Getting Personal with Personal Statements A

[MUSIC] Welcome to Navigating Law School Admissions with Miriam and Christie. In this episode, we are trying something totally new, providing feedback on real application materials. In this case, a few personal statements. We really, really want to thank everyone who submitted their materials for our review and we wish we could have gone through more. We hope that this episode is helpful for all of you individually and also to all of the applicants looking to learn more about how admissions officers actually evaluate personal statements. And we are so lucky to be joined for this mini-series by Ulyss Boide, our fantastic colleague who is the dean of admissions and financial aid at Brooklyn Law School. Thank you so much for joining us, Ulyss. Please take a moment to introduce yourself. >> Thank you so much for having me. I am from Syracuse, New York originally. I went to Cornell undergrad and Harvard for Law School. I practiced commercial litigation here in New York for about eight and a half years before my transition into the world of law school admissions. I started out in the business a couple of years as the number two admissions person at Columbia. That has been a few years in corporate HR. Mostly doing talent acquisition work. I did a lot of work hiring lawyers and compliance people, which really informs my approach to admissions. I'm really glad to be with you. I understand that you guys require a fun fact of your guests. >> Yes, we do. At least one, if not more. One is a minimum. >> All right. I'll give you two quick fun facts. One is when I was about eight years old. For reasons you'd have to ask of my mother, we went and spent a year and a half in Liberia, which opened my eyes in a way that I would never after that be able to go back. Just being exposed to something like an entirely different country at such an early age at a place like West Africa was life changing. From that moment forward, it was always going to be about more, more, more, more, more. The second fun fact is that I'm obsessed with Legos. I still work on Lego models. I'm working on some birds. Later today, I'm going to put together a homing bird. I just really enjoy the idea of creativity within a structure. You can get pretty wild, I'm a big fantasy science fiction person, but I like the idea of being forced to be creative, but within a certain set of lines. And to me, there's kind of a parallel there with the law. >> All right, Yola. So in addition to the fun fact tradition, another one of our traditions on this podcast is to start every episode with a game. So this time, we're going to go with a road trip favorite, which is something we do quite a lot, hypothetical questions. So I thought we could each ask one admissions theme, hypothetical question, and all of us would answer since it's a mini series, we'll each ask one at the head of one of the smaller episodes. So I'm going to start things off. If you could change one thing about the way law school admissions currently works, what would it be? Ulyss, you're up first. >> I think it would be the obsession with exclusivity, right? Like, we all want the strongest students for our schools, our institutions, our students and our faculty deserve that. But I think we sometimes can flate that priority with, you know, with exclusion. And I'm not sure it has to be that way. I feel like we are almost rewarded for excluding as many possible students and I wish we had a different sort of orientation around the admissions process. >> All right, I'll go next. I've said it before. I'll say it again. Death to rolling admissions. >> Death to rolling admissions. >> And it. Finish it. I'd like to see one date certain when all applications are due. And one date or maybe two, when all law schools release their decisions. I maintain it would be better for admissions committees who could see the entirety of a pool before making decisions. And I do really think it would reduce applicant anxiety, particularly the fixation on applying early and what that means. >> Very interesting. I don't actually don't think I've heard you say that before. >> Interesting. >> I had it in our very first episode of this season. I sort of said, I've got to be able to say it. >> I'm not rolling admissions, but more on that another time. >> You know that? >> This is the other time. All right, so for me, it's the rankings. And this is the Canadian and me. We just don't rank things in quite the same way in Canada. And so moving here was such a shock to the system to see the rankings obsession in this country. And so I think what goes along with wanting to deemphasize the rankings is wanting to deemphasize the incredible focus on things that are important, but also have an somewhat arbitraryness to them. Things like library size and acceptance rate and peer assessment scores, which those things matter. But it kind of, they matter to some extent, but not to the extent they matter as part of the rankings. And I think that this can have a distorting impact both on the schools and the way that we run admissions and also on applicant incentives. >> I co-sign. >> Yeah. >> I co-sign you on rolling admissions. I co-sign you, Liz, on exclusivity. I agree with. Why don't they put us in charge? >> I don't want to go on a big rant about the rankings, but I will say I think that they also drive runaway cost of attendance. >> Yes. >> That's a subject for a whole other episode at some point. But especially for schools like ours where the competition is so fierce for the strongest students that really builds the discounting practice and the discounting practice is what causes high tuition sort of, you know, sticker price. So the rankings have lots of problems. >> Yes, I agree with that because I think it also forces schools into a merit based financial aid model, rather than a need based financial aid model, which I think is really distorting the purposes of financial aid in many ways. And as you said, that's what's required and you end up with this discounting. So yes, that is a whole other episode and we will welcome you back for that discussion. >> I agree with that. >> On a later date. >> So let's turn to our first personal statement, but before we do, a few quick background points. This mini series will make a whole lot more sense if you listen to each episode with the personal statement that's being discussed in front of you or after you have read the personal statement. You can find all of them on our podcast website or linked in the description of this episode on whatever platform you're listening from. >> You'll also notice that the personal statements have all been anonymized and any personally identifying information has been removed. We want to make sure to respect the author's privacy. >> And I know I said it before, but I'm saying it again. We want to really thank everyone who submitted an application material. We really wish we had more time to review more of them. We'll be trying to select statements with a wide range of strengths and also areas for improvement. All right, no more delays. Let's get right to the first personal statement. If you're on our website, look for personal statement A, which begins with a very powerful line. And I'm going to read it. When I was 18 years old, I found myself sleeping in the back of my car during the frigid winter. It goes on to describe a very difficult childhood and young adulthood, followed by a pivotal moment when the author joined a job core program and earned their GED. This led them first to community college, then university, and in their words, and again, this is a quote, my hunger for knowledge was forever kindled. The author next discusses how their interest in criminal justice and specifically prosecution work was lit by their college coursework as well as the deep injustices of racism and police brutality. The next section of the personal statement focuses on the applicant's interest in a specific law school and references the school's criminal law clinic and the writing program. It then concludes with a few rather general paragraphs on how the author will contribute to the law school community. And it finally ends with the following sentences. Many of my childhood friends are dead in prison, drug addicted or lost in a cycle of dead and employment and unemployment, reflecting on my experiences, I know my life easily could have been the same. All right, so what was everyone's initial gut reaction when you read this personal statement? So I'll jump in. I thought it was a great example of where the personal story is so strong and clear. It's very connected to the why law school question, which is obviously a kind of time honored question for personal statements to address and why law in particular for this person. So you don't, you're not left wondering why that aspect of the of the applicants, you know, the story, it's clearly addressed here and it nearly writes itself because the sort of plot action of their life is so vivid. I agree. There's a strong narrative here and I was I was rooting for this writer from the get go. This applicant is the first in their family to go to college. They got their GED after dropping out of high school. They've spent time living in a homeless shelter. There's so much grit here. I want them to succeed. So I agree 100% that this is an extremely compelling narrative. The circumstances that the author is describing are really difficult ones, but you're still left with a feeling of optimism and forward momentum. And that can be a really tough balance to find to describe hard things, but still have a positivity to the tone and into the to the way the reader feels when reading the material and the author here, I felt really achieve that balance. Let's start with some basics, length formatting grammar. I know we've talked about this in a few prior episodes, but These small things can matter a lot and shape how you feel about the personal statement as a whole. So what jumped out to me right away is the length. This personal statement runs almost three pages, double spaced, and that's for most schools just too long. As a result, when I was reading it, I was very distracted by my impulse as an editor, whether every sentence or every word is really necessary. Here I think there's quite a lot of room for cutting to two pages. Yeah, I absolutely agree. This author really needs to ask themselves some tough questions about what is absolutely necessary to the narrative. I think when you have a story that's this compelling, the inclination is to include everything. But the problem with that is the expectations of law school admissions offices is a more succinct narrative, right? The capacity to limit yourself and be brief is the work that's part of the work. So editing is a mental exercise, clarifying your thoughts by delivering complex narratives and brief sentences is the work. It's how you separate one strong personal statement from a less strong personal statement and it doesn't appear that really that work was done here. So I have complete agreement and to get a little more granular, I want to give examples of two different types of editing for length. This was one of my superpowers when I was in practice. People would come to me with their overly long memoranda and I would cut them back to the required court page length. So I spent a lot of time working on this. So there can be sentence level edits and there can also be paragraph level edits. So on the sentence level, there are some generic sentences that I didn't feel added much to the overall narrative. So here's an example. For the first time in my life, I did not have a clear direction of anywhere to go. Or here's another one. Looking at my past, I know the odds were against me. Here's the final one. I would not change it for anything and I will never forget where I came from. So this isn't dissimilar from the advice we would give on letters of recommendation. Detail and specificity matter. Don't tell me the odds were against you. Describe for me why and how they were against you as the author does in other places. It's much more powerful and that generic sentence doesn't really add much without the detail and specificity. So in addition to those kinds of sentence level edits where you can just, you know, cut them completely, I found there were also certain paragraphs that were doing less work than others. For example, the second paragraph here describes in quite a lot of detail the author's experiences living in a homeless shelter. That felt either too detailed for the story the author was telling here or not nearly detailed enough if it's the focus of the essay. It felt like that could maybe be a sentence in this essay or it could be expanded to be a much bigger focus of a different personal statement. Similarly, the final two paragraphs, which are quite general and somewhat repetitive of each other, could probably be combined and shortened significantly without losing a lot. Yeah, there's some additional low-hanging fruit in this essay in order to fix it that there's somewhat minor but still noticeable. So grammatical errors, for example. In the first paragraph, there's the two colloquial usage put me out of her home. In the very next sentence, there's an unnecessary comma. In the third paragraph, you have this very evocative sentence by the end of my sophomore year of high school. Many of my friends, joint gangs went to prison or bin murdered, which has been only missing the verb had before bin. So there's some work here that really should have been done before this essay was deemed complete. And no, that sentence really stuck out to me in such a shame because the content is so impactful, but as a reader, you find yourself distracted by that missing verb. This is where having a friend or a family member that you trust or even splurging on a professional editor can really pay dividends to find all of those small spots for you. And I'll just say that the personal editor, a professional editor is not an expensive item. I don't want to minimize the cost of applying to law school. We all know that they're enormous, but that can be a couple hundred dollars to find someone on five or a similar website who will just give it a final proofread and find those typos, find those grammatical errors, any spelling errors. And I think that that in the grand scheme of things can be money well spent. You can also often stop by a writing center if you're still on an undergraduate, graduate campus and ask someone to take a look for you. Absolutely. What did everyone think about the final section of the personal statement where the author discussed why they wanted to attend school X and mentioned that it's in their hometown and mentioned certain programs at that school? Overall, I think this works reasonably well. The author is clearly embedded and committed to their hometown. That felt authentic to me. I really like the phrase hometown change agent. On the other hand, the sentence specifically about school X itself feel pretty generic. I'm not sure they add much. Yeah, I agree with Ulyss. The shout out to the criminal law clinic and the writing program felt a little tacked on. And sentences like X School of Law has an endless commitment to training sound attorneys with his rich practice friendly legal community or a little vague. The hometown theme which came out so clearly throughout the essay just felt more real. And I'm just not sure that it needed gilding. I feel like that Lily was pretty gilded already. I completely agree. And more generally listeners remember not all schools are looking for a why my school statement include them with care only when they add something genuine and specific and authentic. Like that your hometown is where the school is located. And or when the school specifically seeks it out. So any final thoughts? No work overall this personal statement is a few drafts away from final but there's a lot of great material to work with here. Yeah, I think from a technical writing standpoint it can be improved. There's a lot of work to be done. But for some essays the real force is in the narrative voice. It's in the story being told and in this particular essay. You know that element is extraordinarily strong, unusually strong. So I think it in some ways, you know, it's certainly obviously the technical writing is a great concern for what we do. But the compelling voice, you know compensates to some degree. I talk a lot with applicants about having movement, about thinking about past, present, future when you're thinking of how to write a personal statement. And I found this essay to have great movement. I understood where they were coming from. I understood what they were doing now. And I understood how those things translated into Y Law School and Y being a lawyer. So I completely agree this needs some editing to get it into fighting shape. But the bones are there, the structure is there. And that can for some people be the hardest part. And this author already has sort of those great bones to work from. Alright, Ulyss, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great first session in our mini series and it's been so much fun chatting. This podcast is produced by Ryan McAvoy from the Yale Broadcast Studio.