Below, we will review excerpts of two different personal statements, analyzing what worked and what can be improved.

Essay #1: From Reporting to Reflecting

“Why shouldn’t we print the names?”

The way you start your essay matters enormously, as it will go a long way to determining if your reader will engage with the essay or scroll through it to move to the next application. Dialogue is a fantastic way to open your essay, especially a question like this. It invites the reader to ask, “why is this being said?” It gives a sense of stakes—clearly, this question is not being asked lightly. And it leaves just enough unanswered to make the reader curious to read more.

I stared at the article I had written, surrounded by six other members of my newspaper’s staff, unable to answer my own question. At issue were the names of two students, arrested for allegedly assaulting two police officers…. I felt like an investigator, a detective perhaps, building a case of facts and statements, hard questions with hard answers, trying to uncover the truth. But as my article gleamed on the computer screen before us, I went silent, uncertain.

The writer does a great job of establishing critical stakes, both externally and internally. Externally, the author is addressing the reporting of a serious potential crime, while internally, there is a hint of unease with writing this report. You can keep the reader going from one paragraph to the next by showing your story (in this case, “I stared at… I went silent”) rather than telling (“I was at my computer screen,” or “I was nervous,” for example).

While external stakes matter, the real value in this comes in the internal struggle. As this is a “personal” statement, we want to know what the author feels and their conflict. Writing “as my article gleamed… I went silent, uncertain” does a fantastic job of showing this to us. Even if this were only about, for example, an allegation of a player getting away with unsportsmanlike behavior in a game, the internal stakes would make this worth reading.

The first response came quickly, the voice on the other end begging me not to ruin his life, pleading with me to run the story another way. The second student was less forthcoming…. I told them both the same thing: it was not my decision, my editor and the rest of the staff were going to discuss it, and they would make the final judgment…. But my excuse seemed insufficient as we sat and talked about our duty as a newspaper and how to avoid compromising our integrity as an organization.

This continues to do a marvelous job of displaying both the external and internal struggles. As we often say, it is not just about what happened, but how it affected you. The writer does well here explaining he never feels great about this moment, and it is clear that because of the unsettling way he describes his feelings, he is building to a breaking point.

Semesters later, I met one of those students and realized that I had not expected him to reappear on campus. I had assumed he was guilty from the beginning, suspended perhaps, my article fully justified. To find him innocent—no suspension, the charges dropped—and a little abashed to meet me made my eyes stare at the floor. The verdict of public opinion had been overturned, and I felt ashamed of having bought into it…. I wish I had the chance to play a different role in those two students’ lives, a role less focused on producing allegations and more focused on resolving them.

And now we come to the moment of truth—when the writer realizes he wished he had spent less time reporting allegations and more on fixing them. This does a great job of showing “why I want to be a lawyer” without explicitly saying “I want to be a lawyer because…” Through the power of storytelling, he gets his message across far more effectively than he would have if he had dryly described what had happened. While this last sentence may be more “telling” than showing, because he has set this moment up properly, he gives himself the chance to share his experience and the lessons learned.

When the time comes for me to pass judgment on a person whom I have never met, whose words pierce me through the telephone, I want more than just a police log to go on.

Finally, he brings the piece full circle by going back to the beginning, reflecting on how he has changed and how his change will make him a strong lawyer. This essay got the applicant into Columbia.

Essay #2: The Silver Lining of Injury

The turning point of my college football career came early in my third year. At the end of the second practice of the season, in ninety-five-degree heat, our head coach decided to condition the entire team. Sharp, excruciating pain shot down my legs as he summoned us repeatedly to the line to run wind sprints.

Though the essay could do without this first sentence, as it tells us what it shows in the next couple of sentences, this is nevertheless an effective opening. With details like “ninety-five-degree heat,” “sharp, excruciating pain shot down my legs,” and “repeatedly to the line to run wind sprints,” we can imagine ourselves in his place. While it does not pack the immediate punch the first essay did, it interests us because of its vivid detail.

Severely dehydrated, I was rushed to the hospital and quickly given more than three liters of fluids intravenously. As I rested in a hospital recovery room, I realized my collapse on the field symbolized broader frustrations I felt playing college football. I was mentally and physically defeated.

Again, this tends toward a bit of “telling” with these last two sentences. However, we do understand the exact context of this moment, and we understand this is a “moment of truth” for the author. If we were to edit this, we would say that we like the content, but we’d want to see even more detail to show the deflated spirit. It would be taking an A+ idea with B-level writing and turning it into A-level writing.

After the hospital visit, my football position coach—sensing my mounting frustrations—offered some advice. Instead of devoting my energies almost exclusively to physical preparation, he said, I should approach college football with the same mental focus I brought to my academic studies.

Now we get a sense of the “turning point,” the point in which the writer considers applying his knowledge to law school. In prior paragraphs, the writer had described how they had zealously devoted themselves to academics—with the same strengths and weaknesses discussed beforehand—and their coach mentioning this gives him the chance to combine their interests. This would have worked better with dialogue and describing his feelings, but the content is chosen correctly.

After three years of A’s in the classroom, I finally earned my first ‘A’ in football…. Through a combination of film study and will power, I led my team and conference in tackles. I became one of the best players in the conference and a leader on a team that reached the semi-finals of the Division I football playoffs. The most rewarding part of the season, though, was what I learned about myself in the process. When I finally stopped struggling to become the player I thought I needed to be, I developed self-awareness and confidence in the person I was.

Not every part of your essay has to be storytelling, especially as you get near the end. Once you have established the critical moments and highlighted the “moment of truth,” it is OK to discuss the results right after. Here, the writer does that, listing their many accomplishments right after he established the moment of truth. Though he falls into a bit of a cliché in the last sentence by writing a version of “I became who I was,” he has set it up well with his narrative, and since it comes near the end of the essay, it makes more sense to include here—though this would be better using language that references earlier parts of the essay.

College football taught me to recognize my weaknesses and look for ways to overcome them. I will enter law school a much stronger person and student because of my experiences on the football field and in the classroom. My decision where to attend law school mirrors my decision where to play college football. I want to study law at the University of Chicago Law School because it provides the best combination of professors, students, and resources in the country.

If we were editing this essay, we would tell the student to be more specific than this. Though your personal statement is not the place to argue “why Chicago” (or any school), just saying it has the best combination of these three factors overly simplifies the value of a school as prestigious as Chicago. There is value in discussing how one’s athletic background prepares them for Chicago, but we would work on getting this student to be more specific about some aspects of this essay.

Nevertheless, even with its flaws, it still tells a great story, and with the rest of this person’s application, it got them into Chicago.

Now that we’ve covered the personal statement, let’s cover the second most common essay—the diversity statement.