In this episode of Break Into Law School, I'm going to discuss the 5 big mistakes you want to avoid when writing your personal statement. Your essays are an incredibly important part of your law school application and they can make or break your acceptance. I want to help you improve your chances by explaining what not to do, and what to do instead.

Today, we are going to be talking about what you can do to avoid the five common mistakes in your personal statement.

Welcome to another episode of Break into Law School. My name is Sydney Montgomery and I'm a law school admissions consultant specializing in working with first-generation and minority applicants. 

So let's dive in. 

We're talking about what are those five things that you can avoid as you are writing your personal statement. 

The first thing that you want to try to avoid is you wants to avoid telling instead of showing. The second thing you want to avoid is overly vague and broad sentiments. You want to try to be as specific as possible. The third thing that you want to avoid is centering an issue instead of centering yourself. Then you want to avoid not having a structure. That is really a big thing. You want to avoid also sharing unnecessary doubts. That's another one. So again, you want to avoid telling instead of showing. You want to avoid overly vague sentiments. You want to avoid getting on a soap box and then you want to avoid not really having a structure. So let's break that down for a little bit. The first thing that I said is you want to avoid telling instead of showing. 

And this is one of those things that I really work with my students on because narrative writing is difficult. We're not really used to narrative writing. We're not really used to talking about ourselves. And so this entire exercise for many of you is going to seem quite foreign. You're not used to having to write in this way, even if you wrote papers for college or you wrote papers for work, it's a different kind of writing. 

So, I was an English major at Princeton, and I really love the concept and the opportunity to have some really impactful storytelling in your personal statement. And oftentimes students miss the mark because they do a lot of telling, but they don't do any showing. I don't know how many of you have heard the phrase "show, don't tell." 

Sometimes I have to say show first, then tell, but that's what we're doing. When you are using narrative structure, you are actually literally telling me a story. You're painting a picture. You're using descriptive imagery. You might be using some dialogue. You are setting the scene. I think that this works exceptionally well in your personal statement. You want to have at least one or two narrative moments, because in those moments, when you're telling story, you are captivating the admission committee member more so than if you were just to tell me things. Humans are really primed to storytelling. It's one of the first ways of communication. There is something about listening to a story that just makes you lean in just a little bit more. 

It makes you want to listen. It makes you want to feel. It ignites the empathetic nature in us that says, oh, I wonder how they were feeling in that moment? How would I have felt in that moment? Or I really understand what they were going through. I really understand this person now. Through stories we're able to not just show what happened, but we're able to show how we felt about it. And not just by saying I was upset. I was angry. This was really hard for me, but in the words that you're using and the descriptions and the narrative tone that you take, you are going to be explaining without your words, how you were feeling, how you thought about the situation. You're going to be revealing pieces of your character at every moment in your personal statement. You want to be thinking, how are they learning things about me? 

Are they getting to know beyond my resume? Are they getting to know me? And so sometimes this is where students have those questions. Well, can I talk about the things that are on my resume and my personal statement? How do I make my personal statement not just my resume 2.0? And it's those stories, you can give me those bullet points. I manage this. I oversaw that, in your resume. 

But in your personal statement, I want to know: it was 2:00 AM and even though we had been working all night long, we all felt this energy in the room that was contagious. We knew we were close to really making change. As my pencil started to wear out and I went to go sharpen it and get another one, I looked around me and I felt nothing but centered. That I knew that I was in the right place. 

Do you see how that just paints a completely different picture? And I just made that up by the way. But there's a part that's a little bit theatrical. It's creative writing. Right? Instead of we passed these bills, okay, cool. I got that on your resume. But when you can tell me through your narrative descriptions how things were impactful, how you felt, then we have those connections. 

And that's when you can make an impactful personal statement. A lot of times students want a personal statement that stands out and I always say you don't want to just stand out. Because sometimes you might stand out for the wrong reasons. You want a personal statement that is impactful, that they remember, that they're talking about with their husband or their wife over dinner. 

They want to like you and get to know you and advocate for you and committee. 

So that second part then was don't share unnecessary doubts. I don't know why, but a lot of students want to tell me how they were not really sure they wanted to go to law school. That they didn't always know they wanted to go to law school. That they weren't sure what they wanted to study in college, so they weren't sure what they wanted to do. That they were feeling lost and aimless and that might be part of your story, but I wonder, is that really the most important part that you need to share with the admissions committee? Because alternatively, you could weave a very strong statement that looks backwards at some of your experiences and connects the dots. Oftentimes, we feel like we just kind of stumbled upon law school. You're like, I don't know. I just kind of decided I wanted to go to law school. 

And I tell students this all the time: you did not just wake up yesterday and decide you wanna go to law school. Even if that's when you think you woke up and decided you want to go to law school, the issues, the reasons that are drawing you to law, those started way, way back. I know they did. 

I know that the interests that you have, have a genesis that was not yesterday morning. So since the Genesis predates yesterday morning, how can you read a story that makes it seem like this was the clear path? You don't have to say, oh, I always knew I wanted to go to law school if that's not true. 

But you can show me through your stories, through your receipts. You can show me okay, yeah, I lived in a shelter with my mom and then I did spend a lot of time working with women and I was a women's studies major. And you're going to show me this through stories. You're not going to tell me you're going to give me some stories, some examples, some experiences, some receipts. 

And then you're gonna say, this is why all of the work that I've done, it's prepared me. It's made me think deeply about how the law can change it. There are ways for you to be and convey that you are sure that you want to go to law school because let's be very real right now. 

You are applying to professional school. They do not want to let students in who, they're not sure once I go to law school. It's not like college where you want a college degree, but you're just not really sure what you want. They want you to have a little bit more certainty. That the law is the next logical step in your career, that you are applying to law school with a purpose, because if they're not convinced that you know why you want to go to law school, they may think that you won't stay and 1L retention is so important to them. 

So, if you can show them, you've got two pages, double spaced. I think that you have enough. I promise you. I have not met someone yet who hasn't had enough of a pull to fill two pages, double spaced. I've been doing this for a while. You will absolutely have a more convincing and impactful statement. 

You don't have to tell them. It can be like our little secret, that you were aimless and not really sure, and you're still not really sure. That's not convincing. And I think that second part of the purpose behind your personal statement gets lost for students. Your personal statement is to convince them that law school is the next logical step in your journey and that you know what you want to do, and that you're going to use your law degree for good. Or for whatever reason that you want to use your law degree. But you're convincing them of something. Think of it as your first case and they are the judge and jury. 

It is not a convincing argument to say that you're not really sure. Oh, your honor. I'm not really sure. I didn't really read all the evidence, but I think  that he's innocent. I'm pretty sure yesterday we found some evidence, so we're pretty sure he's innocent. It's not convincing. It doesn't work in the courtroom. Won't really work in a personal statement. 

That third thing that you want to do or try to avoid is you want to avoid overly vague sentiments. 

There are so many phrases that students write that are so overdone. They're trite. They're slightly pedestrian. Please don't use them. Because they sound really good and they sound like you're going to be impactful, but you're just saying a lot of nothing. And sometimes in people's personal statements, there is just a lot of nothing. If I'm going to be very frank with you, I want specifics. So if you are going on and on about how you are going to create a just society, help the marginalized, you know, give voice to voiceless communities. I've read all of those sentences. So many times. So many times they don't do anything for me. I'm pretty sure they don't do anything for the admissions committee. 

What does that mean?  What do you want to do? How do you want to give voice to the voiceless? Healthcare. Education law. Criminal justice system, domestic violence. Food insecurity. There's a lot of ways here. So you were telling me about wanting to create an equal and just society and give voice to the voiceless. I have learned still just about nothing from you. 

You would much rather have specific sentences about what areas of law you want to be impactful in. I think of your personal statement as real estate. So, you only have so much land to build on. Do not fill it with empty park benches when you could be building a house. 

You want to make sure that all of the sentences in your personal statement are serving you. Every single sentence should be advancing your goals of making an impact and convincing them that law school is the next logical step on your journey. If you have five, six, seven sentences, that don't really say too much. Or that seemed to say a lot, but don't really say much, you've wasted space. And now that's seven sentences that you're not convincing me that you know what you want to do. That's seven sentences where you're not talking about maybe a program at the school. That's seven sentences where you're not giving me another example of work that you have done. 

I would much rather you, instead of having all these vague overbroad sentences, just use that time to show me through your examples. When I was at this organization, I got to do these things. I made impact here. Then I went to this organization. I made some impact here. I learned this. I'm really interested in knowing about your experiences, knowing about the impacts that you have made, knowing about the things that you have learned and how it shaped your world view and perspective and how you plan to use that in whatever law school it is, in whatever area of law to affect change for certain group of people. I mean, that's a tight, tight essay. And you can do it. But you can not do it if you have all of these big over-broad sentences, they're actually very annoying to read. I always keep it a hundred with you guys, right? I'm not going to sugar coat things. 

Your main objective, it's not to annoy the admission committee member. Do not annoy them. You want them to like you. So we're going to do things that don't annoy them. And those sentences they're a little annoying only because I will probably read like five or six or 10 of those a day or more if I'm an admission committee leader. And so the 10th time you've heard someone talk about this and you're like, yes, I get it. 

Great. Especially in the social justice movement, there's a lot of that. And you don't want them to be like, which girl was she? She was making an impact. She was, she was making impact. You want them to know, you want them to be connecting with you. You don't want them to zone out or anything like that. 

The fourth thing that I want you guys to all make sure that you're not doing, speaking on zoning out, is not getting on a soap box. Sometimes I read essays and students will talk for eight to 10 sentences about the criminal justice system in America. This is not a term paper. This is not the place. Your job is not to educate the admission committee member on an issue. 

That's just not what you're here to do. Your job is to convince them that you are ready to go to law school and that it's the next logical step on your career. You're going to get tired of hearing me say that, but I'm just going to keep saying that pretty much all summer. If I could shout that from the mountain top, I would, but you don't need to go in depth about an issue and start educating them. 

I see this often with students that are writing about dismantling systemic racism, which is very important to me. It's part of the pillars of my platform. However, again, the personal statement is not the place to talk about all the different areas of oppression. It's not the place to give specific examples and statistics. It's not the place to educate them on what you think they might not know about the state of systemic racism in America. There are ways for you to talk about and convey your passion for that work that are candidate-censored. So, instead of telling me in seven sentences or five sentences about the issue, maybe you can show me how you have worked to dismantle something. So you can show me an example of, you know, through this organization, we were able to affect change in this way. Which is so important because, you know, X percentage of black women don't have access to quality healthcare. So now you've told me a little bit about the issue, but you've really just reframed it as I'm going to tell you what I've done and the impact that I've made. And that's so much better than explaining, in America, healthcare is: black women are less likely to receive quality health care, less likely to be believed, higher child mortality rates. Like those are all very true things, but your personal statement is just not the place for you to do that because every sentence that you spend doing that is a sentence I don't learn about you. 

And I want to learn about you and you only have two pages and you are such an awesome person. Some of you have lived many lives. You have experienced so much. I don't want you to waste any space on something that is not going to move the needle for admissions. And then that really does bring me to the last point that I want to make, and that is you want to avoid not having a structure. 

This is so important. This is the crux of a lot of what I teach. I am obsessed, a little bit, with well-structured essays because they're important, because no essay can succeed without a strong outline. Behind every fantastic piece of writing is a fantastic structure. And that is what I want to help you do. And I know that some of you may also be saying, okay, but I don't even know how to get to the outline. I'm not even sure how to do that. And so I wanted to take some time to show you a little bit. How I make some of that a little bit more structured for you because it's important. And I know sometimes we just want to start writing. I'm not doing anything, I'll just start writing. 

I'm going to not lie to you. I get like that sometimes too, in my own writing. If I'm writing for articles, if I'm writing for courses or anything like that, sometimes it can be like, well, I'll just start writing and see what happens. But oftentimes what that does is it wastes time, and time is really in the law school application process, the most expensive commodity that you can't afford to lose. And I don't want you to spin your wheels because if you're going about the essay process ineffectively, if you're just taking 12 hours what could have taken two hours, then that's 10 hours you're not studying for the LSAT.  A lot of you are balancing writing your essays and studying for the LSAT, and you're trying to figure out how can I do these both at the same time? And the answer is in order to do them both at the same time, you have to be efficient. Efficiency is the key to being a high achiever. 

And it is not efficient to meander through the essay writing process without any guidance. Which is why I was so passionate about putting out that free guide, because I want you to be able to have that kind of guidance. That's also why I recently launched my new step-by-step guide to brainstorming, structuring and drafting your personal statement, because I want to make sure that you are able to get the quality help that you need on your personal statement. Even if you are juggling two jobs, you're a single parent you're taking care of your parents. I financially support my family, so I understand what that's like, I've always had multiple jobs. And I really wanted to create something that would make you feel like I am with you. I don't want you wasting time, like I said, writing all these drafts that maybe aren't following a good structure or a good outline.  

For scholarship essays, I want you to brainstorming one time. One amazing brainstorming process that will help all of the other pieces of your writing. And then  talk about crafting your why law statement. 

But just to recap those five things that you want to avoid in your personal statement: the first thing that you want to avoid is you want to avoid telling you want to make, so you're showing and not just telling. The second thing is that you want to make sure that you are not telling me unnecessary doubts or hesitancies or things that I don't need to know that are not going to help sell your case. The third thing is that you want to avoid broad, vague, overdone sentiments that sound great, but aren't really specific to you and don't help me learn about you. 

The fourth thing that you want to avoid is you don't want to get on a soapbox. You don't want to talk about an issue for a very long time, without telling me about how you have been interacting with interfacing and challenging this issue. I want to see how you have made that impact. And then the last thing is you want to make sure that you have a structure you want to avoid just writing with no structure with no outline. If you take nothing else from this: your outline is your best friend. It will enable you to know if you have structural deficiencies in your essay before you spend all of that time writing it. I can always tell when someone started their essay with no outline, I can always tell. When we go back and I make them outline it, they're like, oh, this is so much clearer. And that's the beauty of having a strong outline. That's the beauty of having intentionality behind this personal statement. I would like to learn about you and I think you have so much to tell me. 

This was another episode of Break into Law School with Sydney Montgomery. 

Want to learn more about how you can work with me? Visit my website at www.smontgomeryconsulting.com or follow me on instagram @smontgomeryconsulting.  

Make sure that you rate and review this episode, if it was helpful to you. And if you're looking for even more inspiration, check out my podcast, Mindful Prayers for Students, where I provide encouragement, mindfulness, and prayer on your academic journey.