preLaw - Back to School 2007 - (Page 39) to the personal statement. The personal statement is going to give them a way of understanding who this person really is. As such, it’s terribly important in providing a context within which the application is to be understood. That gives applicants a tremendous opportunity to advance their cases. Unfortunately, it’s something that most applicants don’t do a terribly good job with. Some of them, of course, just can’t write well, or don’t take the trouble to write well. But the biggest problem is less a matter of writing, more a matter of thinking. They don’t choose a subject that’s going to work to their benefit. Those who have been out of college for some years would be well advised to write an essay that discusses their professional futures. Why is it that they’re leaving their current field? Why is it that they’re heading into law? To what extent will they be building upon their prior work experience in where they’re headed in law, and so on. Susan: People say that you need to have had something amazing happen to you in your life in order to write a personal statement. That ain’t it at all. The personal statement needs to be well written, it needs to be well argued, it needs to be the best piece of writing you can possibly do. So, write it well. Spend time on it. Get somebody else to read it. Now, what should be in the personal statement? Don’t tell me about law. Don’t tell me about some legal issue that you’re going to analyze. Because the chances are, I know the legal issue better than you do. I don’t want you to be a pretend lawyer. I want you to tell me about you and give me some sense of who you are as a person, of what contribution you want to make, of what your passion is. I don’t care what it is, but I want to see that you have a passion, that you care about things. I want to picture a human being preLaw: Is there any type of information that you would recommend they don’t put in the personal statement? Susan: We’re not your shrink. We’re not your therapist. We don’t want to know your deepest held secrets about your mental state. It’s not the equivalent of the first meeting with a new psychiatrist. But I have to add a point. If you’ve had any troubles – if something has gone wrong, if you’ve been suspended from school for an infraction, if you’ve been arrested in the past, if you’ve got a secret that you’re worried we’ll find out – tell us. Because we will find out, and if you didn’t tell us, you’re up a creek. Almost anything is explainable; but you’ve got to have the guts and the honesty to explain it. The one thing that will absolutely do you in, is for instance, if you’ve had a problem in college of any sort, you know, that resulted in a disciplinary proceeding or something like that, and you don’t explain it, and we find out about it because the college reports it to us, that’s in the reject pile, no matter what your numbers are. • • • Full-Time J.D. Program J.D./M.B.A. Joint Degree Program Certificate Programs in Dispute Resolution, Law & Government, Law & Business, International & Comparative Law, and Sustainability Law Clinical Law Program and Externship Program Study Abroad in China, Ecuador and Germany • • 503-370-6282 law-admission@willamette.edu www.willamette.edu/wucl/admission Back to School 2007 39 http://www.willamette.edu/wucl/admission http://www.willamette.edu/wucl/admission http://www.law.buffalo.edu http://www.law.buffalo.edu
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