it's hard. Introspection is hard for all, but yes, stepping back and saying, “okay, before I hit submit –”

Dean Zearfoss: Just to be, clear, I think it's perfectly appropriate to have someone else read your application or a couple of someone else’s to say, “does this sound like me? Am I adequately and accurately portraying myself in here?” I think that's an absolutely fine thing for people to do.

Mike: Yeah, and I think most people do it in some form or another.

Dean Zearfoss: Right. I didn't want to leave anyone with the impression that this is all on you and you’ve got to figure it out on your own. And it doesn't have to be, no offense to your people, the consultants at Spivey, but it doesn't have to be someone who's a consultant. A friend who's not a professional can still give you very good advice.

Mike: 100%. We're seven minutes over our timeline. I gotta jet, you gotta jet. We're going to pick it up maybe after the SCOTUS decision for Part 2?

Dean Zearfoss: Yeah, I’d love that.

Mike: Looking forward to it.

Dean Zearfoss: All right. Thanks, Spivey.

Which program are you applying to?

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March 29, 2024

Whatever You Do, Do Not Leave the Law School Optional Essay Blank!

Many law schools invite applicants to share more about themselves through an optional essay. 

For example, the University of Pennsylvania Law School provides the following optional essay prompts:

• These are the core strengths that make Penn Carey Law the best place to receive a rigorous, collaborative, and engaging legal education: genuine integration with associated disciplines; transformative, forward-looking faculty scholarship; highly-regarded experiential learning through clinics and our pro bono pledge; innovative, hands-on global engagement; and a manifest commitment to professional development and collegiality. These qualities define Penn Carey Law. What defines you? How do your goals and values match Penn Carey Law’s core strengths? 
• Penn Carey Law is committed to achieving an expansive and inclusive law school community that brings a diverse range of ideas, experiences, and perspectives to our classrooms. Tell us how your lived experience informs who you are today. 
• Describe a significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. 
• What strength or quality do you have that most people might not see or recognize? 
• What don’t we see in your application file that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee? 
• If you do not think that your academic record or standardized test scores accurately reflect your ability to succeed in law school, please tell us why.

Are these essays truly optional ? Technically, yes, they are; it says so right there in the name. However, the only truly optional essay here is the one about your academic record or standardized test scores. If you don’t feel that those reflect your ability to succeed in law school, take the opportunity to explain why in an essay. If you believe your grades and standardized test scores are a good measure of how successful you’ll be as a student, it is okay to skip that prompt (and others like it). 

Completing your law school application is a very one-dimensional process, but you are a three-dimensional human being, with at least two decades of life experiences. The personal statement was your opportunity to let the committee know why you want to go to law school. After that, applicants often run out of steam (or ideas) and skip writing any additional essays, hoping that the word “optional” means “it’s okay to opt out.” But it doesn’t. If you want to get into a school, take every opportunity to tell the admissions committee more about yourself. Failure to respond to the “optional” essay prompts can seem as though you are saying you have nothing else interesting to offer to the law school community.

Here are a few tips for making your optional essays more impactful:

1. Brainstorm before you write.

After you read the schools’ optional essay prompts, start by brainstorming all possible ideas and situations that might make good content for an essay. Think about your college career, volunteer work, employment, and family and personal life. Which events, experiences, and achievements would you like the school to know about that aren’t discussed elsewhere in your application? Then, decide which of those events, experiences, or achievements make the most sense for each essay.

2. Follow the directions. 

Most optional essays are short – about one page, double-spaced. Be sure to read each school’s instructions carefully, and don’t exceed the word or length limit. The length of your optional essay should not rival that of your personal statement.

3. Show, don’t tell. 

The biggest mistake applicants make is responding to an essay question without fully illustrating what they are talking about. In other words, give the reader some detail about what happened so they can picture it. Remember, you are trying with your essay to help the adcom see you as a three-dimensional person. It is harder to say no to a person!  

4. Don’t repeat yourself. 

Don’t write about the same things you shared in your personal essay or elsewhere in the application. This is your opportunity to continue your narrative, not repeat it. Examples you offer can be from your personal or professional experience.

Optional essays give you an opportunity to share more about yourself with the admissions committee. Putting in the time necessary to answer the optional essay questions effectively will serve you well by adding more depth to your application. Don’t skip them!

Looking for guidance on how to write an optional essay that will boost your chances of acceptance? Schedule a free consultation to discuss your law school application.

Sadie Polen has more than ten years of experience in higher education. She reviewed statements of purpose, personal statements, and resumes for political and public service opportunities and made candidate selections for elite programs at Harvard University. She also has experience advising individuals on their career and post-graduation plans. Sadie holds a BS from UC Davis, an EdM from Harvard, and a DEI certificate from Cornell. Want Sadie to help you get Accepted? Click here to get in touch .

Related Resources:

• Advice for Applicants: Moving from 2023 to 2024 , podcast Episode 557
• Navigating the Law School Admissions Process , podcast Episode 550
• Four Ways to Highlight Your Strengths in Your Application Essays

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