First and VERY Rough Draft of Project Two

Most people bottle up their emotions, and bury them like a trunk of pirate treasure deep inside themselves. These emotions, and even memories can go unrecognized for years, sometimes decades. However, for a lucky few who decide to go to law school, these emotions and memories will have to be revisited. This terrible examination of blocked out emotions happens when students are required to write a personal statement for law schools applications.

First off, law school applications are already tedious and mind numbing. For most law schools, you must go through background checks, and in some cases, you have to write a statement for every violation of the law on your record. These violations can include citations as low level as a speeding ticket for going 42 in a 35 MPH area. If it isn’t obvious already, law school applications are about as serious as applying for a federal job, yet they require self-examination. Imagine a 22-year-old student having to write about why they were going above the speed limit when they were 16 years old. These types of emanatory procedures are what make law school applications so frustrating and time consuming for students.

For me, the most daunting task of applying to law school in a few years is the personal statement. I understand that this shouldn’t be taunting me, especially since I haven’t even finished my general education requirements for my bachelor’s degree. Yet, every time I go to write anything now, ranging from research papers to blog posts, the thought of my personal statement is consistently in the back of my mind. I think that this task is worrying me so much, because I know that I have not confronted all of my emotions, and that I have probably blocked out a good amount of memories that I do care to recall. I know that these entombed personal problems will be brought out during my personal statement for law school, and I would be lying if I said that I was not worried about what might come of unearthing these emotions. Who knows, maybe after writing my personal statement for law school, I decide I don’t even want to attend law school after. Wouldn’t that be ironic.

Luckily for me, my older sister has already had to go through the grueling process of writing a personal statement. My sister is four years older than I am, and she has just completed her first year of law school at Stetson Law School. I watched my sister struggle for a few months with trying to write her personal statement, and it was eye opening to see someone who I look up to struggle with just trying to write about herself. For a task that seems so simple, it can have such an enormous impact on the rest of your life. During my research on writing a personal statement, I interviewed my sister, and one of the more interesting points that she disclosed to me was that regardless of LSAT scores and GPA’s, your personal statement can make or break an application. The reason for this is that hundreds, even thousands of applicants could have the same GPA or the same LSAT score, so a personal statement is something to set an applicant apart from the rest. As if I wasn’t worried enough about having to write about myself, learning that this single article could decide my admittance into my dream law school makes my palms a tad sweaty.

Furthermore, another way to boost my confidence about writing my personal statement was when my sister confessed to me that almost everyone she has met at law school struggled with their applications, and most of all, their personal statements. Conventionally, to fix my predicament I would try to start writing personal statements early and hone techniques involved with writing a personal statement. Although, I plan on majoring in philosophy which is heavy in self-examination, and I fear that regardless of how many drafts of a personal statement I write, that by the end of my major course work I might just throw everything I have practiced out of the window. Additionally, I fear the possibility of not wanting to attend law school at all by the end of my undergraduate studies and all my practice with writing about myself will be worthless. Aside from this, I am worried that with a writing heavy major such as mine, I would be wasting valuable time trying to practice for personal statement that would not be written for a substantial length of time.