i saw that Ethan's advice on the columbia page says to add a couple sentences on why Columbia. i would need to go on to the third page to do this. i'm seeing some conflicting advice on other sites on whether or not columbia wants this, so i wanted to clarify here whether this is necessary/important to include.
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Answering from the AdComm vantage!
Here's CLS's personal statement prompt from last year (emphasis added): "Candidates to Columbia Law School are required to submit a personal statement supplementing required application materials. We are curious about your interests, goals, and aspirations and how the J.D. program at Columbia can help you achieve these. You are encouraged to think about the contributions you hope to make to both the Columbia community and the legal profession while considering your personal, intellectual, and professional background and any relevant information that you may not have conveyed through your other application materials. Please note that the personal statement should be double-spaced and approximately two pages in length."
In general, if a school drops language like that into their PS prompt, it's nice to give them a little bit of what they're looking for even if it's just two or three lines.
If that means cutting out a few lines from somewhere else in the prompt, that's an ok tradeoff.
If you can't make that cut to open up space, then you have a few options. You can not address the Why CLS language in your PS. I think that's ok if it's clear from the rest of your PS why CLS would be a good fit for you (to use an easy example, if your PS is all about wanting to do corporate law in New York City ... well, I mean, CLS is an obviously good option for you). But if your reasons for being interested in CLS are more subtle and wouldn't really be discerned from the PS, then there's a smidge of a risk here.
But an easy out here is reducing your font size to 11.5 or 11. CLS is one of those schools that doesn't specify how big your font should be!
@JacobBaska thank you! if i reduce my font size and end up with a few orphan lines (i'm not sure what they're called, but lines where i only have 2-3 words on the line), does that look sloppy? i'm not sure that i have any other detail to add to those paragraphs, but the reduced font size is the only way for me to add in those lines about columbia.
@sophiak I really wouldn't sweat that. If you had some more detail to add - great, you have the space to do it. If you don't have more detail to add - that's ok, you've said what you've needed to say and I appreciate you not giving me more just for the sake of more.