Madagascar - Harvard - Law school personal statement tips

Law school personal statement tips

It wasn’t until Mihaja turned off the television that I realized I could still hear gunshots in the distance. It was the first weekend of my semester abroad in the capital city of Antananarivo, Madagascar, and the deadliest day to date of the political crisis that began just before I arrived. I sat on the living room floor as my host parents ushered five-year-old Aina and ten-year-old Mialy into another room, troubled by having exposed them to the gruesome images on the news. Over the following months, I traveled around the country, pursuing my goal of learning about Malagasy culture, and constantly hearing news and opinions about the political situation. The more I learned, the more unstable my understanding of democracy became.

I arrived in Madagascar directly after an eventful and life-changing election season in America. As a delegate at the Democratic National Convention, I had experienced firsthand the level of involvement ordinary Americans can have in the electoral process. The election had defined my fall semester at Bowdoin, and the smooth transition of power on January 20 felt like the victorious end to a battle that I had helped fight. The volatile situation I was thrown into in Madagascar a few days later looked and felt nothing like my American model of democracy, although technically Madagascar is a democratic republic. Many Malagasy citizens felt that past President Ravalomanana took advantage of the people for his own economic gain. But I didn’t sense the same fervent support for Rajoelina, the opposition leader, which I had felt for Barack Obama in 2008. My host mother, for example, seemed concerned with the violence but surprisingly disinterested in the social and political debate. She dismissed the protestors as “profiteurs,” merely taking advantage of an unstable situation to riot and loot as opposed to fighting for meaningful social change.

I had, and still have, a hard time making sense of the picture of democracy I saw failing in Madagascar. Perhaps democracy isn’t as fail-safe as I had imagined in the convention center in Denver, or in the voting booth on November 4. The United States has proved that democracy can work very well in a certain context, but does it necessarily have the same potential in other contexts? The fact that democracy might not be a universal concept, as I once unthinkingly accepted, led me to question the universality of many of my other beliefs.

Through the honors project I am embarking on this fall, I am discovering that my previously static view of the universality of human rights is, like democracy, much more complicated in reality. I have always been conscious of the concept of human rights; from values instilled in me during childhood to my two-summer internship at an LGBT rights organization, it has become an integral part of my life to recognize injustice and follow my passion to eradicate it. My first summer at Family Equality Council introduced me to human rights work in the United States, and my interest in anthropology led me to explore the pursuit of human rights in other societal contexts. As I studied cultural difference, I learned how life experiences differ across societies, and how women’s roles, statuses, and hardships differ with them. The nonjudgmental relativism with which many anthropologists aspire to view other cultures can often clash with lawyers’ and policy makers’ ideas of fundamental rights. My honors project examines the intersection of anthropological and legal debate in women’s rights initiatives around the world. I am particularly interested to learn how legal decisions in the United States and Europe treat cultural differences when they address women’s rights. I believe that anthropology and ethnography have an incredible capacity to inform lawyers and policy makers, enabling them to bring about culturally logical and progressive change.

What I have learned over the past several years about culture, democracy, and human rights has led me to many questions and few answers. I am still grappling with these complex concepts, and I look forward to examining them from new perspectives as a law student and lawyer.

Analysis

Immediately, the reader is pulled into this essay with the perilous image of a country torn by civil war in the midst of a political transition. This is something you want to aim for in your own essay. You don’t have to paint a picture of a battle scene in order to grasp the attention of the reader, but be very selective and purposeful in the image you try to create. Pick something that will make any person want to continue reading. What makes the rest of this essay successful is that Oscar Stanton is able to weave two important passions into one cohesive narrative. He speaks of his time in Madagascar and how he juxtaposed that political experience to the one he had in the United States just days before. He lets us know that he played a part in the 2008 campaign but makes his experience seem far more significant by coupling it with other experiences he has had. He then transitions into his most recent project, which demonstrates another side of his interests with ease.

Most impressively, Stanton is able to demonstrate a complex understanding of his world and the many issues that are intertwined. He isn’t just listing his accomplishments and accolades, but incorporating them into a greater narrative. This is an incredible quality that you should always try to implement in your essay. Stanton acknowledges that his accomplishments are more than just singular entities but, rather, in combination have given him the tools that may make him a worthy candidate for Harvard Law School. Ultimately, to make your personal statement stand out you should aim to pay attention to the details that you incorporate, use your experiences to create a cohesive narrative, and incorporate your understanding of how your experiences will allow you to have a larger impact on your future endeavors

From 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays, edited by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson. 
Copyright © 2014 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.