What If You Don’t Like Bragging and Talking About Yourself?

Many LLM (master of laws) applicants believe that to get into an LL.M. program, one has to brag and talk about yourself a lot.

First, if you don’t want to brag, don’t. There is no law in the applications process that mandates you to brag.

Second, if you don’t like talking about yourself, I understand. Being your own mirror is hard. It’s really hard. Problems and drawbacks are magnified, and achievements seem to be small and insignificant.

That being said, the entire application process, including CVs, online application forms, and transcripts, is about you. There is no way around it. You therefore have two choices: to not submit applications at all, or to find a way to talk about yourself that you are comfortable with.

In this post, I will show you one of the ways how to do it.

Think of an LL.M. application as a shortcut to who you are as a person.

What do I mean by that?

The selection committee is not interested in self-absorbed, narcissistic letters. They see a lot of those, and they don’t make a good impression. Neither are they interested in a simple restatement of your CV. They already have that information.

They are interested in you – your goals, your motivations, your thinking, the path you’ve traveled so far. They are interested in what you stand for, what drives you, and what brought you to the point in life where you are applying for a Master of Laws degree. They don’t want to see another egotistical, self-centered individual. They want to see someone who can look at themselves from the position of emotional maturity.

Some people think ‘ohI’m just such a humble, modest person. I hate talking about myself, so I’m not going to try to convince them at all. I’m just going to list the things I’ve done and let them decide. If I’m any good, they’ll see it’.

Let me save you the trouble: They won’t. Not because they are mean or don’t want to support bright students. They do. One of the reasons people sit on selection committees is precisely to help bright, earnest students achieve their goals. That was one of my reasons to do it as well.

The thing is, the admissions process is one of their many, many commitments. They sift through dozens, if not hundreds, of applications, on top of everything of everything else they do. Many applications are decent or even great. And a lot of them are very similar. The way the committee differentiates among them is through the way you present yourself, for instance, in an essay like a motivation letter. The quality of your LL.M. application is how you help the committee to help you.You help them not just by dumping raw information, diplomas, and test certificates on them, but by carefully selecting and organizing the events from your past and what they meant for you. You help them by organizing it in a way that tells them who you are as a human and what drives you – your values, formative events in your life and how they shaped your professional development, your plans for the future.

You see? LL.M.applications are not about bragging at all.

This is really important.

To drive this point home, let me illustrate. I review a lot of applications as part of my consulting practice. Some time ago, I reviewed documents for a friend who applied for tenure at a prestigious university in the EU. Tenure is the most sought-after professorship: It’s a position from which you cannot be fired. Candidates applying for tenure are exceptionally qualified, and so was my friend.

However, she stated from the very beginning that she was a humble person who didn’t like to brag, and so she wrote her application accordingly. So much so that when I went through it, I could barely recognize her for an extraordinarily talented applicant that I knew she was. She listed in a formulaic matter her professional milestones but made no argument as to why her profile was the right match. If I didn’t know her qualifications, I’d simply have thought that she was a weak candidate.

You see, applications written from the mindset of ‘being humble and modest’ do not actually make you look humble and modest. They make you look unqualified.

It’s like with a bad dress. If you are wearing a dress that does not fit, it does not make the dress look bad. It makes you look bad.

And so, a poorly written application makes a human life – your life – look smaller.

Call me dramatic, butI think it’s a tragedy.

Don’t do this to yourself. You’vecome this far. You deserve better.

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