One of the requirements for all UVic Law applicants is the submission of a Personal Statement. The simple guidelines can be found here. We’ve also published some helpful blog posts with tips to write a strong Personal Statement (Tips and Tricks: Personal Statements and Clarification on Personal Statement Guidelines). However, we still get a lot of questions about how to write a strong Personal Statement. This is part of a series explaining more of what the expectations are of a successful application, as well as some tips and things to avoid. This installment discusses style and content.
Your Personal Statement Part A should be written in narrative form, rather than bullet or outline form. Your name should be on it in a conspicuous place that is easy for the reviewers to spot. The narrative should be written in plain language, using graduate-level writing. This means attention to detail such as grammatical and spelling errors is important. Logical flow is equally important. That is, there should be a logical flow to your narrative, whether that path follows a chronological flow, a subject matter flow, or another logical organizational flow.
One activity that we invite all applicants to take part in is positioning. That is, tell us who you are, where you are from, how you identify, and a few other relevant things about yourself. A few short positioning statements are a good way to start your Personal Statement, as it tells the reviewers a lot about you and gives them some context for the rest of your Personal Statement.
When you write your Personal Statement, it may be helpful to think of yourself in relation to the landscape. In this regard, positioning is helpful to the applicant, as well. It often helps frame the answer to the questions one might answer in a Personal Statement. Questions like “Why law?” and “Why UVic?” can be more easily answered if you start from the granular discussion of who you are and then describe the larger picture of how you relate to the landscape you are trying to become a part of.
We ask that, instead of writing from a superficial perspective, you get to the core of what you mean to say. Vulnerability is necessarily a part of that. That is, we want you to forget about the reasons you would tell your aunt or a stranger that you want to go to law school. Peel away the layers and talk about why you really want to go and where you see yourself. Dig deeply for the origins of those reasons. We ask that you do this in part because we want students who want to be at UVic Law. It also helps us with our review to better understand each applicant.
I wrote a few weeks ago that your Personal Statement, Part A is not a creative writing assignment. This is true. However, your Personal Statement should include elements of creative writing. It should be interesting to read, not dry. I haven’t learned everything in my years on this planet, but I have learned that no one’s life story is dry. It just has to be told through the proper lens. However, there is a balance to this. In making your statement “not dry,” keep in mind that this doesn’t mean to use overly flowery language or to spend a lot of time physically describing your surroundings.
Think about what story you are telling. 750 words is not enough space to tell us everything about you, birth to this moment in time, so you will need to select events and relevant topics to speak about. It’s important if you choose events that affected you to try and choose events that actually happened to you, rather than events that are observational or that happened to someone else, in which you had little involvement. Your writing should be sincere and honest, getting to the core of why you want to study law at UVic.
I also mentioned a few weeks ago that your Personal Statement is not an academic paper. There isn’t a need to use as many big words as you can fit into a sentence. While all of the reviewers have great vocabularies, you don’t need to test what words they know. Remember, if they have to look words up, it interrupts the flow of your statement. If they need to consider the meanings of a lot of words, it becomes a burdensome task to understand the core message.
Excessive academic references are also overkill. By this, I mean footnotes and end notes. Recall that you are not arguing a legal point; this is not a thesis. This is an account from a first-person perspective.
Probably the most common style of Personal Statement we get is a cover letter-style recitation of every qualification that applicant might have to excel in law school. We know that style comes naturally to a lot of applicants, and it may very well be what other schools are looking for. Unfortunately, that is not a helpful style for your UVic Law Personal Statement. We absolutely do care about all of your work, volunteer, and academic experience. However, much of this should go in Part B. What we do want is a personal account of why you want to be a student at UVic Law, and why UVic Law should want you to be a student.
We understand that poignant personal stories often come from pain. They don’t always – many meaningful life moments are borne of joy and happiness – but epiphanies, realizations, and meaningful decisions sometimes do come from pain. They come from physical pain, injury, illness, loss, hardship, discrimination, abuse, and other painful experiences. We recognize a few things about this. Firstly, these things are hard to write about. We don’t want people to have to relive hardship in order to get into law school. Secondly, these things are hard to read. We love reading your stories, but they stay with us, and overly graphic or descriptive stories have an emotional toll on the reviewers. Thirdly, we realize that sometimes telling an applicant’s story will necessarily involve talking on some level about traumatic events. Sometimes it’s helpful and cathartic to the author to put them down on paper. Sometimes, they are just integral to the story. All of that said, there is a balance.
We want you to tell your story the way you need to, but know that trauma is not an expectation in your application anywhere. Many successful applicants pen beautiful Personal Statements from a place of joy. Likewise, we get wonderful Personal Statements from a place of hope, defiance, resilience, acceptance, or resolve. Writing about traumatic experiences may be necessary to tell your story, but they are not necessary to an application.
Writing your Personal Statement is not an easy task. We recommend that you take your time and allow yourself the time and space needed to really think through what you write. While it’s helpful to have someone else read your statement for grammatical and spelling mistakes, it’s important to ask them not to edit your message, particularly if they don’t understand the requirements and intent of the Personal Statement.