Crafting a Winning LL.M. Personal Statement: How to Find and Choose the Most Compelling Stories

Introduction

The problem with mainstream representation of writing is that it makes it look like all you do is write.

In the movies, you usually see a tortured individual at their desk, sitting at the computer(or a typewriter) and ... writing, writing, writing. Unbelievable, I know.

The thing is, writing is not a continuous or homogenous process.

But you can’t show it in a movie. Movies need clear, unambiguous visuals, so that the audience knows what’s going on.

In reality writing, especially writing a personal statement or a motivation letter for a master's application, consists of different phases and activities. They overlap, they are circular, rather than succeeding each other in a linear fashion, and they involve different styles of thinking and thus different activities.

These activities include ideation (thinking of stories and ideas that could be candidates for your essay), choosing your stories for an essay, ordering stories, outlining your essay, compiling your first draft, and editing. In this post, I’ll talk about the first three. Since I've talked about the ideation at length before, I'll focus on delineating it from choosing and ordering your stories.

If I had to use a metaphor to describe this, I’d refer to hosting a dinner party. Ideation would be like browsing through cookbooks and jotting down recipes that spark your interest.

The next step would be choosing recipes, ie stories. After you’ve identified a broad selection of recipes, you’ll need to choose what to cook. You can’t just throw everything you’ve found at your guests. You have to decide on a recipe and shop for exact ingredients.

In this context, ordering stories would be like the actual process of cooking where you have everything ready and there is a series of steps to follow.

Here are some of the guidelines I’ve found and developed for generating and choosing stories for an application essay.

Guidelines for generating stories

• think of formative experiences (I talk about strategies for doing this in depth here)
• think of stories that have subjective importance to you rather than stories that people around you or society would consider ‘objectively important’
• don’t discriminate between small and big stories; don’t compare yourself to other people or some abstract ‘objective’ parameter (of the sort ‘oh that competition was not that impressive, I did not even win a the federal level’)
• move freely along the time axis and don’t try to follow the order in which the events happened, or their relative time prominence unless it comes naturally to you
• if nothing comes to mind, start with your CV; alternatively, start with your most recent experiences, especially professional.

Guidelines for choosing stories

It’s crucial to be selective about what you talk about in your application.

• keep it to the last 5 years unless an exception applies (more on that here)
• you can choose small stories as long as they are subjectively meaningful to you
• give preference to the most formative ones, even if they occupy less of the timeline compared than other activities or experiences you’ve had

Example:

A client of mine had been working for two years in a law firm and thought that’s what he should include it in his essay. However, because other experiences, such as university olympiads and moot courts, influenced his formation as a lawyer significantly more, the paragraph about law firm work sounded dry and formal. It looked like the information he gave because he thought he had to, not a part of a cohesive argument about ‘why LLM degree now’. I suggested to revise or exclude it.

• highlight the stories and experiences that seem like the obvious candidates for an essay. What stories meant a lot to you? What stories are dear to your heart, stories about who you are and how you’ve become that?
• check for the story’s relevance for your application. Pay attention to the stories that connect to your goals, that support your argument about what’s next and why now, why you are where you are now, what stories and ideas are relevant to your motivation to pursue a master of laws. Note that this guideline is in contrast to the guidelines about ideating. When you are generating ideas, you want to accumulate as many of them as possible. When you are choosing, you have to be ruthless leaving things out, even for the most formative stories.
• highlight origin stories, ie. stories about when, how, and why you got interested in your field of study. You might not end up using them (eg, because they concern experiences that happened a while ago) but they are likely to have more relative significance compared to other stories, be formative, and therefore be more relevant to your argument about why you are pursuing this application now.
• keep to stories that are about you. Avoid centering your caregiver, your mentor, your trauma, or a person representing a group you’d like to protect. Your essays should be about you and your personal and professional formation. Don’t piggyback on someone else’s struggle.
• liberate yourself to move freely along the time axis. Similarly to what you did when generating stories, discard the need to describe everything in a logical sequence. It’s impossible to squeeze this into the format of an application essay, and unnecessary. It’s going to dilute your message.
• cover a range of time. Look if there are any unexplained gaps in your essay and choose the stories that speak to these gaps.

After you've gone through the guidelines, go back to your ideation files and ask if there is anything relevant that you forgot to include.

Guidelines for ordering stories

As you look at the stories, experiences, and ideas you’ve surfaced and chosen in the previous steps, ask yourself the following questions:

• are there any stories or ideas that seem like an obvious starting point?
• are there any stories that are closely connected to each other, or stories that you need to tell before you tell other stories to set them up?

Example:

In my Harvard essay (available here) I needed to talk about trying different workplaces before I could talk about my desire teaching, to strengthen the point that I knew what worked best for me.

• are there any stories or ideas that you can use as a transition point from one idea to another?

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This is how I go about separating the application writing into manageable steps. Hope this helps and good luck ☺️