Personal statement is making me rip my hair out

[vdcpli]

Hey guys,

I mean the title basically says it all. I don't know what direction to take on my statements and it is driving me up the wall. Can I PLEASE get some help? 

I'm currently in a food science program at TMU. I wrote an entire statement where I talk about the intersection of law and health which is what led me to apply to law school, relate it to my access application (on the basis of chronic illness/disability - undiagnosed ADHD for the first few years of undergrad, followed by what doctors think is fibromyalgia but we still aren't sure) and then finish it off with blurbs that are specific to each school

but then I started to second-guess it and I thought maybe I should go in another direction

Said other direction: I switched into food science after 2 years of fashion at TMU, and into fashion from a year of biomedical science at UOttawa. As you can tell I have a very *colourful* academic history, and the switching several times was undoubtedly due to having undiagnosed ADHD. Should I even mention that? The law and health statement sums up the last 3 years of my undergrad so it's more recent. I feel like mentioning the switches could backfire and make me look indecisive (which I admittedly have been in the past) but I also don't want to leave it out because the switch from fashion to food science is on my TMU transcript and they're obviously going to see it.

Please give me opinions. If it helps to know, I'm applying to every law school in Ontario except for UofT, and will likely be applying to every other school in Canada except for McGill and UBC. I would also loooove if someone could read what I have written and give me pointers.

Thanks in advance!!

Edited October 20, 2023 by vdcpli

[Ob16]

Have you looked at the specific expectations on the applications for each school? From my experience, Ottawa had super specific expectations, they ended up being a nice guideline. 

Edited October 20, 2023 by Ob16

[Yogurt Baron]

Let me give you two pieces of quasi-contradictory advice, neither of which speak to your question at all. That oughta help.

1. The personal statement is a much more minor part of the process than students think. Students think - and are told - that if their heart is pure and they just write the perfect essay, that will be what carries the day. It won't. In my day, a personal statement was a thousand words long. I type a hundred words a minute. I wrote my personal statements in ten minutes, and don't really understand someone who takes eleven or more minutes to write their personal statement, much less taking the time to think about what they're going to write, much less being anxious about it. Nine times out of ten, when an applicant writes, "I am anxious about XYZ," their problem is not XYZ at all; it's their tendency to worry about stuff that isn't worth worrying about.

2. If you have disability issues and are applying under an access category, your personal statement might actually matter, and the question of how and whether to contextualize your performance as a function of unaccommodated disability is a good one. That's the piece that matters. Whether having not known what you wanted to do with your life at 17 and having studied different things makes you look indecisive---you're simply not being judged that way, on that level. Your grades and LSAT matter. Stuff that helps to explain why your grades and LSAT were what they were might matter. But there's not a council of elders stroking their beards and saying, "This one looks indecisive. She's hardly Our Kind Of People - rejected!"

[Diplock]

I think you should write your personal statement about the intersectionality of food, fashion, biomedicine, and law. Because I can't imagine a more urgent issue in society today.

My actual advice would be to cut the bullshit and write about why you actually want to attend law school and pursue a career in law. And that is a topic you haven't even raised so far. Seriously. You've suggested several ways in which you've tried to tie your background together to create an answer that sounds good, but you haven't tried for even a second to start from whatever the actual truth is and build from there. So why don't you give that a whirl?

You know what they say, after all. When all else fails, try not lying.