An acquaintance and I casually batted ideas back and forth about her personal statement when it dawned on me that she had chosen the same topic for her diversity statement. It was clear her heart beat for this topic, but she was allowing it to dominate her application. It is a widely agreed no-no in the admissions community to repeat topics across your essays.
I felt for her. On the other side of applying to T14 law schools, I regretted how my diversity statement and my personal statement both emphasized my desire to ‘translate’ the illegible on behalf of the unequipped or uninitiated. This advocacy angle, inherent to how I, the daughter of immigrants, operated in the world, bolstered my resolve to endure hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. But it would not get me into law school.
We all must learn to present to impress, not express to express.
Overemphasizing what mattered to me… and every other applicant out there
My diversity statement narrated my struggles with body image and my triumph over an eating disorder through weightlifting. Wishing to address the problem of why more women didn’t weightlift, I started a program that targeted Princeton women’s greatest fear: looking foolish among the exercise contraptions.
The story culminated in re-emphasizing my commitment to advocate for others: “While I loved the work of managing and growing ‘Spot Me’ [as its founder and director], my first love was heading down to the weight room as an instructor…With fluency in the labyrinth of sweat and metal, I guided my peers through exercises with balanced assurances and soft words, occasionally asking the ‘scary buff guy’ (in the words of one of my clients) if we could share his squat rack.”
Touching. But a similar tune ran through my personal statement. Both anecdotes revolved around helping vulnerable women. It ended: “Navigating legal technicalities on behalf of the vulnerable was not something I saw myself doing until I met [name]... Helping [her], I saw my limits as a non-lawyer and visualized a future as a litigator and legal advisor.”
I poured my heart out in every word of my application – expressing to express. But the commitment to be an advocate is too familiar a refrain. Thematically in step with the lawyerly profession, it becomes a low-hanging fruit that many an inexperienced applicant hooks onto. But in a diversity statement, you need to present yourself as different. I failed to deliberately craft and present myself apart from other applicants.
Workshopping my diversity statement to impress
I completely glanced over the serious entrepreneurial work I put into building up that weightlifting program: Building relationships with the fitness center staff; pitching my well-researched idea at Princeton Research Day and winning a Gold award; programming an automated emailing system that reminded students of their instructional sessions and collected feedback 24 hours, 2 weeks after; proposing a simple yet effective expansion of the program based on data I collected from clients that won a $10,000 grant; and leading a special mixer event for first-gen low-income students.
These facts, which tugged on a thread of entrepreneurial spirit that ran through most of my extracurriculars, would impress. They could anchor a discussion of my goal to start an employment and housing legal aid clinic in rural Vermont – which I also regretfully omitted.
But I had no space for them because I spent half a page artfully detailing a lifelong struggle with body image and an eating disorder. Certainly, the weighty story mattered – to me and thus to my loved ones. Yet it was not appropriate for this forum.
Your audience, the admissions committee, is not in a relationship with you. They do not care about a topic just because you care about it. They are not trying to relate; they are trying to evaluate. They will not give the benefit of the doubt; they will critique you to strike you out. It sounds harsh, but I wish for all applicants to know the truth of the application experience – and learn to present to impress instead of expressing to express.
Past articles:
Tell me in the comments what article you’d like to see next!
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