LSATneurotic wrote:Really depends on your interpersonal skills--making a good impression will always open doors for you. Not making much of an impression is "doing it wrong" IMO.
It was a room of a hundred people and lots of people want their chance at talking to them. Trying to be the memorable 0L in that situation... sounds risky to me. Now, if I were to mention meeting the Dean at his talk, set up a meeting with him at a campus visit in the next couple weeks and give him another chance to tie my name to face to application... that might be the way to go.
A part of social skills is picking your spots. Gunning at a general/mass talk is the kind of behavior that makes law students hate each other.
jlwx wrote:Hey guys,
First, I'm reporting acceptance to University of Virginia (Yay!).
Second, I'm wondering if you guys could weigh in on whether to write a diversity statement. Long story short, I wrote a four page personal statement that talked about my background, how I overcame the obstacles, and why I want to pursue a civil rights practice. I'm extremely proud of it and I believe it's the reason I got into UVA so quickly. Unfortunately, I am unable to use that statement for Penn, Harvard, or Stanford. I condensed the four page statement to two for those schools, but it's nowhere near as strong.
The first couple of paragraphs discuss the standard "too white for the black kids, too black for the white kids, and too gay for the straight kids" and how that affected me/my desire to go to law school. It's positive over all though-- I don't dwell on the negative and I discuss coming out and my experience at the civil rights firm I work at. I am concerned though that this is not enough information for HSP. I definitely want to write a diversity statement, but I'm wondering how it should be written. Should I use the space to go into more detail about my experience as a gay black kid? I was also considering being more meta and discussing the importance of different perspectives and explain why mine should be included in any legal discussion without going into much more detail about the experiences that I've had.
Any advice would be helpful! PM me if would like to see any of my statements to better assist me.
JW
First off congrats, you're fucking killing it! Clearly you know what you're doing if you got UVa to let you in after a month of consideration, so the first thing I would do is trust my intuitions.
If I'm understanding what you're proposing correctly, I wouldn't give the deans a meta discussion on the importance of different perspectives. Much of their job in constructing a class depends on accepting the idea that differing perspectives are important. I would just focus on myself who I am, how I got to where I am, and how I apply my perspective in the classrooms and in relationships with peers/people. The important addition your perspective makes will speak for itself. If discussing your experience as a gay black kid is a part of that, yeah sure do it.
I don't really know about the level of detail needed in discussing the history of your "diverse" perspective, but I would think you want to tell a cohesive story that takes the reader on a journey, which it sounds like you already know what to do. The old heuristic "from what/through what/to what" applies.
This is all gibberish, you know what you're doing, play around, you'll get there eventually.
