How to Use Personal Stories in a Harvard Master of Laws Application: My Experience

Introduction

This post has been the hardest for me to write so far. Partly, it’s because most of my reflection on the circumstances in which I grew up happened after I went to Harvard. As a result, the insights I have now weren’t present at the time of my applications.

Still, I decided to share my thoughts here to highlight some key points about using personal stories and circumstances in a Master of Laws (LLM) application.

First, difficult life circumstances, on their own, do not entitle you to admission to the program or a scholarship. What matters is the becoming, the overcoming (I discuss this more in another post here).

It might sound harsh, but it’s true. When referring to personal circumstances in your graduate application, the guiding question must always be: Is this relevant? Does it strengthen your argument about why you’re applying for a master's degree? Does it show how you’ve grown and matured as a result of these experiences? Does it demonstrate how you’ve used those lessons for your benefit?

It’s crucial to be strategic about which personal circumstances you include, as well as how and why you include them.

Not every personal story needs to appear in your essay. This doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable—far from it. It simply means they don’t drive the main argument forward.

Stories that evoke pity but fail to demonstrate the strength of your profile or connect to your motivations for the degree shouldn’t be included.

In this post, I’ll share how I approached addressing personal circumstances in my Harvard application essay (available here).

the story i used in the personal statement

This is the final version I used in my personal statement. In the essay, you’ll find the following paragraph:

According to transactional analysis, everyone has a life script (cf.: Eric Berne). Formed through parental programming, the script affects entire human life and is extremely difficult to break. If this is true, my script is “Pollyanna”. A girl raised by the father. A girl whose family had beans and fish balls for dinner, who wished for a doll to arrive in a missionary barrel and received a pair of crutches instead. A girl who is by circumstances forced to play the glad game: find something to be happy about; change the attitude; adapt.

As you see, this paragraph is brief—just six sentences and 93 words (in a 750-word essay).

To achieve this level of conciseness, I analyzed a wealth of factual material, much of which I ultimately excluded. For comparison, I’ll now describe the circumstances that informed this paragraph. I’ll condense them for the sake of this post (there’s much more to share, but this isn’t the right forum).

the factual material i worked with

When I was seven, my parents separated, and I moved to Kazan, 800 km east of Moscow, to live with my grandmother, my mother, and my sister. My father remained in a village one hour outside Moscow.

During one visit to Kazan, my father abducted me. He lied to my mother, claiming we were going to the park. Instead, he took me to Moscow and initiated the divorce proceedings. Over the following years, he engaged in a systematic campaign of emotional manipulation, portraying my mother and grandmother as harmful figures who did not love me and mistreated me. He convinced me that had to take me away to rescue me from a toxic environment.

Limited to supervised visits, I was increasingly isolated from my mother and grandmother. Eventually, my father threatened my mother that she would never see me again unless she agreed to a settlement granting him custody. Desperate, she signed the agreement, and the divorce concluded in his favor. By this time, I lost the ability to separate fact from fiction.

For most of my life, I remained on my father's side. I was my father's daughter. It wasn't until years later, when I could no longer handle the symptoms of PTSD and depression, that I began to confront the traumatic memories of my childhood.

I’m mentioning this here to explain the use of the Pollyanna metaphor in my essay: It felt deeply relatable. (Pollyanna is the heroine of a novel by Eleanor H. Porter grew up with her father after her mother's death). With extremely limited contact with my mother throughout my childhood, the story of a half-orphan felt like a succinct representation of my own experiences.

The metaphor also allowed me to hint at the socio-economic conditions of my upbringing. We lived in extreme poverty. My father worked as an electrician and plumber, but he was never much of a provider. In our household, it felt like the 1990s never ended.

The material conditions of my childhood were harsh, to say the least. There was no flush toilet, only an outhouse I had to use even in -20°C weather. our water came from an outdoor well, which froze in winter; you’d have to go to the basement and pour hot water on the pipes to thaw them. Heating was irregular. For several years, we used a coal heater, and every morning I woke up  with a layer of coal dust in my hair.

When I was around 10, my father decided to install a gas heater. The first snow that year fell in October, but the installation wasn't finished until late December. We celebrated New Year’s Eve in a house barely at +10°C. On top of that, the conditions were simply unsafe: an uninsulated wire in my room burned through my finger once, and a stack of wooden planks with nails sticking out left a 15cm scar on my leg.

analysis

This is just a fraction of my personal circumstances. As I mentioned, much of the interpretation happened after I returned from Harvard.

I’m not sharing this to indulge myself. Rather, I want to illustrate that, just like with professional experiences, you’ll only use a select few of the stories you uncover. And that’s ok - that’s how writing works.

Compare the abundance of empirical material you'll analyze with how economical you have to be in using it within an essay to make your argument. In my case, I reduced all that complexity to a single paragraph. This doesn’t mean the rest wasn't valuable - it was. It simply didn't drive my argument forward. My goal was to show transformation, so everything I included had to serve that purpose.

This also highlights just how important the Pollyanna metaphor was to me. When I wrote the essay, I asked a native English speaker, an American, for feedback. He suggested removing the metaphor, calling it a cliché. I got extremely upset about it, disagreed with him, and left the essay intact.

First, I believe it would only be a cliché if used by an American (since it's an American cultural reference). More importantly, what he saw as a ‘cliché’ was, for me, a way to convey much deeper meaning: the the socio-economic conditions of growing up in extreme scarcity and without a mother; the longing for better circumstances but receiving the metaphorical ‘crutches’ instead; the glad game – learning to live with the circumstances you can’t change.

The metaphor let me to convey all this meaning in under 100 words in a way that an American audience could understand. It also allowed me to illustrate how my chosen profession – law – helped me break free from that narrative. All of that, in one paragraph.

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I hope this demonstration and analysis helps you in describing your own personal stories and circumstances in an application. Please let me know if you'd like me to elaborate on anything discussed here.