The June round has come and gone, so I'm going to skip writing about the LSAT. My experience was pretty unusual anyway; I was taking practice tests on my kitchen table in Berlin this time last year. My experience as a sub for Kaplan didn't teach me all that much about what most people need either, since I never saw a given set of students more than twice. Still, if you want to ask me about the LSATs for October or December, feel free to shoot me en e-mail.
I'll be back later to the specifics of writing a personal statement, and I'll go through how I wrote mine. The first thing I did, and I recommend you do the same, was to start getting down on paper as many ideas as possible. It was surprisingly difficult for me to write about myself, to describe what I would be like to another person. I always knew who I was, and never had to worry about describing me to myself. So when I had to talk in the abstract about who I was, I had no practice at it. Coming up with meaningful insights is hard.
Luckily, brainstorming can help a lot. I started out by writing, in a complete stream of consciousness style, things that I thought were true about myself. It looked something like this:
Okay, so I like fixing things. Finding problems and fixing them. See this in CS. Like thinking in the big picture, don't like wroking out pointer details. Like finding clever solution. "it's a big hack" inelegant, but effective. Umm, what else? like to talk in section, argue debate. easily distracted, like to focus on one thing at a time ...
Worry later about making this into a meaningful statement. Right now the idea is just to off-load all of these thoughts about yourself onto the paper, so you can address them visually rather than from memory. If you're like me, this will already help you get a better sense of who you are than you had before. It sounds silly, but for me writing this thing was kind of a process of self-discovery.
More about that process later. Now, I have to go watch The Wedding Crashers.
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