I use the top-law-schools forum but they’re all mean. Actually, most people on most forums are snarky and rude and cruel. Here everyone’s like “Awwwwww!” all the time. MUCH better. I told my boyfriend about how mean all the law school forum people were and he said that’s just how forum people are. I’m glad that it’s not just law students… so you guys are a lovely, lovely outlier =)
So I need help! I have to write an essay called a Personal Statement, which counts for about 1/3 of my application. It has to be extraordinarily well-written, round, intriguing, and grasping from the get-go. It also has to exemplify my personality and my skills. It can’t restate my resume. Basically, it has to be a story.
I started it but I don’t know…. meh. This is my intro paragraph. I had a different intro but the top law school people said it was not enough about me so I tried again (remember it’s super rough… I barely have more than an intro):
I was taken aback. I had spent months planning this event, had focused on the most minute of details to make it a success. And, since the incoming international students and their families had filed into the oddly shaped room early that morning, I had been entirely devoted to assuring the program’s success. I had taken care of any glitches as they had arisen, and I had made sure the hundreds of students had completed their immigration check-in despite the sundry who had forgotten to bring their passports and I-94 cards. I had no thoughts but those relating to the success of the program. Normally a talkative person, today I had found no joy in communicating with these people who would, on any other day, intrigue and fascinate me. Today, they were just numbers. Lists to be filed through, names to be accounted for and checked off.
The statement will go on to talk about why I’m taken aback (a girl sits down while I’m trying to plan stuff during lunch and I feel obligated to talk to her and the people who followed her over), and then how I find out she’s from Iran and just completed an engineering PhD at Harvard but now she can’t go home since relations between the US and Iran got really bad and it’s dangerous for her and the family she left there and she can’t get a regular visa working here bc she’s from Iran so instead she’s just doing another graduate program with scholarship and living stipend bc it’s the only way she can figure out to take care of herself. Between that story I’ll be talking about my job, and how her story and my job make me interested in law.
and I MIGHT use her story to segue into a story about me and a health condition I had to semi-overcome and how it was worse in my law class that everything else but I’m still super interested in law, despite the fact that many times I wanted to just not ever go back to class.
But is that no good? Are there better topics I could use? People talk about difficulties in childhood, getting kicked out of college, being shrewd and bright, etc….
thanksss!