Workshop Information
This Career Connections Center hosted workshop was led by George Mitsios, Career Coach for the Public Sector, and includes information on personal statements for law school applications. George was joined by panelists, Joseph Matthews, the Director of Student Recruitment at the University of Miami School of Law and Ariana Arguello, the Associate Director of Recruitment at Florida International University College of Law.
Pre-Law Personal Statement Basics
Students should understand that personal statements are crucial for demonstrating an applicant’s character, values, and potential fit for the law school community. Often serving as the deciding factor in applications between candidates who might be similar in comparison to each other. Do not downplay the importance of application components like the personal statement as admissions committees will review every piece of information submitted by applicants for a holistic review of the applicant.
Reflecting and Brainstorming…Why Law School?
Your approach to brainstorming or reflecting prior to writing the personal statement might be different depending on your preference. One option is a broader approach to reflect on your life’s journey up until this point highlighting pivotal moments or impactful experiences. From there you can work to identify which of these experiences connect with your motivation to pursue law school for your statement to start to take shape.
You can try a more direct brainstorming approach suggested by Joe, starting with the basic question of why one wants to go to law school and go from there. This can lead you to identify your strengths, moments of overcoming obstacles, or significant experiences that will help shape the personal statement. Both approaches will lead you to personal stories, deep explanations, and your motivation for pursuing law school. This is important as Ariana highlighted this is something admissions look for in personal statements.
The Beginning, Middle, and End!
With any writing submission, it needs to be coherent in its structure with a strong introduction, a meaningful body, and a compelling conclusion. These different parts of the personal statement should all be connected by a theme. You should focus on personal experiences and avoid replicating information from resumes. Joe and Ariana provided insights regarding common pitfalls, such as starting with someone else’s quote or failing to maintain the applicant’s central role in the narrative. You are the focus of your personal statement, so it is important that from beginning to end the admissions teams are learning more about you.
Joe added that the body of the personal statement should include strong facts supporting the applicant’s argument, while the conclusion should be brief and reinforce the main theme without mentioning specific law schools. Conclusions should tie together the applicant’s experiences and motivations while looking ahead. You can avoid common errors like including the wrong law school name by removing mention of the specific law school by default unless otherwise stated by the prompt.
Proofreading and Editing
Some techniques in seeking feedback include getting multiple perspectives on your personal statement and reading your statement out loud when assessing the statement on your own. There are many available resources, including career coaching appointments, a pre-law personal statement guide, pre-law advising appointments, and Career Connections Center drop-in hours, to support students in their law school application process. The pre-law personal statement guide also includes resource pages for University of Florida resources and external resources.
Personal Statement Guidelines
For specific personal statement guidelines, you will want to check with the specific schools you will be applying to. Most follow similar prompts and guidelines. As far as formatting and content goes in a general sense, keep personal statements concise at 2 pages and professional, using standard fonts, and submitting documents as PDFs instead of Microsoft Word documents to avoid formatting issues.
