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Hi everyone, I'm new to this site and am planning out my essays for admissions.

My personal statement is going to focus on my legal work experience and interest in an aspect of the law, but I would also like to write a diversity statement. I know the topic of immigration and refugees is pretty prescient in our culture right now though I don't want to come across as trying to exploit that. My parents are both Russian-Jewish refugees who fled persecution and, in my father's family's case, political targeting in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Only my mother has a college education and both my parents and their parents battled through tremendous adversity to achieve a middle class life in America and Israel, as they had to leave family, belongings, and livelihoods behind. Their experiences informed our family identity (Russian and English are interchangeable in my house) and pretty significantly affected my personal identity, always inspiring me to push myself as hard as I could to live up to their work ethic and expectations. I'd like to write a diversity statement about it, but I'm not sure if it would be appropriate as outwardly, I'm just another white middle class jewish kid applying to law school.

Advice would be much appreciated.

I think it is perfectly appropriate for a diversity statement. You won't get the type of consideration that a URM gets for admissions purposes, but for the purpose of demonstrating how you can enrich the diversity of the student body, that's exactly what that statement will do. That said, it's true that immigrant-refugee diversity stories are pretty common so it's good to approach it from a new angle. "Pushing me to work hard to live up to their work ethic" has surely been done to death.

janereacher wrote:I think it is perfectly appropriate for a diversity statement. You won't get the type of consideration that a URM gets for admissions purposes, but for the purpose of demonstrating how you can enrich the diversity of the student body, that's exactly what that statement will do. That said, it's true that immigrant-refugee diversity stories are pretty common so it's good to approach it from a new angle. "Pushing me to work hard to live up to their work ethic" has surely been done to death.

Thank you for your feedback. Perhaps finding some way to integrate the immigrant family story with my passion for learning Russian/Soviet history (which my parents and grandparents helped get me into as a child) and the fact that I'll be the first in my family to attend graduate school would be an interesting way to approach it.

If you write about your passion for Soviet history, you could get some "Why Law" mileage out of the importance of rights in Western legal systems, made clear to you through the experience of your parents, and your desire to be a zealous advocate or whatever.