A few years ago, an applicant asked me to look at his materials from the previous cycle. He had the kind of pedigree that makes an admissions officer’s heart race: a 99.9th percentile LSAT score, a nearly perfect GPA, and a degree in electrical engineering. But his results had been disappointing. He hadn’t gotten into any of his reach or target schools.
If it seemed like a mystery, it didn’t stay mysterious for long. He’d written his personal statement about being a “perfectionist,” which is like responding to a dinner invitation by threatening to start a food fight.
That brings us to our first lesson: your personal statement matters. It can disqualify you, as it did in the case of Mr. Perfection, and while it can’t make your application all on its own, it can help make your application to a greater extent than any other element you can control.
Compare Mr. Perfection with Ms. Sea Turtle, an applicant whose interests had shifted from marine biology to law and whose essay connected the migration of giant sea turtles to her own journey as an immigrant. It was a lucid, friendly, engaging essay that did not imply that she would be enraged by minor setbacks. Her LSAT score was ten points lower than Mr. Perfection’s, and her demographics were probably less attractive, but she got into all the schools he didn’t. Actually, she got into all the schools. Period.
But Not Everyone Has a Unique Topic
Do you mean that you have not spent months communing with sea turtles? Have you been—shame on you—studying and working and being a normal person? Don’t tell me that you’ve even failed to have an exciting upbringing or to experience a life-changing event that has filled you with a burning desire to study law!
In fact, that might be an opportunity: you can tell a quiet, level-headed story. In the end, the content of the personal statement doesn’t matter as much as its sincerity and authenticity. Some readers are more impressed by strong essays that don’t feature any set-piece drama, because those essays require more craft.
Unfortunately, thoughts about craft can paralyze applicants. They assume that there is a single perfect essay and their job is to locate it by means of furious contemplative effort. They can’t bring themselves to start writing (“I’ll never find the right topic”), or else they can’t finish writing (“I have to squish everything in here”), or maybe they can’t stop writing new, radically different essays.
It’s easy to get lost in the maze and much better to start the process by asking how the maze is constructed. What does the personal statement have to do, and what is the context in which it has to do it?
The Goal of a Personal Statement
Your personal statement needs to communicate a sense of who you are, both to distinguish you from other applicants with similar numbers and to reassure admissions readers that you’re decent and sane and they wouldn’t be making a mistake if they invited you to be part of their community. That’s the “personal” part. As for the second part: you don’t have to write a statement of purpose, but you have to prove in some way that you’re getting into this for the right reasons. Even if you are decent and sane, readers need to know that you understand what law school is, you’ll do the work when you get there, and you’ll be employable afterward.
Who are you, and why are you doing this? The goal is to answer those questions.
There’s a critically important constraint, however: the essay has to do these things quickly and unambiguously because the application review process is stressful for the people doing the reviewing. Your reader is not kicking back with a pineapple Fanta and enjoying an application or two before they hit the slopes or the sweat lodge. It’s 2 AM on a December night, and they have a big stack of files to get through. They’re looking for red flags that enable them to say no and move on. Even in the best case, you’ve only got their attention for a few minutes.
Maybe that has you reaching for the smelling salts or reconsidering the management training program at Six Flags, but the more you know about the context in which your essay will be received, the simpler your task becomes. You wouldn’t add bibliographic citations to a billboard or write an astrophysical journal article using letters you cut out from magazines. All writing must respond to its context, and considering your audience is the first and most important step in any writing project.
In this case, your audience is tired, and you need to make it easy for them. Write simply, make sure your transitions are clear and logical, and remember that subtlety is very likely to go unappreciated. You’re here to tell a lucid and straightforward story that a reader can grasp in about two minutes.
Think About Your Own Context as an Applicant
When an admissions reader picks up your file, they’ll look at your test scores, your transcripts, and your resume. They’ll learn what you’ve done, that is, but they won’t know what it meant, or who you really are, or how you came to be applying to their law school right now, today, instead of on some other day in the forgotten past or the unimaginable future. That’s what the personal statement is for.
Just as you need to consider the larger context of the application review process, you also need to think about the context of your own file. An essay that works well for someone else will not work well for you. If, for example, you’re a non-traditional student who’s been working as a rodeo clown for ten years, you need to make sure the reader understands why you’re pivoting to law and how your experience as a rodeo clown might be construed as an asset in law school and in your subsequent legal career. If you’ve been out of college for two years and you’ve spent that time working as a paralegal, the situation is different.
Either way, the essay needs to address those big questions: Who are you, and why are you doing this? In practice, the Why usually determines the story you want to tell, and the Who is a matter of the way you tell that story. The details, the voice, the rhythm.
Let’s consider the case of our hypothetical rodeo clown. The Why might look like this: “I worked as a rodeo clown for ten years, and that experience has given me an intense interest in the laws and regulations that protect gig workers, especially gig workers in high-risk professions.” While the writer makes that argument, however, they’ll also explain what it feels like to do that job. The bull’s bloodshot eyes. The discomfort of the protective gear underneath the bright, tearaway clothing. The shattering moment after the rodeo, when the sad clown is alone with his injuries in a dark locker room that smells of sweat and rubbing alcohol and cheap liquid soap. The reader is left with a few unforgettable images, but they also feel good at a higher level because those images have been carefully packaged and deployed in the service of explaining the Why.
Sometimes, Don’t Be Afraid of the Traditional Career Narrative
It’s important to say that your personal statement can be memorable without being shocking or unusual. Think of that tired admissions officer. After reading ten essays full of flashing lights and loud sounds and jokes that don’t land, might they appreciate a sober, level-headed career narrative?
If you’ve been working as an accountant for a few years and you dream of starting your own firm and working as a full-stack tax attorney, you should say so. You should err on the side of saying it plainly and clearly, and you shouldn’t worry that it’s not exciting. It’s the right essay for you. The choice of topic will speak to your good judgment, and the essay will describe a clear professional trajectory that leaves the reader feeling confident that you’d take your work seriously and finish your degree. You’ll look like a good bet.
Most essays are a mix of sober career narrative and loud sounds. That’s fine. There’s no formula, and there’s no subject that inevitably makes a great essay. There are lots of trite or boring ways to write about rodeo and lots of engaging and interesting ways to write about tax law. It’s not a unique subject that makes an essay unique; it’s the way you tell whatever story you choose to tell.
That’s the lesson. No one else is you, and they couldn’t be if they tried. That also means that you shouldn’t try to be anyone else.