LAW SCHOOL ADMISSIONS | my personal statement

hello world i'm cece [Music] i'm a mid-level associate at a large law firm in new york city which means that i obviously at one point did have to apply to law school and with that application process on top of just having my gpa which was pretty good and taking the lsat i also had to submit my personal statement and for yale a supplemental statement that they call the yale250 because it can only be 250 words that's cute right yell so today i want to share with you my law school admissions essay is both my personal statement and the shorter yale 250. these essays took me a really really long time when i first started drafting i wrote pretty much five versions of a really really terrible personal statement and i think one of the traps of a personal statement is that you end up telling the admissions committee what you think they want to hear and the truth is the admissions committee never wants to hear what you want them to hear because it's usually really cliche not authentic and they can see right through it the first few drafts of my personal statement were kind of like that they were really terrible they really pandered to the admissions committee and it talked about wanting to pursue a legal career because of negative space and by negative space you'll see much more what i mean when i actually read my essay the saving grace was that i did have a lot of friends including law school graduates and english majors who read over my essay and helped me improve what i was trying to say and pointed out things that really didn't work i believe i had five drafts of my personal statement and it was pretty much final i reread it and i just totally hated it and my friends hated it so one night and i don't condone this but i decided to write drunk and edit sober as some of the writers do and i just started drinking vodka by myself in my apartment it's not a good alcohol at all i don't really know what i was thinking but hey i was in college and we also drank everclear and punch all the time so who knows after i was starting to feel it i started word vomiting everything i felt about law school and my path to getting there onto a google doc five more revisions later and it entered its final form which i am going to read to you i'm pretty proud of it because i do think i put in a lot of effort crafting it and thinking about what law school would mean to me and the good news is that the admissions committee really seemed to agree along with my gp and lsat my personal statement and my yale250 got me accepted into yale harvard as well as colombia and nyu and with colombia at nyu i also got full tuition offers immediately with my acceptance which was really awesome so a dramatic reading of my law school personal statement as i stared at the full-time employment contract in front of me i felt as if my significant other were kneeling in front of me at a romantic restaurant a jewelry box from tiffany's opening his outstretched hands this was it this was the moment that i had been working towards my family would be ecstatic about the tempting signing bonus and the generous salary they would be so proud that i had received a coveted return offer from a respected consulting firm they would tell me that i finally had it all but it didn't feel like i had at all it felt like i finally understood the panic of being proposed to and realizing that i was not in love after all growing up in a traditional immigrant family i was taught that the only acceptable professions were in science or finance in college economics intrigued me economics purported to explain every decision in the world by a behavioral cost benefit analysis and i wanted to be a part of the decisions that would in turn influence thousands of other decisions i wanted to be a technician of the world engine when i declared my major in the fall of my sophomore year economics and i officially became an item that long-term relationship was how i got to new york city the summer before my senior year at 21 years old i was advising bank executives and district managers on how they could more effectively manage their 11 digit sales goals my research informed actions that would affect the lives of over 75 000 employees i have made an impact in the world or at least in the world of banking in economic consulting i could effect change in the world equilibrium in response to real problems and yet i flipped through the pages of the job offer before me feeling strangely numb i knew that i was lucky to have this but all that ran through my head were the moments in my life in which i had experienced a rare juxtaposition of passion and purpose my first love my fling the one who got away in high school my first brush with love was when i won the county hamut court competition researching writing and presenting an appellate argument on same-sex marriage to a panel of judges and attorneys was the most rewarding experience of my life thus far overshadowing my s.a.t score and blue ribbon science fair project by leaps and bounds since my parents preferred math and science accolades viewing most extracurricular activities as a distraction from my academics i spent many hours arguing with them to let me participate in moot court promising to work an after-school tutoring job in order to pay for a cell phone that i could use when traveling for competitions although moot court became merely a trophy thrust into the corner of my parents cabinets i never forgot that first rush of pride when i successfully defended my application of case law loving versus virginia in response to the judge's question later that year i obsessively followed the in court arguments of proposition 8 and perry b schwarzenegger captivated by the one decision that could change 861 000 california citizens lives i thought back to my favorite college course work classes in which professors pushed me to think not only about how the world was but also about how the world could and should be my papers analyzed legal precedence of the past in order to apply them to problems of the present that would have far-reaching implications for the future i was captivated by the fact that the law sought to simultaneously connect and reconcile the past present and future while consulting allowed me to draw upon information of the past to solve business problems of the present consulting did not guarantee that my insights would change the course of the future the next dodd-frank act would render my solution obsolete above the neatly typed and collated offer packet before me i realized what being a technician of the world engine truly entailed economics accepted the parameters of the world and optimized within those constraints law questioned accepted parameters to explore new constraints not only did i want to properly respond to changes in the landscape of society but i also wanted those responses themselves to change the landscape of society i didn't just want to use the past to inform decisions of the present i wanted my actions and decisions in the present to guide the framework of the future as well economics was my safe stable relationship law my torrid tortuous love economics had been my past my present but it could not provide me with the future that i so desired i had hoped to fall in love with consulting and live happily ever after i had hoped to love instead merely enjoy the subject and the work i had hoped to become a technician of the world engine through economic analyses and business recommendations none of those hopes however materialized but it was not too late for passion for love for me i pushed the consulting contract away i knew what i wanted to say yes to and it wasn't kneeling in front of me that's it that was my personal statement it's honestly a little weird reading it back now because this was written in 2012 which was nine years ago and even though a lot has changed i still feel some of the urges and the motivations that i talk about in my personal statement so it's really cute seeing the hopes and dreams that i have going into law school and i'm really hopeful that i will be able to continue pursuing them and work towards effecting change in the future and being a technician of the world engine as i like to say okay and now for my yale 250 which as a reminder was a supplemental essay required by yale only which capped you at 250 words you got to be super concise really get to the point and the way i approach diversity statements or any kind of supplemental statement is if you're trying to say something that you already said before and just reiterate it don't submit that if you're trying to explain away something because you think it's going to be an issue unless it's really glaringly obvious and something that you think really needs to be addressed like failing out of one class during your sophomore year less is more it's kind of like when you get arrested right lawyers always say don't say anything like just keep your mouth shut because less is more and i think in some way admissions is similar you have to tell them enough information but you don't want to ramble or seem like you're over explaining or use five different essays to try and explain the same concept about you if your essay presents a new perspective on you or a new facet then great submit that make sure it's well written but if you're just trying to explain away something that the admissions committee already sees or that you talked about in another statement like no without further ado my yale250 randy canavey made his students want more eternally bored suburban teenagers snapped attention when he walked into the classroom boys who routinely used class for 100 minutes of flirting cease their antics girls who spent 90 of their waking hours texting on their phones put them away a teacher who expected students to think beyond one's age mr kennedy succeeded in penetrating the adult adolescent barrier by refusing to acknowledge us as adolescents at transgressions outside of the classroom were of no consequence everything inside the classroom was a paramount importance he would often tell us i care but i don't care do you understand we nodded we did immaturity was not an excuse for misbehavior it was the privilege of that treatment which prompted my interest in juvenile justice edward humes is no matter how loud i shout as a staple on my annual reading list forcing me to constantly re-evaluate the relationship between education and delinquency perhaps the solution lies in mr canady if adults be it attorney judge social worker or teacher hold youth to a higher standard so that first offenses are addressed out of the onset then more children could be rehabilitated instead of ignored by the system until they commit a violent crime children may be children but is that really an excuse well that brings me back mr kennedy was my freshman year and junior year english teacher in high school and he unfortunately passed away when i was in college and i would say that he single-handedly had the biggest impact in my in my life really i was always really good at school because i think my parents helped me a lot with things they would assign me math worksheets that weren't related with school but it wasn't really until i got to reading books and discussing them in mr kennedy's class that i realized how impactful and fun reading and talking about books could be and even though you are talking about fictional characters you're talking also about the bigger ideas of life and the bigger ideas of what it means to be alive um mr canady would also always make fun of me because i would tend to freak out unnecessarily about assignments when we turn them in there was one time we were turning in a paper and as i was about to turn in the printed sheet i realized that one of the paragraphs i had put two tabs instead of one so it was a double tapped paragraph and all the other paragraphs were single tabbed and i actually went up to him and i told him i would like a one-day extension to turn in this paper and he asked me why because i think he saw me holding my essay in front of him i told him it was because i had double tapped one of the paragraphs he just laughed at me and then took the paper from my hands in junior year when i got student of the year from him for having one of the highest grades in his class i remember he wrote me in that card that he hoped that i would stop to smell the roses sometimes that really stuck with me because i think for the most part in a lot of my academic career even in most of my adult life i didn't really take time to think about what i was doing or where i was going or if i really wanted to be doing what i was doing so much of my life has just been about constantly achieving being told what the next objective is and then reaching for that and it's certainly gotten me to a really really good place in life i have a really well-paying job and i went to great schools where i made a lot of friends and really learned a lot of things about the world and why the world is the way it is sometimes though i do think about who i might be if i weren't so scared all the time failure and if i hadn't just been conditioned to constantly achieve whatever objective was put in front of me what if i had to make up my own objective what would it look like what would it be sometimes i think about what risks i would have been willing to take in those circumstances without the fear of failing without a safety net my alternate universe self i hope she's okay you know ah man audiobook narrators props to you

Channel: Cece Xie

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Id: x08UuSsMFYU

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021