Ever since I posted a portion of my personal statement for law school on Facebook and Instagram, I've received SO many excellent questions regarding how I managed to structure my first official draft within less than 24 hours! So, for this week's Odyssey article, I decided to share a brief outline of the content I chose to include in my personal statement for law school in order to help those of you who are still curious and in need of some ideas for yours!

In order to construct your personal statement for law school, you'll first need to start by gaining a basic understanding of what exactly a law school personal statement actually is. This is where the following two links will come in handy. The first one discusses the content that should be included in your personal statement, and the second one provides two examples of personal statements that resulted in acceptances to law school:

1) https://www.lsac.org/jd/applying-to-law-school/who...

2) https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-sch...

IMPORTANT NOTE: You'll want to refer to these links before, during, and after you finish writing, as this will enable you to make sure you've included everything in your personal statement that you need.

1. Write the very FIRST sentence of your personal statement

This will likely be the most difficult part of your personal statement construction process. At first, I thought of starting mine off by saying "Hello! My name is Amelia Hope Alamdar, and I am an undergraduate senior majoring in Writing and Rhetoric and minoring in Legal Studies at the University of Central Florida!"

However, when I finally took some time to really think about it, I realized there were three major problems with choosing to make this the first sentence of my personal statement rather than something else:

1) Why am I devoting precious space of my Google Document to informing the admissions committee of what they already know about me based on my application?

2) Why am I starting off my personal statement with a sentence that the majority of applicants are probably going to start off their personal statements with?

3) Why am I choosing to start off my personal statement with such a basic sentence?

That's when I finally decided that I needed to start off my personal statement with something that still introduced me as an applicant, but also acted as a baseline for everything else I wanted to say.

The final result was this:

"Teaching my younger brother of 4 years of age how to read when I was only 8 years old resulted in so much more than just a means of adhering to my role as an older sister, in that it was also one of the first instances that my passion for writing and the legal profession began to reveal themselves to the world."

Notice how this sentence successfully encourages admissions officers to want to learn more about me as an applicant, as well as provides them with a bit of an insight on what's to come.

2. NOW you can introduce yourself

This is your chance to answer the question of:

"Why do YOU want to attend law school?"

In doing this, tell admissions officers the story that lies behind your major, career choice(s), etc. In other words, tell them why you chose the majors/minors you did, what experience(s) led you to pursue the career(s) you want to pursue, and anything else you can think to include that they wouldn't already know based on the information you provided in your application.

For instance, I chose to inform them of the heart-to-heart conversation I had with my mom regarding what was once my career choice (pediatrics) and why that conversation helped me to realize why it would be in my best interest to pursue a career in law instead. I also included a brief list of some of the jobs and organizations I've been affiliated with that concern the legal field, as well as a summarized discussion of a deeply personal experience of my own that led me to finalize my career plans.

Here are some questions that might help to trigger some ideas for what YOU could write for this portion of your personal statement:

1) What is it about being an attorney that would make you want to get up and go to work every morning?

2) What unfortunate/eye-opening experience(s) have you had that would cause you to approach those same experiences a certain way if you had the power to do so as an attorney?

Remember, think deeply about all of this!

3. Win over the admissions committee

Now it's time to leave the admissions committee speechless by the fact that you're absolutely floored by all of their outstanding qualities and accomplishments! To help you best understand what I mean, here are some more topics to consider addressing in your personal statement that I addressed in mine:

1) Have you ever visited the campus? If so, what do you admire/still remember most about it and why?

2) Have you researched the law school and any awards or outstanding reputations it's received in the past? Why would knowing that make you feel more than honored to be able to attend that same law school in the future?

4. Go out with a BANG!

This "BANG!" should be the last sentence of your personal statement. Just like with the first sentence, this will probably be equally as difficult to create. The easiest way I can tell you to go about doing this would be to come up with something that would make those admissions officers think "WOW! Now THIS is a student who knows how to convince us that they should be admitted to our law school!"

Just for your convenience, here's what I wrote for mine:

"Leaving home won't actually mean that I'll be "leaving home" this time, in that it wasn't until I started considering which law schools to apply to that I realized my third home has been residing in Morgantown, West Virginia since 1878."

You wouldn't know the background behind this sentence unless you actually read my entire personal statement for West Virginia University's College of Law, but I basically wrote it with the intention of helping admissions officers at WVU to understand my sincere interest in wanting to attend their law school when the time comes for my application to be considered for admission.

FINAL TIPS:

1) Have a professional proofread your personal statement before you submit it (e.g. a current law student, former professor of yours, etc.).

2) Construct each personal statement slightly differently from all of the others, so as to make it specific for each law school that you apply to (optional).

3) If you have no other option but to include any necessary referendum (e.g. explanation for poor grades) in your personal statement, do it. However, make sure it isn't the entirety of your personal statement.

While you may intend on pursuing a career in something other than law, I hope you will find this article at least somewhat useful during your personal statement construction process! As stated in another one of my previous Facebook posts, "A personal statement for law school of only 2 pages in length and double-spaced is definitely going to be a difficult one for me to write, but I know that as with every final draft I create, it's going to be something unexpectedly beautiful."

Remember, all you have to do is think about where your personal statement is going to get you if you manage to do it just right. The rest will be all downhill from there!