How to Choose a Topic for Your Master of Laws (LLM) Personal Statement

I work with a lot of master of laws (LLM) applicants.

They all have the same problems in common:

• how to find ideas and stories for a personal statement;
• how to recognize good ideas, ideas that are appropriate to use in a personal statement, ideas that will make a positive impression on the admissions committee;
• how to recognize bad ideas, ideas that will ruin an application;
• how to decide on the number of ideas; how many is too many and how few is too few;
• how to get from an idea or a story to a fully finished essay.

I've written about it before (the technique I call the 'Rodriquez List'). In this post, I’ll share my process for how to find a topic for a personal statement in more detail.

The use of terms

To find good ideas and write a winning personal statement, you need to start by defining the concepts involved. A lot of people get stuck because their assumptions about what the process are flawed - eg, because they believe that personal statements are all about selling yourself really hard, or conforming to some generic and abstract ideal of a candidate the universities are looking for, or finding what's unique about them. This is not true.

So to avoid any confusion, I'd like to clarify the terms I use from the start.

Choosing a topic, brainstorming, and ideation

What is commonly referred to by ‘choosing a topic’ for a personal statement is essentially a process of generating ideas and choosing which ones to include in your personal statement.

Referring to it as ‘choosing a topic’, however, would be an oversimplification. Usually, a personal statement not only has a broad overarching theme but also brings together a variety of your personal and professional experiences. The most effective personal statements include multiple strategically selected stories about your background and (equally important) their analysis in the context of your application.

Since the personal statement never just has one ‘topic’ but rather represents a series of your unique experiences and interpretations of those experiences, I don’t think that the term ‘finding a topic’ is an accurate reflection of the process.

The terms I use are 'ideation' and 'brainstorming'.

What I mean by them is essentially a system for generating ideas on a given subject on demand, a system that structures the process of formation of ideas for you and allows you to never start from a blank screen with any application.

However, I’ve found that the term 'brainstorming' is the least understood. Most people assume that it's some kind of a corporate nightmare where everybody is wasting time and nothing of value is produced. Hence, the conclusion that brainstorming is dispensable. A lot of people therefore believe that they can skip brainstorming and just sit down and start writing an essay.

It’s a false idea that usually leads to multiple problems down the road, such as ending up with weak ideas and stories that don’t convey the strength of the profile, having unexplained gaps in an essay, and not making a coherent argument about how the individual’s background relates to the decision to apply for a master of laws.

In my terminology, brainstorming is a structured process for generating ideas on a given subject. In other words, it’s a structured process of ideation. Its goal is to create a wealth of ideas and stories that can be used and reused across multiple applications.

In my work, I use ‘brainstorming’ and ‘ideation’ interchangeably.

In this post, I’ll be showing you my system for generating multiple ideas for your personal statement, the system that I developed in the context of the master of laws applications but use for all types of applications, including PhD, scholarships, research fellowships, and postdocs.

Personal statement, motivation letter, statement of purpose

Another set of terms that needs to be defined refers to the types of essays. As a graduate applicant, you’ve probably seen different names for essays, such as personal statement, motivation letter, statement of purpose, required essay, and the like.

Theoretically, the basic difference is that motivation letter is primarily about – you guessed it – your motivation for doing the program you chose and the goals you want to achieve by doing this. Personal statement, on the other hand, is more about reflecting on your overall path, as well as professional and personal development. Statement of purpose, like motivation letter, focuses on your goals and aspirations and what you want do with your degree afterwards.

However, they essentially different flavors of the same type of document, and the difference is mostly cultural. In the US, it is most often referred to as a ‘personal statement’, whereas in continental Europe the same type of essay is called ‘motivation letter’. What you really need to pay attention to is not the name of the document but the questions asked.

I’ve successfully written and guided other people's writing with both of them.

That being said, this post will focus on the American-style personal statement for a master of laws application to a US law school. This is what I have the most expertise in, and this is what the system I’ve developed is tailored for. This means, there is significantly more self-analysis and it’s geared towards behavioral questions about your life choices and values.

I wrote about it in more detail here, but for the purposes of this post I define personal statement as follows:

Personal statement is an essay where you talk about your past, your present, and your plans for the future. You answer questions like why do you want to do a master’s? Why do you need this particular degree at this particular time of your life and career? Why is this degree the next logical step for you? And what are you going to do with this degree afterwards?

NOTE:

Please keep in mind that this does NOT include a legal essay, even if a law school, for the sake of simplicity or other reasons, asks you to submit an essay on a legal topic as a part of your personal statement. Legal essay is an analysis of a legal topic. Personal statement is a different beast altogether. I’ve written about legal essays previously here.

Why ideation is important

I have written and seen enough essays to be able to say this directly: most people are notoriously bad at knowing and analyzing their own backgrounds. They think they are good at it, but they are not. I’m not talking about memory gaps here.

I’m talking about a sophisticated set of skills that includes:

1/ having the bank of knowledge (facts about where, when, what, who, with whom, etc.) about your background on hold, available at a short notice to support the claims you are making in the application;

2/ being able to describe your background in a way that is sufficiently specific and clear for a person outside of your immediate environment to understand;

3/ exercising judgment and being strategic about what to leave in and what to leave out, instead of trying to pack 15+ years of life in a 700-word essay;

4/ being able to match the facts from your background with the subjective interpretation of what these facts mean for you AND how they are relevant in the context of your application;

5/ being able to interpret your background from a position of emotional and professional maturity and making a convincing argument as to why you deserve a place on the program.

You see how important it is to get it right?

One of the reasons people are bad at this is that they are simply not asked for self-analysis often. Personal statements are a highly specialized genre of writing. Most probably, you were never trained for it. So if you don’t know how to do this, that’s ok. It’s not your fault. I’m here to help you.

I’ll simplify the process as much as I can, but I need to make sure you understand why ideation and a structured approach to it are essential for your success and cannot be skipped.

If you want the process to yield the best results and result in the best essay you can possibly write, suspend your disbelief and don’t assume you already know everything about yourself, because most probably you don’t. Most probably, you’ll uncover a lot more detail than you thought there was and come to new interpretations that present your experiences in a new light.

Shouldn't it all be evident from my CV?

Your CV is a basic framework of your experience, a distilled version of it, map. It's significantly more fact-based, compared to a personal statement. Personal statement, in contrast, is largely interpretation-based.

More importantly, a CV does not showcase you self-analysis skills, and does not give an admissions committee a preview of what your thinking process is like.

You can use your CV as a starting point for ideation but it can't substitute for an essay.

How to start ideating

Should you look at the questions first?

A mistake that I did when writing my own essays was that I was too hung up on the questions asked and constantly measured my stories and ideas against them.

If I were doing it again, I'd go about it differently. I'd read the questions, but then do my ideation independently. I'd then map my stories and ideas onto the questions asked.

In my experience, the archetypes of the LL.M. essay questions are usually quite similar. You'll find that the differences in phrasing, flavor, and angle, but most probably they won't change the core message you'd want to convey through your essays.

The technical guidelines

First, the technicalities. To achieve the best possible results,

• allocate 60 to 90 minutes for an ideation session.
• eliminate all distractions. switch the 'do not disturb' mode on your phone.
• find the environment that’s comfortable for you, be it your office, a café, your living room, etc.
• find the time when you feel the most productive.

To get the ideation going, ask yourself: what events in your life were formative?

A few guidelines for identifying the events that you consider significant:

• don't differentiate between professional and personal. Quite often, things that are important for us personally are also intertwined with professional choices. Also, trying to separate one from the other is likely to put you into the editing mode, rather than creative idea-generating mode.

Example: a client of mine talked in her application essays about how she got interested in climate litigation and how that inspired her decision to build a career in policy making to affect climate change. That started with a personal choice of hers to become vegan and also involved dealing with her heritage (as being born in Kyrgyzstan, where eating meat is an essential part of culture).

• you don’t have to do this chronologically. Start with the first event that comes to mind and go from there. Our memory is associative, regardless of what you've been taught to believe. Once you start with a memory of an event, try to think in terms of where the associations lead you, rather than what's 'logical' to discuss next. Allow yourself to jump between experiences.
• don’t look for things that make narrative sense or for finished stories with a defined beginning, middle, and an end. Life doesn’t unfold like the books and movies portray it to. You’ll work on presenting stories in away that makes narrative sense later in the process. Now your job is to collect them. At this point in the process, a 'story' is a series of unstructured notes about what, where, when, with whom, and what that meant for you.
• don't try to sort events, order them in any sort of logical manner, or edit them in any way. Your goal is to resurface memories, as many as possible, to create a wealth of ideas and stories for future use.
• don't discriminate between events based on their timeline and scale. Treat shorter and longer experiences equally. For instance, if you spent 3 years working for a law firm and then one weekend decided to be an observer at the national elections and the latter impacted you more, you are allowed to talk about it. Generally, suspend any judgment of the sort 'oh, it's not that impressive, I only won the district level of the competition' etc.

The only criterion for a story to be written down here is whether it was formative or not in the context of your life. Was it significant for you? Did it change and define you?

Guidelines for thinking of good stories

• substantive directions

To identify formative stories, you can think along the lines of:

influences in your life (mentors, role models, books, events, etc.);

professional achievements (what you are proud of accomplishing);

skills and strengths;

weaknesses and failures;

values, personal philosophy, and where they come from;

leadership (I like the definition by A.V. Gordon - 'occasions when you have directed the outcome of a project or part of a project, or have been responsible for coordinating or motivating others'.

• obstacles and adversity

One of the directions you can think in is obstacles and adversity. Pretty much everyone in this world faced adversity in one form or another. Similarly, everyone had to overcome obstacles in their lives. For many people, this is identity-forming.

Formative is something that dramatically changed your outlook on who you are and what your personal philosophy is. Examples are:

a conversation with a mentor;

a family event;

death of someone close to you;

the time you spent in a particular country;

a moot court or another competition you participated in;

a class you took or taught;

the research you’ve done;

a volunteer commitment you undertook, etc.

It can be about your passions, things that inspired you, your future goals and aspirations. Anything that made you into who you are today.

• formative is subjective

Formative is not what the society considers important or impressive. It’s not necessarily something you've got a degree, a certificate, or a medal for (although that counts too).

As a rule of thumb, don’t try to measure your life against an ‘objective’ standard. There is no such thing, and it’s not going to get you admitted anyway. Competently discussing your background and making a convincing argument as to why you should be admitted will.

• formative is not what looks good on paper

Don’t try to skew things to make them look good on paper based on what you think the university would want from you or what you’ve seen other people do. This is about you and your world. The further away you’ll move from gauging yourself against an abstract image of an ideal candidate and to your own background, the more likely you'll be to win.

Keep it within the ethical limits and don’t misrepresent the objective scale of the event. If you won a scholarship for a summer academy, don’t claim to have won the most prestigious thing ever. Say what it was and explain how it changed your life.

Be clear on what exactly happened and what it meant for you.

If asking the question about formative stories doesn’t work for you, try listing your most prominent experiences. Then go on the basis of the list you’ve made and attribute subjective importance to them.

Generally, keep in mind that most practices work for some people in some instances and never for all people all the time. Adjust the technique in a way that works for you.

I demonstrate how I’ve done it for my personal statement for Harvard Law School here (Part 1), here (Part 2), and here (Part 3).