Feedback on Personal Statement Please! Forum

[jazzconvert]

Hi everyone, I am a brand new member here. TLS has been a great resource for me doing research on law schools so far. I have a slightly unorthodox background, as a music major that became enamored with law and public service during my final year of college. I am trying to get across that my interest in law for real, that my time studying music has prepared me for it, in its own way, and that I am truly committed to helping others. I do also have a diversity statement that discusses my ethnic background and goes into greater detail regarding the family stuff I mention in the last paragraph, so it's not just hanging there. I really appreciate you guys taking the time! Without further ado:

When I was seven years old, I was enrolled in piano lessons after pecking out Jingle Bells on a yellowing keyboard at an uncle’s house one afternoon. I learned the standard complement of chords and scales, how to knead Bach from the piano and how to pound Beethoven through it. By the time I reached high school, I had taken up the guitar and bass and could play nearly anything off the radio. I enrolled in college as a music major, where I spent long and lonely hours in a practice room listening to jazz music, grasping at fragments of melodies and turning them inside out as I prepared to deploy them on the bandstand. One day, a year or two into college, I was packing up my string bass after a long night at the local jazz club. The piano player came up to me, shook my hand, and said, “You know how to listen.” It seemed a strange thing to say – I thought it perhaps more important how I had played. I would go on to learn otherwise.

Last fall, in my final year of college, I enrolled in a class entitled Law, Politics, and Society, vaguely curious about all three. What ensued was a semester of rapt discovery of my long-dormant passion for legal reasoning and argumentation. I pored over the assigned Supreme Court opinions like coffee-stained bebop transcriptions, scrutinizing them at every level, from the structural arc of the whole to the slightest turn of phrase. In place of a final exam for this class, we were to deliver a five-minute argument on same-sex marriage as though before the Supreme Court. Nervous and unsure of myself, I signed up to argue last, but when the day came and I walked up to the front of the room, a familiar feeling came over me: it is time to blow, and silence will not do.

I ventured the first words of my argument like the sparse and patient notes I might play in the vacuum aftermath of a screaming saxophone solo, and as I proceeded I felt the assigned cases spring to mind with the same union of preparation and intuition. My professor’s questions struck me not as the paralyzing interruptions they had my classmates, but rather like the convivial jab of the drummer’s snare drum, or the ten-fingered interjection of the piano player, and I responded eagerly. I navigated through my argument to a crescendo in answer of an especially probing question and sailed through my conclusion like the last line of a love song.

This past spring and fall I have participated in undergraduate Moot Court, and the same feeling has pervaded my time at the podium. My partner and I had the honor of [potentially identifying, but brief sentence describing our performance]. What I have heard most consistently from judges and coaches throughout the semester is familiar: “You know how to listen.”

For a long time, I thought that being praised as a good listener was merely a polite placeholder for a more substantive compliment. But I have realized that the only way that anyone, from the jazz pianist to the Moot Court judges, has come to know anything about my listening abilities is through the way that I respond. In the heat of the moment, on stage or at the podium, I remain calm. I readily identify important ideas and seriously consider their implications. I pay careful attention to what is said and, just as importantly, what is not said. I formulate my responses based not on value judgments of people but on the substance of what is communicated. These practices have served me both in music and my preliminary foray into the law, and I believe they will be indispensable in my legal career.

In recent years, I have done a great deal more listening. I have listened to my mother tell me about my father’s thankless toil in a doll factory in Hong Kong a lifetime ago, about my two brilliant and compassionate uncles from El Salvador who disappeared in the Salvadoran Civil War long before I was born. In the past year alone, I have volunteered teaching philosophy and GED preparation classes at a state prison, interned at a public defender’s office, and worked on a research project for a labor organization. In these positions I have listened to the groans and sighs of inmates, defendants, low-wage and (overwhelmingly undocumented) immigrant workers – of those who are unaccustomed to being listened to – and I have found that I cannot leave them unanswered. I am pursuing law school, and ultimately a career in law and politics, in order to represent those ill situated to represent themselves, and to advance the prosperity of ordinary people. Just as I have labored in the practice room to perform on the bandstand, I intend to seek the answers to their grievances in the law library, and to give them voice in the courtroom and beyond.

[cbbinnyc]

Hey there. As an actor/musician who is starting law school next year, I salute you.

I'm mostly going to focus on big-picture stuff, but one small thing. Don't write, "it is time to blow." It sounds way too sexual.

To start, I think you write vividly. You might want to go through and make sure you are completely happy with all your choices of metaphor, imagery, etc, but it has a lot of character.

Right now I have three main thoughts: The first is that it reads as a little bit too self-congratulatory right now. "I started learning music when I was young, and I was really amazing, and then I decided to do a class in law and politics and I was much better than my classmates at it because it was like playing music and I listen really well and everybody says so." Obviously, I'm exaggerating, but it would be nice to see (as in pretty much any good story) that you had to overcome some sort of challenge or that you had a realization or moment of change where you saw the connection between music and legal argument or something else.

Second, I wonder why you decided it would be better to pursue law than to pursue music. Might not be totally necessary, just a thought. The hesitation some law schools may have in accepting a former musician/actor/artist/etc is that they don't really have a clear picture of what law school and being a lawyer will entail. This essay doesn't necessarily assuage those fears, since you focus so heavily on the performative nature of being a lawyer (making oral arguments) which will be a small fraction of your law school experience (and, likely, your experience as a lawyer).

Third, the final paragraph feels tacked on. You try to make a connection by tying it in to the theme of "listening", but I'm not sure it gets there. You've been talking about music and oral argument and performing under pressure, and then all of a sudden you're talking about how you have a deep desire to help people. If that's the message you want to drive home, you need to make it a more central piece of your essay or it will feel hollow.

Hope this helps, good luck, and I'm happy to look at more drafts or dialogue about my comments.

[jazzconvert]

Thanks man. I think I'd agree with you on the overemphasis on the performative aspect of law, which I think gives rise to both of the other issues. It almost becomes a performance itself, which leads to some of the self-congratulatory tone, and crowds out the interest in public service. Will definitely rework it. Much appreciated.

Happy to see another arts person!