I thought a lot of readers would be interested in such a captivating topic. Unfortunately, I no longer have time to edit personal statements but I want to utilize the collective brilliance of site readers. This thread will be for readers interested in exchanging personal statements with each others so that each reader can give comments on the other person's statement. Just post your willingness to exchange personal statements on this thread (and perhaps a bit about your background if desired) and other readers can PM you if interested.
For those who have not yet read my tips on personal statements, that is an excellent introductory resource. See:
http://www.top-law-schools.com/statement.html While having a professional editor is likely not necessary, if you feel you need one I have heard from readers that Essay Edge is the best. See:
http://www.essayedge.com/law/ Editing each others personal statements is a synergisitic use of this forum, so let the games begin! Good luck and good editing.
Best,
Ken
Because I personally do not have time to edit statements anymore (my practice is booming, 3 kids, building site content, etc.), I did want to jumpstart the thread by providing an example of a personal statement from last year that I edited. Your edits will likely not be so in-depth, but I wanted to provide a sample. You can either jump immediately down to other readers interested in editing or read this statement and my edits.
Outraged, I walked out of the large lecture hall on the first day of class my freshman year of college. As I left, I could still hear the professor rattling off percentages about the relationship between open markets and poverty levels, without acknowledging the incalculable human suffering these figures represented. A young anti-globalization activist, I felt more comfortable being tear-gassed at protests than with this presentation of ideas different than my own. As I left the room, the professor jokingly remarked, “I guess she won’t be taking the class.” A few students laughed uncomfortably; my chest tightened in righteous anger.
What did my boycott of the class accomplish? The professor would never know what angered me about his presentation. It would be my senior year before I learned the quantitative relationship he had explicated—knowledge that would have helped me understand the global reality I felt to be so unjust. Although I excelled in college, I spent much of it safely on the political fringe, avoiding classes and interactions that might challenge my solid, simplistic ideas.
These ideas crumbled when confronted by the complexity of the developing world. First, during a semester studying development in Uganda, I found that the people at the World Bank with whom I was doing research were not the money-grubbing caricatures I had believed them to be. Then, in Cambodia the following summer, I was crushed when the indigenous poverty-relief organization I had received a grant to work for closed in an embezzlement scandal. This complex reality—in which the apparent villains and victims do not play their assigned roles—did not fit into my neat categories of good and evil. The line between them blurred and my own place in the resulting chaos became unclear. What was I doing in these countries halfway around the globe? Was I trying to relieve the proverbial white man’s burden and assuage my own guilt? My passion and activism were brought into question by a reality far murkier than I had believed it to be.
Reeling from this sense of confusion and loss of identity, I fell back on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of my parents. After college I did a month-long meditation retreat called a dathun. During the long hours of meditation, I realized that I had never looked at my own mind. At school, I was so busy learning about the world that I had not examined my interactions with it. I began to see that my indignation usually created more confusion than understanding or change, and that my American goodwill was naïve at best and neocolonial at worst. By dismissing opinions that differed from my own—leaving the metaphoric classroom again and again—I had, on a small level, replicated a common pattern of intolerance. My inability to engage with the professor and the angry tightening in my chest as I left the classroom are no different than what fuels partisanship and political violence around world. Although my life had always appeared to be dedicated to others, I realized I had no idea how to be of real benefit. I did not want to continue to live in this way, so I devoted myself to the practice and study of meditation and immersed myself in Boulder, Colorado’s substantial Buddhist community.
A science of the mind, the practice of meditation has allowed me to see through my seemingly solid opinions, thoughts, and emotions. I have found that whether selfish, altruistic, trivial, or profound, they are fleeting; they rise and fall away one moment to the next. In between them are gaps filled with an empathetic awareness that remains constant, like the continually shining sun behind the ephemeral clouds. This awareness sees suffering—my own and other’s—and tries to ease it, often using theories and opinions to order the world and make it legible. This basic desire not to suffer was the seed for my belief in the supremacy of protest and villainy of the World Bank. I believe it was also at the root of my professor’s vision of a numbered reality. We are not that different after all.
I stopped believing in my theories and opinions so rigidly once I saw the process by which they are formed and the basic human desire for happiness at their root. My professor’s numerical presentation of open markets and poverty levels was correct according to his logic and priorities—as was my critique according to mine. They are, in fact, complementary snapshots of a reality so complex it can only be approximately captured. This realization has not made the pursuit of theoretical knowledge seem futile. Rather, as I continue my study of global justice, the importance of both my professor’s and my perspectives has become clear. They now coexist in my mind—helpful but incomplete theories that expose each other’s assumptions. This thought process is the result of my Buddhist training in the middle way between the extremes of fanatical belief on the one hand, and the rejection of the pursuit of knowledge on the other.
This tolerance for contradicting truths has spawned a playful curiosity as well as the desire to engage. In discovering the basis and biases of my own opinions, I am excited to learn about those of my once sworn enemies. Why do social conservatives and free-market economists think the way they do, and where is the common ground on which we can stand and explore what the world needs? I want to stay in the classroom with the professor whose perspective I disagree with, identify the truth in it, and challenge it fully instead of running away. Training, in meditation, to touch into the basic human awareness that underlies these myriad perspectives has given me the open-minded confidence to listen—and then disagree if necessary. This willingness to leave the gated communities of our own opinions is necessary in a society that allows all of those opinions, those imperfect snapshots of reality, to coexist. I want to be in the room where the laws that form that society, and protect the competing opinions of its people, are debated and created. I no longer want to protest outside.
Personal Statement Commentary
What’s Strong:This author is driven by personal commitments. The essay is structured as a narrative of personal growth, explaining why the applicant shifted from an insular to a cosmopolitan young woman. She describes developing a resourceful, eager, and strong ethos from a once stubborn attitude. The topic is how the real world clashed with her theoretical personal views. To cope with her awakening, the author turned to Buddhism, which taught her the importance of meditation and mediation, periods of calm followed by a middle path. And this subsequently taught her the importance of staying calm in a heated situation as well as the value of compromise. She also understands the importance of dialog, and she makes it clear that she is ready to back down from the views she was protecting in order to open herself up to points of view she has never fully considered. She has also demonstrated that she can be strong-willed and formidable if certain situations in law school and beyond require these characteristics.
What’s Wrong:The heart of this essay is not the freshman teacher, but the awakening experience the author had in Uganda. Perhaps it would be better to begin with a specific story about a World Bank employee interacting with someone in Uganda, and the author describing how her views began to change in that moment. To start with the freshman class story is to start negatively with a poor first-impression of the applicant’s ethos because the reader is asked to envision an entire room laughing at the applicant for her naïve idealism. It matters how one first presents oneself in a personal statement, and it can be hard to recover from a negative self-presentation. The author might want to consider writing the essay from a different perspective: using a more authoritative, reflective narrator who interprets the experiences with a mature perspective. Right now, the essay is narrated from the perspective of a person in the moment, becoming increasingly indignant and then confused and full of questions. This invites the reader to feel the same frustration and confusion in the third paragraph, but this emotional journey, or pathos, might be lost on the reader because there are not any specific details about Uganda or Cambodia that would put the reader in the moment. The essay seems to begin over again at the end of the fourth paragraph, when the applicant reevaluates her personal commitments. The reader wants to have made progress by this point, to have been told what qualities make the applicant a good candidate for law school. Introducing a retrospective narrator from the beginning could easily solve this. A wise narrator, who is of course a picture of the author now, who has distance and perspective on the events, would be able to make sense of the younger self’s feelings in a positive light. This narrator would be able to take the reader out of that confused mind into a more serene place by interpreting what was happening in a way that brings out the positive qualities of the author’s journey, such as a searching mind, the ability to experience doubt, and willingness to embrace other cultures.
One contradiction in this essay seems to be that the author asserts her individuality throughout the essay, but this jars against her Buddhist commitment to selflessness. The tone of the essay often seems angry, with phrases like “outraged” and “sworn enemy,” rather than the reflection of a still mind. College is a time to be receptive to many new ideas. The essay would end much stronger if instead of saying she would like “to stay in the classroom with the professor whose perspective I disagree with, identify the truth in it, and challenge it fully instead of running away,” she could describe how she did go back to that professor, or another one in her department, and debate. This would demonstrate that she now actively seeks out social interaction and coalition building, that she is not a loner, and that she has impacted others. If this essay included a few more personal details and interpretation of the evidence it gives, then it would better tell why the candidate should be admitted to law school, and not just that it is something she very much wants. This essay is an example of how an extremely talented applicant can choose a tone that actually hurts the application.
Editing in this detail on your part is unlikely but it is best to discuss suggested improvements as well as what is currently effective.
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 1:34 am 
This will mean so much to me, if you have time of course.
