Thanks for sharing your experiences. I’m happy this post is getting advice from people in all kinds of different situations (and I’m sure any pre-law readers appreciate it as well).

Congratulations on finishing up 1L year! Good luck on the test tonight, and thanks again for commenting!

1. Why I want to attend law school.
2. Why I have decided that now is the right time for law school.
3. Why I have decided that the XXX University School of Law is right for me.
4. Why I believe that the XXX University School of Law should accept me and the value added that I offer as a law student.

My situation may be different from the majority of readers as I work full-time and applied to an evening program, plus I’m in my mid-40s. I was accepted and maybe the time I spent crafting my personal statement helped cinch the deal.

I also had several people whose opinion I trusted review my drafts. I could trust them to give me honets feedback and not just tell me in sounded fine.

Good luck to those now writing their personal statements. Tomorrow abouut 10:00 PM when my Torts final is over, I will officially be a 2L!

Yes, at the margins it may help. I am not at all advocating for people to not pay any attention to it - that is foolish. It is important, and people should make sure to invest the proper effort. However, for most schools and most people it is not that important.

Very interesting info on Harvard’s admissions process. I didn’t realize they got faculty members involved in choosing the class. Thanks for sharing.

As for the effect of a good personal statement, I more or less agree with you. In many cases (maybe not 99%, but a lot), a personal statement won’t change an application from a reject to an admit, but for people on the margins, where the admissions committee starts to look at factors other than numbers to decide who is to be admitted, I think the personal statement can help. The blanks on the application don’t allow for all the information that makes someone special, so if any extra information can be worked into a well-written personal statement, the admissions office has one more reason to pick you instead of someone else.

I also imagine that in many cases, admissions committees can tell the difference between typos/editing mistakes and errors where the writer didn’t know any better. I can’t imagine them faulting someone very much for typing “the” twice, for example.

About the “why I want to go to law school” personal statement topic — I’ve heard LS adcom people roll their eyes and say, “Please, DON’T tell us why you want to go to law school!” But like you, Josh, I think if your background is in something completely different and you have an actual story to tell that relates to your experiences (and not “I loved L.A. Law as a kid” or “my dad is an attorney”), it’s okay.

I will say that if you plan on doing the whole save the world theme in your essay, you better have the experience in life to back it up. Otherwise it looks very fake.

For the most part though, if your numbers are great for the school you will get in and if not then other factors about you (gender, age, race, experiences) that are visible from other parts of your application will be the deciding factors. School build a class in addition to just picking the high numbers. Who you are in terms on socioeconomics, etc is going to be more important to them than your essay.

I dont know about other schools, but I know that at Harvard there are two steps to the admissions process. The first one is done by the admissions office. That is where they weed out the obvious rejections. Then all the people who are in the ballpark get passed on to a faculty committee that “builds a class”. At that stage they are selecting people with the intention of getting the best applicants from each genre. The best old dude, the best minorities, the best gay people, the best women, etc. I just cant imagine, barring some incredible revelation in your essay, that what you write will make or break you. But then again, I am a cynical person. So feel free to ignore me.

The personal statement is certainly important, and it gets more important the lower your numbers are relative to the school’s averages. I’ll edit things to emphasize that point a little more.

But I’m sticking with the “why I’m going to law school” theme, if only for certain situations. I felt that in my case (a computer science major suddenly switching to law), the admissions committee would want a little explanation showing that I understood a little about what I was getting into and why I wanted to do it. I thought that if I didn’t explain myself, they would just assume I was running away from real life or the crappy job market for a few years. It was a good theme for me, as it let me talk about some interesting work I did with encryption and security and how that led to an interest in cyberlaw, etc. The focus was on me as a person, but it was built around a framework of “how I decided to go to law school.” The theme isn’t always appropriate–it’s probably never the right approach for people with more traditional pre-law majors (PoliSci, Economics, etc.), but I think it was okay for me.

For my statement, I also went in with the assumption that, duh, I’m applying to law school, so you don’t need to know HOW I got to that decision. That made things a lot easier for me, not trying to justify my decision. I just presented it as a foregone conclusion and talked about how I’m special (’cause I am. Really).

I had as many people as possible read my personal statement; most people aren’t great at giving feedback, and everyone will read it slightly differently. So a lot of opinions is a good thing.

I would scratch “here’s why I didn’t do well on my LSAT/GPA” as an essay theme. There’s a separate space to write about that; I think more sounds like you’re making excuses.

It’s true that numbers are the #1 most important part of your application. But for me, I think my numbers were borderline and I got in on my background, which I explained in my personal statement.