Law School Essays That Made a Difference

by The Princeton Review, Eric Owens, The Princeton Review

Book Overview

Let's face it, a lot of students have great LSAT* scores. The best way for you to stand out in a crowd of applicants to top law schools is to write an exceptional personal statement. This book puts... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375765700
• ISBN13: 9780375765704
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Princeton Review
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Good place to get started on your essays

I picked up this book when I started to write my law school application essays. It was just what I needed. Probably the most helpful part of the book is the intro, in which admission directors from several top law schools discuss the application process and application essays. You get some great insight into what sort of content you should put in your essays. The rest of the book is a collection of actual essays that got applicants into various schools. In other words, you can read essays that actually worked. Reading those essays actually made me feel much better about my own work. You don't have to have an awesome essay to get into a good school. But reading these examples will give you a feel of how to focus your work. The book is not a blueprint for a good essay, but it will get you on the right track.

Super Helpful!!

When I was applying to law school I had everything done way early- resumes, applications, letters of recommendation, even the LSAT. Everything but the personal statement. I had no clue where to even start, not to mention the fact that I can't stand talking about myself. I tried and tried to write essays on any topic that came to mind. Nothing seemed good enough. Reading these essays helped me to stop thinking about the "perfect" essay and realize that there are a lot of different topics that could be great, some that I hadn't even realized could be interesting. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone like me who doesn't really need help with writing itself or with the application, but just needs something to help them tackle the monster that is the law school personal statement. And to give a little weight to what I say, I got into Columbia, NYU, UC Berkeley and every other school I applied to- it really did help.

This Book Will Not Get You In Anywhere, But It Might Help

I imagine that most students buy this book with the hope that it will get them in to the more difficult schools. It probably won't. There's no one trick or one strategy that will, so that's really not a criticism. This book will help the student who has already put signiificant effort into getting into law school. There are some pretty good tips, and definitely a good sense of what not to do, in the first section. The essays are a little trickier to work with. You don't want to only focus on one brilliant essay (which is the girl who went to Harvard, if you're wondering), and you don't want to just skim through all of them. I thought it was helpful to go through the book with a pencil and just underline some of the sentences or ideas I liked. It's also helpful to choose some of the essays you liked generally and figure out why they were so good. Will this book help the 150 LSAT get into Yale? No. Will this book help the 172 who needs a little something more to get into Harvard? Maybe. Other reviewers are right though, not all of the essays are amazing. Some you almost wonder how they got included (Coincidence that so many of the authors taught for Princetonreview?). Just work through the okay ones and find the gems. But don't copy.

Useful

This book is divided up into two (or three, if you count the Games bonus section) sections. If you have been reading law school admissions books, the first will tell you ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING NEW. It is general advice about drafting a personal statement and some questions and answers from admissions officers. If you haven't been reading law school admissions books and you just want some personal statement advice, I imagine it would be very enlightening. It wasn't anything new to me. The second section is essays, and I found them extremely useful. I found looking at other personal statements and analyzing what worked and what didn't work in them was VERY helpful in helping me draft my own. The point is not to mimic any of them, of course, but to develop a sense of the range of what is effective and ineffective. Some of the "differences" the essays in this book show aren't positive: at least one of them seems to be an instance of an otherwise excellent candidate arguing himself OUT of law schools where he should have been competitive by trying a tactic that seems to have backfired. The personal statement is really your only chance in the application process to make yourself stand out as more than just a score and a GPA, so it's in your best interest to do whatever is honorably in your power to make it excellent. I found that mine (which I spent considerable time on) was key in my admissions success, so really, if you even think it will help--GET THIS BOOK. As for the "games" section, I didn't so much as glance at it before I handed the book off to a friend who will be applying to law school next year.