I'm in a Glass Case of (Stress) Emotion!

I know that it's been (gasp) almost a whole week since I've updated here. There's a good reason for that, I promise you: I've been sooooo insanely busy with everything in my life that I literally haven't had a half hour to myself that didn't have something to be done in.

I guess I'd better get used to the feeling before next year, right?

Well, aside from being so busy -- or maybe because I've been so busy -- I've been incredibly stressed about the impending move and all of the worries that go along with it. I've been trying to book my flight to Dallas at the end of June to find an apartment, trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my car, what I'm going to do with my furniture, how I'm going to move all of my stuff 1400 miles, how to go about applying for student loans, how I'm going to pay for everything, etc. etc. etc. I've also begun the process of targeting firms for 1L SA positions, getting a mail merge ready (where it's needed) and figuring out cover letters and resumes, since I know I won't have time come November.

My head's going to explode one of these days.

And because I was seriously so stressed about all of the things I just mentioned, plus a couple of things in my personal and work lives that have hit snags, I kiiiiiiiiind of had a mini-meltdown late last week. I cried and vented and pondered aloud, and then when it was done and I had prayed about it, I came away with a much clearer head about the whole thing.

I mean, yeah, I still have a CRAPLOAD of things to figure out, but I just have to take things one at a time, and I trust that everything will work out the way it's supposed to.

So, yeah. That's what I've been doing. I'll get back on the updating train soon, I promise.

Reliable Transportation -- Worth More Debt?

So here's an issue I'm struggling with right now...is taking a loan out for a car right before law school advisable?

Now, before everyone starts shouting, "NOOOOOO," and/or laughing at me uncontrollably, let me explain. Now I know that I'm going to need reliable transportation while I'm in law school, especially since I'm going to school in Dallas. Yes, Dallas has fairly extensive public transport options, and it's not 100% necessary to have a car, but it would make life about a million times easier, so we're calling it a necessity.  I have a car in California, but it's old...it got me faithfully through college, and it certainly wasn't new then, and I feel like it might be on its last legs.

My original plan was to pack my car up and drive it to Dallas, and then drive it until it crapped out. I mean, I paid cash for it, so I don't have any debt on it, it's in good external condition, and while the transmission might be wearing down, I did just have the brakes done, and it could (probably) get through another three years of daily driving.

But, do I want to chance it? I mean, if I do drive it until it literally craps out on me, then what do I do? I'm not going to be working during law school, so I won't have any money to buy a new one, and by then I'll already have the expenses of law school...loans, living, etc. And I won't even be able to sell it and use the little money I could get for it as a down payment or anything. I'd definitely have to ask my parents to help me out, and to be honest, I really don't want to do that unless I have to.

If I go ahead and drive it to Dallas and then sell it there, my only concern would be that the car's transmission might go out on the road from here to Dallas. Then I would be stuck on the side of the freeway in the southwest US in the middle of summer, and I'd have no choice BUT to pay for the repair to the car, so then I'm stuck with it.

If I sell it here in California, then drive around one of my family cars for the rest of the summer, I have to move back to Dallas by packing everything possible into suitcases and flying back there. Then I have two choices: I can either buy a car for the money I have now + whatever I get for my current car, or I can take out a loan and get a new car with a warranty and everything.

I don't need a BMW. I just need something that will get me from point A to point B and hopefully won't cost me a lot (or anything) in maintenance between now and 2014.

I guess I've just got a lot of thinking/number crunching to do. I hate number crunching.

Writing a PS without a Tragic Life

If you frequent the TLS boards, you've no doubt read through threads upon threads of people posting their personal statements as examples or for critiques. When I was going through the process of planning and writing my own PS, I definitely drew a lot of advice and inspiration from reading the personal statements of those who went before me.

Pretty much every single PS I read on TLS dealt with some sort of tragedy in the upbringing of the writer. Whether the death of a parent, the loss of a home, the incarceration of a sibling, the drug abuse of a family member, or a battle through some terrible disease, each of the personal statements I read focused on overcoming the obstacles they've faced in life. I see where they're coming from...from a topic statement, their lives are pure PS gold.

There's just one problem: I don't have a tragic past. I'm a white female from a happy and prosperous middle-class family. My parents have been married for 28 years, they're still together, none of my sisters is a raging alcoholic, drug addict, parolee, etc. I've had a normal, healthy, well-adjusted life in a white-bread sort of town. What on earth do I have to write about?! I remember moaning to my parents in my writing haze that my life (at that point) would have been so much easier if one of them had had cancer, or had been in prison.


Don't worry, I didn't actually mean it.


But I did have to think a little harder about what to write. Writing a PS is like toeing a fine, fine line between sincere and genuine or trite and overwrought. Just a little too much emotion or pushing can really make your PS head downhill faster than Heroes after the middle of the second season.

So I have a few tips for those of you planning on writing your PS over the summer in order to get a head start on the cycle (this is a very smart idea, by the way!). Now, bear in mind, these are just my personal thoughts and tips, they definitely aren't the end-all, be-all to PS writing. What do I know? I'm just one applicant.

Here are my thoughts:

• I feel like everyone and their mom writes about the death of their grandparent. Seriously. I must have seen no fewer than 18 PS drafts that mentioned the death of a grandparent and how the writer worked hard in school because they know that's what their grandparent would have wanted for them. If I've seen that many, imagine how many the adcomms have seen.
• Don't try to make a situation sadder or more dramatic than it is. Readers can tell that it's forced. Okay, you broke up with your high school sweetheart, who you thought was "the one." That's terrible, we feel for you, but unless you're somewhat mentally/chemically imbalanced, this should not have been the impetus for your three suicide attempts. If you are feeling clinically depressed or suicidal, please get help. If you're just trying to connect or relate with someone who might know how you're feeling about a break up, don't make it sound worse than it was.
• In general, don't write about a break up. Period.
• It is okay to let your voice come through your PS. You don't need to be 100% formal 100% of the time. If you try to be business like and write formally, you're going to come across as either arrogant, soulless, or like you're trying too hard. My topic was tongue-in-cheek, and I inserted a few silly one-liners in order to show the adcomms that I don't take myself too seriously.
• On the other hand, don't go too far in the other direction. This can't read like the transcript of your stand-up monologue. Don't swear, don't use slang unless you define it, try to include as few contractions as possible, and PROOFREAD PROOFREAD PROOFREAD. People are judging you based on this one two-to-three page essay.

My PS was about clumsiness. Kind of. Basically, I wrote about signing up for an advanced flamenco class when I was in college. I'm not exactly the most coordinated person in the world, and I knew ahead of time that signing up for this class was signing myself up for something where I'd have to work twice as hard to look half as good as my more experience and better coordinated class mates. But I did it anyway, because I wanted to prove to myself that I could, and I enjoy the challenge of pushing myself to get through things at which I am not naturally gifted.

Earth shattering stuff? Nope. But I think it was just light enough to convey my point without bashing the reader over the head with it. It probably made the adcomms smile a time or two. And it accurately reflected my personality, and the approach I'm going to try to take to law school.

Ultimately, you have to write a PS that shows the adcomms who you are while getting the point across that you are a good writer and would be a good addition to their program. You don't need to be Little Orphan Annie in order to write a startlingly poignant PS. My best piece of advice is this: write about what you know, not what you think they want to see. 

You know what bugs me?

It always really bothered me when people said to me, "Oh my gosh, you're going to be such a good lawyer -- you love to argue!" or "I can just imagine you standing up and yelling, 'I Object!'" or "Good, one more to lock up all of the murderers and rapists. You'll do some real good in the world."

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't lawyers that do all of the things listed above -- argue well (and often heatedly), yell "I object" (or the variation: "this whole court room is out of order!!"), or lock up criminals. There are, for sure. And those lawyers are great.

But most lawyers don't do that on a daily basis. In fact, a lot of lawyers never get to do that in their whole careers! Why does everyone not involved in the legal field assume that being a lawyer is a lot like what is depicted on Law & Order?

I really don't get this all that much anymore, since I've been working with actual lawyers and people intimately connected with the legal field for two years, but it used to be said to me on the regular, any time I told someone I was interested in going to law school.

I don't want to go into any facet of criminal law. While I won't back down if someone is getting in my face, and I will always stick up for my convictions, I actually HATE arguing...at least the kind of arguing most of these people reference. I am much more the type of person to say, "look, I can see where you're coming from, I'm not necessarily agreeing with you, but why don't you just open your mind to my ideas, I'll ponder yours, and let's meet back up to rationally discuss this when you're less heated, okay?"

I'm also the type of person to diffuse a meaty fight in a bar parking lot by jumping in the middle and making one or both parties laugh, but that's a different story, and probably not that likely to be relevant in my future career.

But who knows, maybe it will be.

ANYWAY, my point is: a lot of lawyers never even see the inside of a court room. If you have big plans to be in front of a judge every day, grilling the witnesses and charming the jury, I hope you know that there is a lot of seediness to that side of the law, and unless you're good -- and I mean REALLY good -- odds are you won't be making a whole heck of a lot of money.

Be realistic when determining if law school (and then a career in the law) is a path you're really wanting to go down. Know the limitations of the degree, and have a solid expectation of what real life will be like when you come out of school with your J.D.

Writing an Effective Addendum

Law school applications themselves are pretty easy to figure out. Heck, LSAC does half of the work for you! But what should you do when the numbers themselves just don't show the whole picture?

You write an addendum to your application.

There are a lot of reasons to write addendums: a bad semester in particular, low grades overall, multiple LSAT scores (I'm talking over three), a huge disparity between LSAT scores, a really terrible LSAT score, criminal history, etc. But for as many addendums as you can write, they should all follow the same basic parameters.

An addendum is NOT a personal statement, and it's not an essay or persuasive argument. It's not a forum to get the adcomms to come to your same conclusion about a particular issue, or to tell "your side of the story" about your fault. An addendum should be extremely straight-forward, incredibly factual (with little to no "fluff"), and very concise.

Say you had a bad first semester in college. Now you could write a page and a half about the difficulty of moving so far away from home, the steep learning curve, how your newfound independence meant that you didn't spend as much time studying as you did in high school, how having your significant other at another school far away was a real strain on your resources and time, etc., but guess what? Adcomms don't care.


Or say you went to take the LSAT, and the day before your grandfather died, or you got into a car accident on the way there and were understandably shaken by it? Your performance might have been impacted, and you might want to explain why you think you could do better on a retake (make sure you're signed up for a retake) or why your score on one LSAT is 9 points lower than another. Understandable, right? Sure, but only if you don't go on and on about how you'd never been in a car accident before, how bereft you felt by the loss of your family member, or the exact feelings of adrenaline pumping through your body on the test day. Adcomms still don't care.


An addendum should, in an ideal world, be nothing but a paragraph, maybe two, in length. Short paragraphs. And it shouldn't be chock full of excuses. If you have a good reason, then list it. If you had a bad semester all it should say is, "My bad."

Well not really. But it should be straightforward, acknowledge your poor performance, give a legitimate and non-whiny excuse, and then point out the improvements made since then.

Criminal addendums are a slightly different animal, but the same rules apply. Just the facts, and how you've gone about changing your errant ways (even if "it wasn't your fault"). Adcomms don't want to see an essay about the evils of the judicial system. They just want to know what happened and if it will impact you in the future.

Okay, so you got an MIP or got busted with a little weed. Just say, "look, this is what happened. I accepted responsibility then, I accept it now, and since that time in my life I have a) never let it happen again and b) been involved in community service efforts involving alcoholism and/or drug addiction."

I'm verbose, to say the least, and when writing my own addendum I wanted to make sure that the adcomms knew that I wasn't just flighty, or partying too hard, or something of that nature...I was hospitalized and very ill for part of one semester, and it showed in my GPA. But after reading my full-page addendum, it just sounded like a 12-year-old providing excuses for something that they just needed to own up to. 

So I pared and pared and pared it down until I got to a two paragraph, less-than-half-page addendum that didn't try to paint me in the best light possible. It just said, "look, here are the facts, there was a reason for the fault that was outside of my control, but I've moved on and have done significantly better since."

In short, the most important things to remember when writing your addendum: brevity, straightforwardness, and acceptance of responsibility will win the day. Don't make excuses, keep it short, and just give the facts, not your opinion.

Good luck with the addendums!