Critque of personal statement
Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2018 5:26 pm
I have a 3.2 GPA (first two years were low, and second two years were straight As) / 164 LSAT / 30yo. with career unrelated to law
Columbia is my first choice, but with my stats, getting in is probably a pipe dream. I genuinely think I could succeed there as I took the LSAT while working 50+ hour weeks, but I don't think it makes sense to retake the test for a higher score given my age. If not Columbia, I'm hoping to get into a T20; I can provide a more specific list if it is helpful for the critique. Thank you for your help.
Personal Statement
I never knew my grandparents or even my parents' siblings (both of my parents were estranged from their living relatives). Still, when I was born in Chicago, IL, I was immediately thrust into a kind of dual existence: I descend, on one side, from a long line of American rebels who made their home in North Carolina after being exiled from Scotland, and on the other, a green-card carrying Canadian immigrant. Very soon after I was born, I moved for the first time to California. Then to Wisconsin, then to Switzerland (and back), to Connecticut and Vermont. By the time I reached college, I was already a dual-citizen who had lived in five very different states and two countries.
I experienced a crisis-of-identity being from so many places. I was always arriving or departing. I was always exploring a new place and people only to leave them behind a few short years later. Each new place gave me the opportunity to become a new person, and that’s what I did. I didn’t realize at the time that that being a new person and being more deeply your own person is not the same thing. I tried on various identities as I wove my way in and out of states, schools and social groups. One year, a football jock. The next, a goth. The next, a hippy. Through these transitions, I was developing the character traits that I have used to create and define my adult identity: intellectual curiosity, self-reliance, and commitment to human and environmental justice.
I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder early in high school. My mother has bipolar disorder, but, as I know now, I do not. Most cases of child & adolescent bipolar disorder are diagnosed based on the observations of a parent, however, in my case the usual narrator was unreliable. While this diagnosis was reversed when I was 20 because I lack key symptoms of the disease, for years, others around me defined me by this label; my own personal Rosenhan experiment. In their effort to help me, my parents surrounded me with people who believed I was sick. I recognize that my parents were trying sincerely to help, and I bear them no ill will. For teenagers who actually have bipolar, their support system helps them succeed, but for me, the system acted as a weight. At the time, I was too young to be strong enough to lift it alone, and I gained a deep appreciation for what it means to find yourself, without an advocate, in a complicated system over which you have no control. I learned to rely on myself and my own effort to define who I was and what I could do, and I became sensitive to other’s suffering.
When I first got to Marlboro College, I thought I would major in biology or math because, when I was in high school, I had excelled at those subjects. I realized though that was not going to be the path for me. I participated heavily in our college community. I helped found the Marlboro College Victory Garden, our college farm. I spoke regularly at and then was elected as Moderator of Town Meeting, our New England-style campus government involving students, faculty, and staff. I found I enjoyed learning and using Robert's Rules of Order as part of my responsibility as Moderator. At the same time that I was working to reverse my misdiagnosis, I found my academic footing when I changed my major to Sociology at the beginning of my Junior year. I let my work in the community, readings of classic sociology and my struggle to form my identity inform my choice to write my Plan of Concentration, a two-year senior thesis, on the environmental sociology of agriculture.
After I graduated, I felt drawn to the law as the inevitable next step, and I began the application process. However, in 2010, amid the economic uncertainty of the Great Recession, I decided that I wouldn’t be able to handle the economic commitment to law school, and I went to work. While I have developed an incredibly rewarding career since then, I keep coming back to pursuing the law, especially immigration law, as a way of helping others who find themselves, like I was, feeling trapped in a system without an advocate.
Columbia is my first choice, but with my stats, getting in is probably a pipe dream. I genuinely think I could succeed there as I took the LSAT while working 50+ hour weeks, but I don't think it makes sense to retake the test for a higher score given my age. If not Columbia, I'm hoping to get into a T20; I can provide a more specific list if it is helpful for the critique. Thank you for your help.
Personal Statement
I never knew my grandparents or even my parents' siblings (both of my parents were estranged from their living relatives). Still, when I was born in Chicago, IL, I was immediately thrust into a kind of dual existence: I descend, on one side, from a long line of American rebels who made their home in North Carolina after being exiled from Scotland, and on the other, a green-card carrying Canadian immigrant. Very soon after I was born, I moved for the first time to California. Then to Wisconsin, then to Switzerland (and back), to Connecticut and Vermont. By the time I reached college, I was already a dual-citizen who had lived in five very different states and two countries.
I experienced a crisis-of-identity being from so many places. I was always arriving or departing. I was always exploring a new place and people only to leave them behind a few short years later. Each new place gave me the opportunity to become a new person, and that’s what I did. I didn’t realize at the time that that being a new person and being more deeply your own person is not the same thing. I tried on various identities as I wove my way in and out of states, schools and social groups. One year, a football jock. The next, a goth. The next, a hippy. Through these transitions, I was developing the character traits that I have used to create and define my adult identity: intellectual curiosity, self-reliance, and commitment to human and environmental justice.
I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder early in high school. My mother has bipolar disorder, but, as I know now, I do not. Most cases of child & adolescent bipolar disorder are diagnosed based on the observations of a parent, however, in my case the usual narrator was unreliable. While this diagnosis was reversed when I was 20 because I lack key symptoms of the disease, for years, others around me defined me by this label; my own personal Rosenhan experiment. In their effort to help me, my parents surrounded me with people who believed I was sick. I recognize that my parents were trying sincerely to help, and I bear them no ill will. For teenagers who actually have bipolar, their support system helps them succeed, but for me, the system acted as a weight. At the time, I was too young to be strong enough to lift it alone, and I gained a deep appreciation for what it means to find yourself, without an advocate, in a complicated system over which you have no control. I learned to rely on myself and my own effort to define who I was and what I could do, and I became sensitive to other’s suffering.
When I first got to Marlboro College, I thought I would major in biology or math because, when I was in high school, I had excelled at those subjects. I realized though that was not going to be the path for me. I participated heavily in our college community. I helped found the Marlboro College Victory Garden, our college farm. I spoke regularly at and then was elected as Moderator of Town Meeting, our New England-style campus government involving students, faculty, and staff. I found I enjoyed learning and using Robert's Rules of Order as part of my responsibility as Moderator. At the same time that I was working to reverse my misdiagnosis, I found my academic footing when I changed my major to Sociology at the beginning of my Junior year. I let my work in the community, readings of classic sociology and my struggle to form my identity inform my choice to write my Plan of Concentration, a two-year senior thesis, on the environmental sociology of agriculture.
After I graduated, I felt drawn to the law as the inevitable next step, and I began the application process. However, in 2010, amid the economic uncertainty of the Great Recession, I decided that I wouldn’t be able to handle the economic commitment to law school, and I went to work. While I have developed an incredibly rewarding career since then, I keep coming back to pursuing the law, especially immigration law, as a way of helping others who find themselves, like I was, feeling trapped in a system without an advocate.