Very Long Personal Statement Critique Forum

[ycha28]

MOD EDIT:

After thinking it through, I've decided to nuke this essay and go with another one. Thanks to those who gave their input.

[icecold3000]

Any given part could be cut. . . Bigger problem is that it reads like a resume. A really long resume. If you cut the long stories that could be seen and understood by looking at your resume, this might get to an appropriate length. Also, the conclusion is very week. You spent 4 pages telling your life story and then only wrote 2 sentences about why you want to be a lawyer.

[rinkrat19]

Are you applying to a graduate program in English literature? No? Hmm.

Your love of reading comes across loud and clear. And then you throw in two sentences at the end saying "Also! I want to be a lawyer because they read and write dense legal stuff!"

The "But my journey to find that style..." paragraph made me want to throw something. People who haven't formally studied literature aren't going to understand much of it, or care. (I basically read it "blah blah academic jargon blah blah pretentious vocab words blah blah I'm too smart for my professors." I assume that was not what you were going for.) Say it more in layman's terms, like "the more I studied the various schools of literary criticism, the more dissatisfied I became. Finally I resorted to post-structuralism, and Derrida's theory of deconstructionism in particular convinced me that the reason none of the other theories rang true for me is that all supposed insights are essentially arbitrary." Or something--obviously, I am not a lit theory major so I'm just faking it.

[ycha28]

Fair enough! I did feel that I went on way too long a tangent about lit theory. I didn't mean to come across as "I'm too smart for my professors" - I thought I made it pretty clear that I had deeply misunderstood theory and misapplied it to my professors' criticisms, which is why I came to mistakenly feel they were arbitrary. But that was obviously not clear.

I'll work on shortening the lit stuff and post another revision soon.