dneuman wrote:Thanks so much for the reply. I'll definitely have to see if I can fit in religion into the next draft of the personal statement (or whether I should go for a Diversity essay with that). I know BU offers the optional diversity essay, although I think I'm already going pretty heavy with the "diversity" aspect in the personal statement.
So I'll post what I have as a first draft. Like I said, I suspect I might be going to "broad" and that I should maybe put more of a "story" element into it. But I'd love to hear what you think so far. Thanks for reviewing it (even a quick glance would be extremely helpful for me) and I definitely plan on sending in the next draft under the more comprehensive review that you guys offer. 
The first time I attended school was at sixteen. Well, to clarify, I was home-schooled. This meant the first time I entered a classroom regularly was when I started college. While I was looking forward to the challenge and was even excited, it was a huge change from the type of education I had received up until then. While before, it had been up to me to find exciting and different ways to approach education, I was suddenly thrust into a classroom and expected to read through chapters in a textbook, memorize the material, and then take tests on them. At first, this was a struggle. Education that had once felt so free, spirited, and creative was now trapped inside a beige colored square box, with only a professor’s words and the occasional PowerPoint slide to teach me. While in the past, I would write a fictional story surrounding certain microorganisms and bacteria working together to save their world, the human body, I would now sit for many hours reviewing study materials again and again, hoping to be ready for test day. For history, what had once been an exciting trip to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia to watch the war reenactments and read the recovered letters of actual soldiers during the revolutionary war, was now spent in a library, reading through a textbook and scanning through black and white photos of the very same fields and houses that I had been to myself.
But while the schedule and method of Homeschooling was vastly different from more traditional education, I still feel strongly that homeschooling gave me the tools to not only match, but exceed the challenges I faced in college. The main staple of homeschooling is self-commitment. I didn’t do the schoolwork because a teacher forced me to, or because the deadline was fast approaching, but because I genuinely wanted to. My commitment both then and now, is to learn new things. To acquire new information. At the age of nine, instead of heading off again to summer camp, I asked if I could take an extra writing and math class during my break. A few years later this same desire rose again and I began taking a couple of summer courses at a college in New York for the summer. These short stints in classroom settings, while a huge change from my past experience, were places where I soon thrived. I learned that the self-drive which had always been a part of my education was something that was not only valued, but expected. Soon after I had begun college and taken that first tentative step into a new world of education, I found myself improving and enjoying the college atmosphere.
This drive to learn new things stayed with me through the first years of college as did the respect for travelling that most home-schoolers appreciate. One day, before entering one of my classes, I spotted a flyer illustrating the possibility of studying abroad in Israel for a semester. I knew immediately what I wanted to do. By the end of the college year, in the middle of the summer, my twin brother and I boarded an El-Al flight to Israel, in the hopes of garnering experience in an entirely different world, where we had no relatives and very little grasp of the Hebrew language. Only thirty minutes after we had disembarked from the airplane, we had been shouted at by two angry taxi drivers and almost run over by a public bus that had apparently decided that the speed limit was only a suggestion.
After the first difficult month passed, new possibilities opened up. In between my college studies, while others spent their free time lounging around to recover from the intense schedule, I forced myself to attend Ulpan classes, where I did my best to learn the Hebrew language. I found an Israeli tutor who helped introduce me to music by teaching me the guitar. Each day was a different, new experience that I believe has helped broaden my view of the world. Hearing classmates and friends talk of their experiences serving in the Israeli Defense Force allowed me short glimpses into a very different kind of life.
Ultimately, I decided at the time to stay the rest of the year in Israel and upon my graduation from college, I returned here to study for the LSAT. While I do plan on living in America, I have tried my best to take up opportunities to learn and experience different types of places, people, and cultures. I hope that I can bring a unique perspective and personality to _____, from both my experiences growing up in a class of just three students as well as from the wonderful lifestyle and culture I’ve been lucky enough to experience in this wonderful country of Israel.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for posting your draft! I have some feedback for you below. At times it's really specific, and at other times really broad.
Let's start with the opening: I'm not sure this will work, or rather, I'm not sure it's working as well as you want it to. The first sentence gets you interested, but the followup takes away the punch. The "Well, to clarify,..." cuts all the dramatic tension. Also, the uniqueness of the opening is lost a bit because you have been in school, just not the institutional version. So, that second sentence feels like a small letdown. I'd probably go with your opening sentence, and then make short work of the homeschooling and then get to the rest of your paragraph, because the tone relaxes after those first few sentences.
In the second paragraph I like the message you are sending, but note that parts of this also undermine the opening statement because you were in traditional classes prior to age 16. Side note: remove the "couple of" that appears just before "summer courses." Those two words aren't necessary and for some reason kept disrupting my reading flow when I looked at them.
Let's move to the third paragraph, which I think needs some minor work. Overall, I think you are a really good writer. You have good pacing and you add details that make a difference (a good example is mentioning that the flight is El-Al—that immediately conjures up a certain image which helps place the geographic transition). This is still a draft, and one of the the things I'd do here is go through this and examine every word to see if it first is necessary and second whether it delivers the message the best way possible. For example, I would eliminate part of the phrase, "By the end of the college year, in the middle of the summer..." I don't think you need both, and I'd probably just mention leaving in summer since that evokes a certain image. Another change I'd consider making would be to remake "I knew immediately what I wanted to do" into "I knew immediately that I wanted to go," simply because that's a bit more direct. I also might contemplate dropping the reference to your brother. No offense to him (
), but his presence threw me off a bit, and lessened my impression of you as self-reliant and a self-starter. Last, the bus reference—was it just speeding or was there a reckless element to it? The reason I ask is because when I read this sentence I stopped to think about it, not in a reflective sense but in a factual one. I was thinking about whether that factually made sense, and that's something you do not want to have the reader do when reading. The statement should supply the information in such a way that any "thinking" the reader does about it is to think about the person who has written it, and not whether what they've said is factually consistent or possible.
Moving on, be careful with the comparison to other students. The phrase "lounging around" has a definite pejorative tone to it, and you never want to appear uncharitable (unless the whole point of your statement revolves around addressing some character/performance issue. One of the best and funniest personal statements I ever read started with the phrase: "In the past five years, I've been called an asshole a lot." That was an opening that made everyone want to keep reading). That aside, this is probably my least favorite paragraph in the essay. It feels a little bit like you are stretching to make your point (guitar for one, and then the experience of your friends).
In the last paragraph, I'd continue on with the shaping and cutting. I don't think you need to mention the LSAT, for example. It's not integral to who you are, and it's also a universal thing for every law school applicant so you get no advantage from mentioning it. I also think the closing message needs to be stronger. You've gone into a rather standard close, and I don't think it suits the rest of your statement.
Ok, that's the end of some of the specific comments I had while reading. As I said earlier, that's just a portion of the kind of feedback we give within our Admission Consulting programs, so my comments aren't meant to be the final, definitive word on your personal statement. Overall, your statement is good, and you are a good writer. As you work on your next draft, aside for the specifics I mentioned above, I think you should focus on how the big picture message is presented at the end. The statement highlights your academic abilities and the fact that you love learning—this is all good. What I'd like to see is a bit more "pop" in the message. I'm not sure if there are examples you could use, or maybe some summarizing aspect, but you have space since that second-to-last paragraph isn't really necessary, and I feel like the ending needs some work. I realize that is vague advice, but I don't have a clear picture yet of what I'd do to make this a bit more gripping. I just sense that it needs it. Perhaps it could tie in your educational background with your achievements or law school plans. In doing so, that could change the ending from a more descriptive narrative style into a statement of purpose, perhaps. I'm not always big on those types of endings, but your setup here could make that a more fitting end. I'll think about it some more, and see if anything comes to mind in terms of what to do here.
Please let me know if the above helps. Thanks!
