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Sample Essay

This personal statement has been looming over me throughout this application process. I find myself unable to overcome the seeming impossibility of this exercise. How can I convey enough of myself in two pages? I act. I sing in the shower. I occasionally reread the collection of comic books I amassed during high school. I enjoy helping people, but I do it for myself. Lately I've been dressing a little sharper. I play hockey whenever I can. And I question everything, often in the hopes of effecting a change.

Which is why the law interests me. Not to work within the system, but to change the system. But to change it, you must first understand it. To understand it, you must first get accepted to Law School. Which leaves me writing impossible personal statements.

Trapped by this inelegant thought process, I decided to take a walk and hope for inspiration. While I walked, I did what I often find myself doing. I imagined that my hands suddenly had energy, and that I could throw globs of fire or light from them. Whoosh. Whoosh. "Strange," you must be thinking, as you consider forwarding my application to the nearest psychiatric unit. I do this a lot while walking around-I'm still waiting for my latent superpowers to kick in. Sometimes walking to class, I break into a run for no reason, excepting that I feel like I would be there already if I were flying. I wait to be lifted in the air. I have spent entire class periods trying to push a pen across a paper with my mind. I assume this is not normal. But these thoughts kept coming back, the more I tried to answer the question: "Who am I?"

I took it a step further. I have been surrounded by extraordinary people all my life. From a family of brilliant type A personalities, I came out a type B: more relaxed and easygoing. Moreover, I was inclined to question the process of achievement first, rather than simply reaching the next level. My family would patiently explain to me why they thought it was important to excel in education, to play hockey, to keep writing. When I eventually understood, I would excel.

I attended an east-coast "prep" school-amongst the brighter members of the Rockefeller and Pillsbury clans. Then to an Ivy League college, where I found a far more diverse spectrum of brilliance. Once again I found that I allowed myself to lose sight of the goals and question the process itself. Why was there an English major? Why the rigid professionalism? Why were whole periods of literature only dealt with from a feminist viewpoint, or a conservative canonical viewpoint. My senior thesis became a debate on the origins of literary study. My peers in the English department were shocked. Not (horrors) Relevance!

Finally, I find myself here, amongst the best and brightest- the law school applicant pool. I don't find it humbling or scary; I've dealt with you all my life. But I yearn to somehow be exceptional, in a way that would even impress myself.

And so I finally came up with a symbol, one that makes a personal statement. I stand before you, with palms facing up. And flames sprout from my hands in an elegant plume. And slowly the flames take a shape, twisting, curling and licking each other until they form a rose of red, green, and white flames, the stem just barely touching my fingertips. And this is my totem: the flames would be my passion, and my desire to effect a change-the rose would be a symbol of my romantic life vision. Maybe. Mostly I'd just like to do it.

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