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Chapter Page
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Evolution
Anne-Valerie Prosper 3
Eric T. Romeo 7
Zain Jinnah 10
Jimmie Strong 14
Brian Aune 18
Michele Gauger 22
Suzanne Turner 25
Telling a Story
Jacqueline Yue 31
Sarah O'Loughlin 34
Rachel E. Endick 37
John 40
royalcrown 43
John Wheeler 46
Joel Knopf 49
Nimra Azmi 52
Identity
Amanda Morejon 57
Josh 60
Alicia Robinson 64
Jordan Klimek 68
Marissa Florio 72
Enumale Agada 75
Isaac Ho 79
When the Going Gets Tough
Claire M. Hankin 85
E.S. 88
Richard Davis 91
Tony Carr 94
Mara Ludmer 98
Justin Lu 102
Natalie Rad 105
Dasha Wise 108
Thinking Critically
Oscar Stanton 115
Michael Elias Shammas 118
Ritu Gupta 122
Peyton Miller 125
Victoria Abraham 128
Nicholas Warther 132
The World
Marisa Schnaith 139
William Barlow II 143
Lara Berlin 146
Deanna Parrish 149
Daniel McMann 152
Elizabeth Spencer 155
Joshuah Fiveson 158
Yonatan Levy 162
Inspiration
Michael Jacobson 169
Stephen Iya 172
Emma Raviv 175
Anonymous 178
Angela Chan 182
James Baker Jr. 186
Jason Lee 190
Avery E. Hook 193
Nicolas Sansone 197
Alene Georgia Anello 200
Khalea Ross Robinson 203

CHAPTER 1
EVOLUTION


Chances are the "you" of ten, five, or even one year ago looks very different from the person applying to law school today. A full statement about the person you are often requires a look at the changes you have undergone. Essays in this section explain how applicants' mind-sets have been molded and remolded by experiences and by those around them.

As you trace your own personal evolution, be careful to proceed clearly and avoid covering too much ground. The reader should be able to easily follow your growth and development. Sometimes steps and sequences of events that feel obvious to you, the person who lived them, may seem opaque to an admissions officer.

For some applicants, the tale of evolution demonstrates the vital role of the personal statement in an application. For instance, one writer spent three years toiling in a pharmaceutical company's lab. On its face, the sudden application to law school might seem odd or even suspicious. But his essay paints a broader context of evolution, honing in on the more logical leap from compound creation to chemical patent law. Another writer spent years as a bookstore manager before returning to school, an unconventional path to law school. With context though, his motivation becomes far from early-onset midlife crisis. Instead, his essay weaves a narrative of leadership, parenting, and search for knowledge.

Not everyone needs to explain a unique set of circumstances, but a story of change can take many forms and can highlight a variety of qualities, from openness to discernment to strength tested by adversity. Above all, the story of how you have changed should point to who you are, and to who you see yourself becoming. Every other application component offers a snapshot of who you were or who you are ― only the personal statement lets you look to the future.


ANNE-VALERIE PROSPER

"Hi I'm Joleen! I'm from Wisconsin! Where are you from?" trills the pretty brown-eyed girl in my dorm room. I sigh. I would love to have a simple answer to give her and, usually, when confronted with such a daunting question, I smile politely and answer some version of the truth. I try to read her. I wonder if it would be enough to give her the "I'm originally from Haiti" retort. This immediately evokes images of me as a little girl sitting at the kitchen table as my mother cooks "Grio" and laughs along to her Maurice Sixto tapes, relishing the Haitian comedian's depiction of Haitian politics. When coming from a country like ours, it's nice to be able to laugh at the folly of it all. This would be an honest answer after all. Although we left Haiti when I was one, my parents enrolled us into a French school in Maryland. We spoke French and Creole at home, I spoke French at school, I ate Haitian food, I listened to Haitian music; we even went back to Haiti twice a year every year ― until things got really bad that is. I could always go with a different approach and tell her that I went to high school in Kenya. She might think of me as a world traveler. She might see me as riding matatus and playing with orphans, or, she could look at me as some diplomat's child with a driver and uncanny sense of entitlement; unfortunately, back then she would have been right on both accounts.

The thing is, the world attributes who we are with where we are from, and so, for a long time I didn't know who I was. I didn't know where I was from and so I couldn't know where I was going. All of that changed when I got to NYU.

I moved to the big city alone while my parents remained halfway across the world in Nairobi, Kenya. I chose New York because in fourth grade, on a school excursion, I saw Les Miserables on Broadway and it changed my life. I moved to New York having lived a very contradictory life. On the one hand, I was quite privileged. The international community in Kenya lived in their own world with their own set of rules. On the other, I had always had a heart for children and had spent much of my time in a baby orphanage known as "The Nest." I looked at these two-week-old infants, children of victims of rape who had died from AIDS and I had a piercing sense that something was not right; we were living in a world of disequilibrium and something had to give. I was going to change the world and I knew that I needed to go to New York; the same place that so beautifully told the story of a French orphan girl.

I had moved around before. I had lived in four places by the time I was eighteen and so I hadn't expected the culture shock to hit me; you always get hit harder when you don't see it coming. The city's stresses slowly but surely took their toll on me. I didn't know what I was doing anymore. Among the actresses and models, away from the slums and the injustice, my big plans didn't seem so feasible anymore. It wasn't until the second semester of college, when I joined a Christian fellowship on campus that my vision came back to life. I came to Christ that year and, later, with tentative support from my parents I moved into a house in the Bronx and became one third of the nonprofit organization A House on Beekman. We felt the biblical call to serve the poor and for us New Yorkers, Beekman Avenue was where we could do that. It was a far cry from the Kibera slums but it was the land of single teenage mothers who were victims of domestic violence. It was the place where dozens of kids had absentee parents and appreciated a healthy snack and a good story. These people weren't as poor as the people in Kenya, but they were marginalized. I started to see the other forms of oppression that existed. My roommates and I began to share all of our clothes and as we grew in community, God grew our ministry. More kids started showing up for family dinner on Monday night. More "gang members" started calling us "Ma'am" and pulling their pants up as they walked into our home. Living here has shown me what it is to serve in the United States. God continued to grow my intolerance for injustice when I received an internship at an immigration law firm. We mostly worked with asylum cases and as I walked into the conference room wearing a suit, and sat across a girl my age who was being forced to be the fourth wife of a seventy-five-year-old or who had to undergo female genital mutilation to be eligible for marriage, day after day after day, something in me snapped. I decided I was going to law school. I decided that I couldn't live a life that glossed over the gravest injustices of the world. I realized that I could hold orphans for months or give our Bronx kids healthy snacks for weeks, but that one day, I was going to die. One day, my roommates will die as will the lawyers at the law firm that I work at. I need to be a part of systematic change. I need to be a part of something bigger than the one life I have been given. I knew I was graduating in December, and so I applied to the International Justice Mission. I will be working there as the Human Rights intern in D.C. from January through April. My projects will be in Haiti, Ecuador, and Peru. I finally get to partner with lawyers who are changing the system from the inside out.

Through all of these experiences I finally realized where I was from. I realized that I am a child of God and a citizen of the world and this has led me to where I am going. I am going to law school. I am going to get a degree that allows my voice to be loud enough for all us world citizens. I am going to be part of the redemption that far outlasts the one small life that I have lived.


Analysis

Admissions officers certainly see many tropes repeated in application essay after application essay. There's the "overcoming adversity" story. There's the "look at my passion" narrative. There's the "I have finally discovered myself" reflection. Without a doubt, these archetypes can get stale, especially for someone who is reading them as part of their fulltime job. The power of this essay arises from its masterful

Harvard Law School is one of the premier law schools in the world. It as well as other top schools draws thousands of applicants from the best colleges and companies. With only a limited number of slots for so many talented applicants, the admissions officers have become more and more selective every year, the competition has become fierce, and even the best and brightest could use an edge.

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