How to Generate Winning Ideas For an LLM Personal Statement: My Harvard Experience, Part 2
Introduction
This is Part 2 of my series where I demonstrate how I generated ideas for my personal statement for Harvard's master of laws (LLM) program. You can find Part 1 here. One key concept I covered is the importance of formative experiences - why they matter and how you can uncover them in your own background.
In Part 1, I used my participation in moot courts as an example, discussing their significance in my life and how I incorporated them into my LLM personal statement. In this second part, I’ll focus on another key experience: my participation in the All-Russian Olympiads in law. I won three Olympiads during high school and two more at university, with the high school ones having the most profound impact on me.
I’ll first provide the broader context, then dive into the specifics of these experiences. Finally, I’ll offer actionable tips to help you identify your own formative experiences and effectively integrate them into your application materials.
As with the moot courts, my aim is to show how much thought and analysis went into selecting what to include in my essay. At the idea-generation stage, your goal is to resurface as many details about an experience as possible. It's part of creating a bank of knowledge you'll be tapping into when writing your essays. You'll be editing and cutting ideas later.
Formative Experience No. 2: Law Olympiads
In Part 1 of the series I talked about participating in moot courts as one of the formative experiences. Here, I'll talk about another one: olympiads in law.
I won’t go into the details about my childhood here, but it was extremely traumatic, and I am still dealing with its consequences. Unlike home, school provided me with stability and predictability. It was a place where promises were kept, and actions led to expected results.
I had a wide circle of friends, including a close group of girlfriends, and almost no enemies. I was also respected by teachers, though I was never a teacher's pet. It may sound unusual, but that’s how it was for me. At school, I felt valued, and people listened to what I had to say. It was my first experience of visibility and recognition.
In some ways, I was lucky. I was able to channel all my energy into academics as a way to cope with difficult family life. My sister, on the other hand, struggled more, and the trauma at home severely impacted her ability to do well in school.
It is against this background that I began participating in the Olympiads during the 9th grade. In Russia, Olympiads were held in most school subjects, and unusually, law was one of them. Some schools taught an introduction to law as either a standalone subject or part of the social science curriculum. These competitions had different stages: district, regional, and federal. If your school was large enough (mine had about 2,000 students, with 5 to 7 groups of 25 students per grade), there would be a selection process at the school level as well.
I lived in a village and attended school in a nearby town with a population of about 30,000. Throughout my 10 years in school, I didn’t realize I was socio-economically disadvantaged because almost everyone around me was in the same situation. Many of my classmates lived in communal apartments, with two or three generations sharing 20 square meters.
The Olympiads were an opportunity to travel, meet new people, and experience something beyond the small world I knew. Winning at the federal level even granted you a state-funded spot at a university without the need for entrance exams. Aside from the Olympiads, there weren’t many other ways to get out of nothingness—not that I fully understood this at the time.
There were also monetary prizes, though I wasn’t motivated by them. The first money I ever earned came from winning an Olympiad, and it funded my first trip abroad—a summer school in London to study English. I also won various prizes like two laptops, a camera, a pocket computer, and an MP3 player.
3. How Law Olympiads shaped my life
In the 9th grade, I won the school competition and advanced to my first district Olympiad in law. I didn’t prepare much—honestly, I wasn’t sure how one was supposed to prepare for a law contest at 14—so I relied on common sense. As it turns out, common sense wasn’t so common after all. I placed 2nd at the district level and qualified for the regional round. At regionals, I placed 3rd, which took me to the federal level, where I also placed 3rd.
I was hooked. I’ve always had a deep need for intellectual fulfillment, and these Olympiads became a way to satisfy that need.
Over the course of three years, I competed in various subjects—law, history, geography, literature, Russian and English languages, Russian literature, ecology, and biology. I earned prizes at the district, regional, and federal levels, but my greatest success was in law.
Most of the time, I had no idea where to start, and the teachers couldn’t offer much guidance. They were encouraging but didn’t really know how to prepare me. In a school as large as mine, they simply didn’t have the capacity to focus on individual students. Occasionally, I could get my hands on previous years' assignments, but the competitions had grown increasingly difficult, and by the time I entered, those old materials weren’t very helpful.
There was some preparation at a training camp that the region organized for us before the federal competition, but it was mainly team-building, and the camp was too short (just five working days). For the most part, I was on my own.
In my solo preparation, I focused on reading the legal codes, especially the main ones: the Constitution, Civil Code, Criminal Code, and both civil and criminal procedure codes. My goal wasn’t to memorize them but to understand the logic behind each law and reconstruct it based on reasoning, rather than rote learning. I didn’t use textbooks or scholarly articles because I found them too overwhelming to navigate at the time. Just studying the codes was more than enough to keep me occupied.
Each year, in the months leading up to the federal competition in the spring, I would skip school for a couple of months. The teachers allowed it because of my track record of success and because they knew I wasn’t slacking off. I was working intensely. My routine was disciplined: I’d wake up at 6 a.m., start studying immediately, take breaks only to eat, and then go to bed at 11 p.m. I repeated this cycle daily.
In my first year at the federal level, I placed 3rd nationally. The same thing happened the next year, in the 10th grade.
4. analysis and actionable Guidelines for Your LLM personal statements
Now, let’s note that my last high school Olympiad took place when I was 17. (In fact, I received the award on my 17th birthday—April 25th). When I applied for the LL.M., I was 23-24, which was 6-7 years later.
In graduate applications, there's a general rule of thumb: it's best to stick to stories from the last five years of your life. Focusing too much on childhood or adolescence can be seen as weakening your personal statement, making it feel backward-looking or like you're avoiding discussing adult experiences.
However, there are exceptions. Childhood or teenage experiences can be useful when they provide context for later decisions or events you'll discuss in your personal statement.
For me, it made sense to include the Olympiads because they significantly influenced the trajectory of my professional life. Honestly, I don’t think I would have become a lawyer without them. My grandmother was a historian, and history was my favorite subject in school. I was genuinely surprised when I did better in law than in history, as I initially thought I’d follow in her footsteps.
Now, let’s compare the material I’ve just discussed (and analyzed while mining my background for stories) with what I actually included in my Harvard essay:
“For years, the glad game and Pollyanna’s irrepressible optimism were my philosophy of life, and changing the attitude toward a problem was primary solution. This continued until the high school: I entered All-Russian competition in law. As I prepared, I learnt: adjustment was not the only option. I may try changing the situation first. Law offers tools designed for this. Understood this way, law was for me about taking actions and making decisions, while leadership was an inherent part of the legal profession.That’s what appealed to me, and I chose law school. As I went through law school, this perception of law remained undistorted”.
The question is, why did I make this choice? Why such a brief mention, and why this particular phrasing?
As much as I value this experience, my purpose in including it in the application was to:
- Show my commitment to law: This journey started when I was a teenager. (Yours doesn't have to—this was just my personal path, and I wanted to highlight it).
- Demonstrate an academic track record of success: An LL.M., like any graduate program, is academic in nature. You need to show that you thrive in an academic environment and enjoy learning. Winning an Olympiad is a clear, tangible way to do that.
- Connect it to my later choices: I wanted to link the Olympiad experience to my ongoing search for meaning in the legal profession, which ultimately led to my decision to apply for the LL.M.
As you can see, most of the details I’ve described here didn’t make it into the essay. Instead, there’s a brief description of the Olympiad paired with its deeper meaning to me. Crucially, I connected this experience to my decision to become a lawyer in the same paragraph.
Although I wanted to include more about the Olympiads, I had to be strategic about how much of the 750-word limit I could dedicate to something that happened seven years ago. Every part of the essay needed to serve the overall goal of explaining my motivation for pursuing an LL.M.
Since this experience was incredibly important to me, I also highlighted it in my CV—but I framed it differently. I removed any mention of high school and simply listed the prizes and awards I earned. I could do this because the winner's title came with a prize, so it didn’t matter that it happened during high school.
In general, for all meaningful experiences, I suggest finding ways to include them in multiple parts of your application. This reinforces the significance of those experiences and makes your application feel cohesive and memorable to the admissions committee.
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In Part 3 of the series I discuss my last formative experience of teaching at the Lomonosov Moscow State University and how I connected it to my motivation for pursuing a master of laws at Harvard.