Is This a Good PS? How Could It Be Better? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Sample PS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I had been freelancing two months when Vijay called. “Look, I’m trying to open a PR company that’ll target the South Asian audience and I think you’d be a good fit, James.” This struck me as being a little strange, as I’m not South Asian nor had I ever worked in PR, but Vijay was convinced I’d be able to make it work. “We have one client right now, a Swedish calling company that’s trying to expand into the U.S. Can you come to a meeting with one of the founders tomorrow and get started?” I showed up the next day and six months later, their South Asian user base has gone from 40,000 to 80,000 and the PR agency has two additional clients, a subsidiary of the biggest Indian company in the world and an Indian American cable network. Over the course of building the PR agency, I’ve had to negotiate deals with newspapers and online publications, coerce editors into running stories about my clients and persuade companies that my services are worth paying for and that my marketing and business development plans are worth implementing. Each day I’ve learned something new about business or working with a diverse group of people with differing goals, but my job has lacked in that it doesn’t present the deep theoretical problems and focused analysis that I love.

It was February of my senior year in college, and as I sat in my German Idealism seminar, another student raised her hand and asked, “But if we can only know things as they exist in our minds, what would happen if I looked at my brain while I was thinking of my brain? What would I be thinking of?” The class laughed and the professor scowled and gave a cursory response to what he thought was a stupid, surface-level question, but something about it really made me think. Up to that point, I was immersed in the theoretical world and spent almost all of my time debating, writing or reading about philosophy, politics and law. Over the last few months as it became clear that I was the top philosophy major, several of my professors and close friends lobbied me to apply to graduate programs in philosophy and get my Ph.D. This path sounded good on the face of it. I enjoyed writing my honors thesis, reading and analyzing dense texts on theory and debating with professors and other students. But something about that question had really struck me: Did I want to spend the rest of my life arguing over points of theory that I could find no plausible way to connect to the lives of millions of people around me? Even though I loved theory and writing analytical tracts about philosophy, I knew that it lacked the “in the world” experience that I craved.

As I worked after college, I found myself reading more and more books on law and the Constitution. I became the person my friends went to when they had legal trouble with a landlord or a boss, as I found I enjoyed searching through books of state and federal code, exploring the law and how it could be applied to my friends’ situations. And then it made sense, the last eight years I’d been preparing to go to law school. It is a perfect synthesis of my creative, entrepreneurial drive that focuses on praxis and my inability to ignore deep, theoretical thought and analytics. As a result, I’m placing the call to [insert] Law School. “Look, I’m trying to study and practice law and I think you’d be a good fit in helping to achieve those goals, [insert law school].”

[Christinabruin]

Is this your PS?

A PS from 2009 on the TLS Guide to Personal Statements is literally verbatim (see essay #11 http://www.top-law-schools.com/chapter9.html).

Not sure if you wanted us to critique someone else's sample PS or if you thought it'd be okay to plagiarize. Just sayin.

[cavalier1138]

Is this your PS?

A PS from 2009 on the TLS Guide to Personal Statements is literally verbatim (see essay #11 http://www.top-law-schools.com/chapter9.html).

Not sure if you wanted us to critique someone else's sample PS or if you thought it'd be okay to plagiarize. Just sayin.

Wow. That's a new one.

OP: if you wanted critique of someone else's PS, then it looks like the site already provides some. And if you were curious about plagiarism, I think you now know how easy it was for someone to find out that you copied this without any of the tools academic institutions have for ferreting out cheaters.

[Anonymous User]

No not trying to plagiarize haha. That's why I wrote "sample PS" at the top. I saw what they wrote on the guide but I liked a lot about it and thought some more analysis on it would be helpful. I think the format is really cool. It's short, sweet, and pretty good