How I Found Ideas for My Personal Statement for an LLM at Harvard: Part 1

Daria Levina

Introduction

In this blog post, I’ll show you how I brainstormed and found ideas for the personal statement that got me admission to the master of laws (LLM) program at Harvard. You can have a look at the final version here.

In the previous post, I talked about the conceptual framework I use to help people ideate, i.e. to generate ideas and stories for application essays based on their backgrounds. I followed the same framework when choosing a topic for my LLM personal statements. I started by listing the main experiences of my life up to date. I listed everything that came to mind, in the order in which it came. I did not order them at the time. I just followed the associations.

I didn’t discriminate between experiences that spanned over several years and the shorter ones. I just listed what was subjectively important. I highlighted what I considered particularly formative.

I spent an awful lot of time trying to find a theoretical overarching theme, something that would speak to my personal philosophy, because I like connecting personal experiences to greater concepts. I did it because it was important to me. You don’t have to do that.

For me, the most formative experiences were, in no particular order:

  • all-Russian Olympiads in law. I participated in five (three as a high school student and two as a student of the Moscow State University), taking two first prizes and three third prizes. The most formative was the one I won at 17. It gave me the right to choose any law faculty in the country without taking exams.
  • moot courts, namely the Concours Charles-Rousseau and the Philip C. Jessup competition. I participated in both and coached a team for the Charles-Rousseau for three years.
  • growing up with my father in extreme poverty.
  • teaching the law of obligations to the 3rd-year students at the Moscow State University.
  • working as a researcher at the Higher School of Economics on projects for the Russian Central Bank and participating in the banking law reform.
  • learning languages. I learned German and French by attending free classes at the university and studying at home. I learned German because I wanted to participate in the summer school in Regensburg and have access to legal literature in German, and French to participate in a moot court. Those were rare opportunities to go on an academic trip abroad on external funding, and the prospect was so appealing that I was ready to pay the price of intense language study.
  • working in a law firm for three years.

I will elaborate on a few of them. You'll see that the description of each is quite extensive. This is not to indulge myself but rather to show you just how much context I had to dig out and analyze when ideating before I was actually ready to choose stories and write my personal statement. I suggest doing the same for your essays. It will give you confidence in the strength of your profile and make your choices more reasoned.

moot courts

On the Realities of Doing a Moot Court in Russia

Moot courts were the most formative experiences of my university years. To comprehend the scale of it, you need to understand what a moot court is for a student of a post-Soviet university, compared to a Western university, or at least what it was at the time I did it.

1/ a moot court is the only interesting thing to do

A moot court is not just one of the many things on offer you can choose from. Rather, it is the ONLY interesting thing to do. Other things I could use my time for were lectures and seminars (we had 3 to 5 daily), student conferences (I did 11, effectively exhausting my enthusiasm), and work (in your 4th or 5th year if you don’t do a moot court, you’d usually seek out an internship with a law firm and start working). That was it.

2/ a moot court is a means of upward social mobility

A moot court could get you an interview at a law firm that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

More importantly, it could change your entire life by exposing you to a new way of thinking and a new reality, a reality that you wouldn’t even suspect was available to you or even existed – like a possibility to go abroad, do a master’s, and build an international career.

3/ a moot court is a scarce resource

A moot court was an extremely scarce resource. At my university, there would be only two moot courts advertised – Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot and the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition; occasionally more. Coaches would prioritize getting results over making the opportunity available to more people and select people who’d already participated the year before. That meant that out of 5 to 6 places on a team there would usually be available only 2 to 3. You have to keep in mind that the law faculty would admit about 500 people a year, and the moot court would be advertised publicly, so you can imagine the level of competition.

The Cost of Participating in a Moot Court

Now that you know the stakes, I'll highlight the differences in preparation. If you got selected for a team, there would be a number of hurdles to overcome.

1/ it's hard to access the academic materials

First, it would be extremely hard to get access to academic materials like books and articles. The organizers made some of them available, but it wasn’t nearly enough to produce the work that could withstand the competition. My university had zero subscriptions to international journal databases and did not have any up-to-date books on international law in English in the library. You would have to devise ways to get hold of them, like asking friends who were doing their LLMs abroad, or using the pirated versions.

2/ it's hard to find funding

There would be a problem of funding. Even if you made it to the top, it didn’t guarantee you funding, and the team would have to look for it. My team was lucky but I know of others who were not able to secure money to participate in the international rounds.

3/ a moot court did not count towards academic credit

Oh, and the work you did for the competition did not count towards credit. You’d do it in the time you had left after attending 3 to 5 classes a day or taking exams. When I did Jessup, the week we submitted the memorials I had 5 exams all of which I had to prepare for.

Participating in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Competition: Factual Description

My fascination with moot courts started when an acquaintance mentioned the Jessup rounds in Russia. I was a 2nd year student back then, and I signed up as a bailiff. Bailiffs are volunteers who keep the time during the oral pleadings. As a bailiff, you get to see the process and also meet participants and judges.

I so excited and scared to do that, probably more than the teams. The procedure appeared mysterious and bizarre, and yet since the first moment I knew I was going to come back.

That year, I went to the team tryouts but did not pass the interview. Next year, I made it to the team.

As a matter of background, in 2012 the Moscow State University took the Jessup World Cup, and the pressure on our team to keep up the standard was high.

The team selection took place around May, and our two coaches gave us materials to study over the summer. It was my 4th year of law school and already had a university course on public international law, but it was nearly not enough to compete in Jessup. Not if you wanted to go to D.C.

The case was published in September, and we started our team meetings at the office of one of our coaches at Linklaters.

I loved the hypothetical case that we worked on - it was the case concerning the Alfurnan migrants, about climate change affecting a small island country so dramatically that it sank (literally) and had to relocate its population to the territory of another state. It raised the issues of statehood, sovereign immunity, debt restructuring, and climate migration.

We met weekly, for 3 to 5 hours, and discussed what each of us had done over the course of the week. The first couple of months were about collecting research and building an argument, and then we started writing the memorials. We were lucky that two of the team members from the previous year were doing their LLMs at Harvard at the time and they helped accessing the materials we needed on international law.

We submitted the memorials end of December and had the national oral rounds in early January. Combining it with regular classes at the university study was brutal: I had 7 pass-or-fail exams in December, and then 5 graded exams in January. I did alright in the end;)

Russia has one of the biggest national rounds, 30 to 50 teams competing annually. Top 10% qualify for the international rounds in Washington D.C. It gets quite intense, as for each team it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Everyone wants to go to the international rounds. In our year, there were 42 teams, and we placed 3rd nationally. Worldwide, there were about 600 teams competing, and we made it to the top 10 in the D.C.

Coaching for the Concours Charles-Rousseau

Moot courts did so much for me that I desperately wanted to give that opportunity to other people. In my 3rd year, I took part in a French moot court Concours Charles-Rousseau, and it was natural for me to continue as a coach.

It was significantly harder to find people for it than for Jessup because participants had to be equally fluent in English (to read the sources) and French (to write and plead).

The first year I trained, we only had two team members, and one of them experienced difficulties writing the memorial. We ended up not going to the international rounds.

The second time, the team was stronger, and we went to compete in Paris. We did not find sponsors, however, and I paid for the team. At the time, in 2015, it wasn’t very expensive – I was not renting my own apartment yet and had few expenses; the euro to ruble rate was decent; and I had a good salary. I combined 2 or 3 of my monthly salaries and that covered the trip for four people.

For the third time, we had a strong team and a team member managed to find a sponsor for us. We went to compete to Cuba. The case concerned the dispute between the US and Cuba over Guantanamo, and the organizers decided to make it more realistic by setting the competition there.

Concours Charles-Rousseau taught me a lot, and I used that experience for multiple essays.  I used the experience of coaching the team to connect it to my passion for teaching and explain my motivation for transitioning to academia in my American applications, including the one to Harvard.

Further, once the case concerned investment arbitration, and I relied on this to prove my enthusiasm - at the time - for delving deeper into this field and building a career in arbitration. I discussed it in my motivation letter to the Master's in International Dispute Settlement (MIDS) program in Geneva (which I got, with a full scholarship) and to Paris law firms for arbitration internships. Also, while at Harvard, it helped me land an assistant job with Prof. Ko-Yung Tung and co-design a course on international investment arbitration.

On the Subjective Importance of Moot Courts

Can you see how it all adds up? How the socio-economic context of doing a moot court in these circumstances makes this experience transformative?

For me, moot courts were, quite literally, a ticket to a new way of life.

First of all, they fed into my idealistic worldview. They were an opportunity to become a part of something bigger and brighter than anything life had presented to me so far.

They were about belonging to a community of people intensely caring about international law. They were about a world where international law mattered, and international lawyers mattered. Where disputes were solved by going to court and constructing an argument, not using violence. Where decisions were made by lawyers with a moral code and integrity, not politicians.

Moot courts validated my insatiable need to feel intellectually realized (I mean, two PhDs...) They allowed me to live in the realm of abstract arguments yet were deeply applied. Each hypothetical case was based on a real-world scenario, presenting a rare opportunity to practice your legal skills.

On a more practical level, I got my first internship at Morgan Lewis because of Jessup – they specifically invited all the team members to interview with them. White & Case in Moscow, at least at the time, also used Jessup to preselect people for their internships.

It also equipped me with the language expertise that significantly enhanced my chances of getting a well-paid job. If you are not a native English speaker in an English-dominated world, language is a real barrier. Doing a moot court, I had no choice but to master English at the level I wouldn’t be able to on my own.

Far more important, a moot court gives you an idea of an alternative reality. You are not destined anymore for a low-paying job at a regional company as an in-house lawyer. All of a sudden, you start meeting people who did their master of laws at a fancy university and got a fancy job afterwards – and they start asking you, quite casually, whether you are planning to do the same, as if it were a normal thing to do. And you start believing that it is indeed accessible, even for you, with your background. It’s a real means of upward social mobility, and you don’t get many of those where I come from.

Comments and Guidelines for Your Essay Ideation

The way I described it may look very neat now. It was not when I ideated for my personal statement. It was really, really messy. I just had a bunch of notes I collected and the insights that were coming to me over the course of days and weeks, if not months.

Moreover, after brainstorming and uncovering all of this I decided not to use the Jessup story at all.

I am giving all of this context to illustrate a few things:

  • first, the subjective value of the experience trumps its objective parameters. If it was important to you, it was important. Period.
  • second, you won’t use 95% of the stories you uncover. That’s just how writing works - you end up using only a fraction of the material. It’s still absolutely essential to do this exercise as thoroughly as you can because it’ll allow you to be certain that the stories you choose are the ones you believe are the strongest and not simply the ones you remembered first.
  • third, it shifts your focus from ‘bragging’ or ‘selling yourself’ (which is a block for a lot of people) to self-analysis that comes from a place of deep self-knowledge and emotional maturity.

Overall, it helps you see the value of your life experiences, not in comparison to anyone but rather in the context of your life and your unique circumstances. It shows that the things you’ve done in your life are worthy of being reflected upon and make you a valuable candidate for the program. This is at the core of my approach to the essay work, and this is the reason I do what I do and why I do it the way I do it.

I show you more of my process in the blog posts to follow. Here you can read how I worked with another experience I included in the essay: participating in the All-Russian Olympiads for High School Students.