A significant part of my summer rotated around preparing myself for law school applications this fall, taking the LSAT, writing personal statements, and asking professors for letters of recommendation. Since eighth grade, I’ve seen the legal profession as a niche to establish myself in, over time gaining a continually more nuanced understanding of what my dreams entailed. Lawyering is not Suit’s Harvey Specter or Billions’ Chuck Rhoades, but portrayed more realistically by every junior associate in the background buried in reading and casebooks.
In reading more, I saw that research and legal writing would replace peppy one-liners and a jury’s ‘ooh’s’ and ‘awe’s’. Although watching dramatized depictions of the legal profession stoked my interest years earlier, now, living in the continual pressure cooker imagined in those shows seems terribly stressful. The shows, in their very premises, create logical inconsistencies regarding the field they depict–all the time, looking to compel the viewer to consider the legal field through such a distorted lens.
Ironically, then, the actualized legal profession requires a series of written essays in which applicants describe what kind of lawyer they wish to become. I find one of the most intriguing aspects of the law school personal statement lies in its purpose, to demonstrate a candidate’s qualifications and the intangibles that they may bring to a law school’s program. These qualifications, of course, are additive upon one’s LSAT score, their cumulative GPA, and their letters of recommendation. Conceptually, these questions allow candidates to articulate their roundedness beyond simply their statistics; and yet, you can observe through how schools treat these essays––often given less than five percent weight towards a candidate’s admission––that the actual content does little to swing the scales in favor of a particular applicant. And why should they? It asks people with a layman's understanding of the legal system––ignoring the few paralegals who apply–– to articulate why they wish to become part of that system. For a large majority of students, their statements of purpose appear entirely theoretical and the qualifications they list rest on unsubstantiated assertions of what constitutes a good lawyer––the written equivalent of applying to law school because your grandma told you that, “you’re good at arguing, you should be a lawyer.”
I find myself amused when reading many professional school applications, where, as the University of British Columbia writes, “Tell us about why you would like to study law at UBC, and how your past education, employment, extracurricular activities and/or other experiences have prepared you for the study of law.” Maybe it reflects poorly on me that even after spending over two hundred hours preparing for my LSAT and likely near an additional one-hundred and fifty reading about the legal profession, I still couldn’t provide more than a cursory answer to “why law school?” In my defense, and I believe the defense of many typical people who cannot manifest a Hemingway-esque narrative of how life led them to apply to law school, I believe the question holds an unfair perspective. It assumes, I believe, a unfairly large degree of teleology onto our human experience, that our significant life events occurred purposefully and within a larger thematic scope. How then does one explain to admissions officers the randomness and inconsistencies of life? Of course, these questions are worded with a high degree of openness; however, when law school administrators reveal excellent personal statements, they reveal that the best articulate a complete life narrative––one that unites one’s extracurriculars, hobbies, undergraduate research and volunteering into cohesive themes. At its heart, it motivates applicants to look back through their life with a revisionist lens and draw connections between events and experiences that did not inherently exist beforehand.
I think we find these questions often, when we must look back at our lives and attempt to make a cohesive picture of it. It feels like a taxing process, as it seems to go hand-in-hand with the question, “did you do enough in your life so-far?” They’re sibling ideas, really, or at least they build off of each other. The first attempts to categorize one’s lived experience while the second adds to it the dimension of value-judgments. Certainly, living with a constant looking-back is incredibly disruptive to the now, but one cannot ignore the value of hindsight in learning, growth, and self-assessment.
I feel the most challenging part lies in making clear sense of one's lived experience. In writing my essays, I felt pressured to unite my most formative moments into one cohesive idea or theme. From the current moment, it draws one to wonder if you should be doing more to make one's life more thematically similar—but should we have to? Should it be disadvantageous that I enjoy racing motocross on the weekends but also enjoy political philosophy? Applications ask you to demonstrate what separates you from other candidates, and yet, they reward applications with similar differences—a uniqueness that makes sense when examined from a distance. It can be difficult, then, to demonstrate one’s wholeness as a person without feeling like you carry parts of wholly distinct sets of ethos.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.