My Personal Statement

I was waiting for the completion of my application cycle to post my personal statement. The decision from Indiana completed my cycle. Here is my personal statement.

Dr. John Fenn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry during my first semester at VCU. During his press conference, he confessed that he had not set out to revolutionize mass spectrometry with his development of electrospray ionization. He found an interesting problem and performed a few experiments to see if he could solve it. He characterized this process as kicking over a rock and finding something interesting underneath it. I was just beginning my Ph.D. research, and the suggestion that such a significant development was due to a fortunate accident clashed with my conception of how revolutionary discoveries are made. Seven years later, I know Dr. Fenn described the process perfectly.

My initial attempts to kick over a rock resulted in more stubbed toes than interesting discoveries. It was not until I began to concentrate on making the smallest details of my experiment the same from one trial to the next that I started to make progress. One point at a time, a small peak began to appear in my data processing software. It did not look like much, but our analysis revealed that the origin of the peak was a metal ion that my advisor and I had added to the system. We had been curious to see if the metal ion would change the system, but we did not know what effect, if any, it would have when we began the experiments. While working on the paper describing our discovery, I realized that I had kicked over my first rock.

Other discoveries followed that first success. Initially, I felt fortunate to be performing experiments that were leading to publications, but each experiment gave me a greater appreciation for the process of observation and engagement with the data that directs a research project to unexpected insights and discoveries. When we took a closer look at what we initially thought were background signals, we gained new insights into the properties of an important material. We observed an unexpected phenomenon when we tried a new experiment on our electropolymerized porphyrin films. The experiments were not part of a carefully planned strategy that we were sure would lead to interesting discoveries. We were simply looking at our data very closely and probing our materials with interesting experiments. We were kicking over rocks with something interesting underneath them.

To a novice researcher like me, Dr. Fenn’s comments made it sound like he had just been lucky. My graduate school experience has taught me the wisdom of his words. Discoveries are made when we challenge our understanding of a system. We may have an idea of what we will see, but the only way we will ever know if we are correct is to perform the experiment. Sometimes nothing interesting will happen, but every now and then, challenging an assumption or taking a second look at some data might lead to a surprising discovery. We just have to kick over the rock.

Minnesota Decision

It is possible to get accepted at Minnesota with a personal statement that is less than two pages (granted, it's short by a few lines) that does not address a specific reason for applying to Minnesota. I got the call that I had been accepted a few days before Christmas. My package arrived in the mail today with a scholarship offer of $18,000 a year. I thought that Minnesota was the most likely after UVA to reject my application. Now I've been accepted and offered a pretty nice scholarship. There is an applicant on LSN that has numbers very similar to mine (and a few schools that overlap, It will be interesting to see how his cycle compares to mine as he is still in undergrad). He was given a scholarship for $12,000 a year. I guess my career experience and PhD bought me an extra $6,000.

Only IU-Bloomington and Washington University are pending. Once rejections start going out I'll be able to see how much of a boost my PhD gave me in my cycle.

Law Schools want to see direction?

I have applied to most of the schools on my list (see my LSN profile for the details), but I have not pulled the trigger on UVA and Vanderbilt. There are two reasons for this. One, my aforementioned reluctance to pay the Vandy application fee. I have sent them an email seeing if they will give me a fee waiver. I have also been thinking over my decision to forego mentioning why I am applying to law school in my personal statement. I think I need to say something about it in my application, and an interview with Ann Levine (author of my law school admissions guidebook) has reinforced that thinking.

She was interviewed by some students at Fordham, and she mentioned that law schools are looking for direction in applicants. While I am clearly not the unemployed undergrad with nothing better to do with 3 years and $150,000 that she was talking about, I still think I need to tell law schools why I'm leaving my well paying job with good prospects to pursue a JD. I have added a paragraph to my main PS that gets at my key motivations for law school. If I reread it an don't like it, I'll just submit my original, but if I think it helps my case, I'll go forward with it in my application.

A Personal Decision

I have decided to ditch a personal statement that describes my motivation for going to law school. I have been working on it for months, and I have not been happy with anything that I have written. Every draft has a major flaw that I just can't find a way to fix. Looking at what I have going on at work and with the family in the next few weeks, I don't have time to rework my latest statement into something that I would feel comfortable submitting with my applications. I would rather have my applications in early than delay submission until the middle of November.

My wife read the statement that I submitted to Richmond, George Mason, and Alabama. She thought it was good. That's high praise from her. I would rather use a statement that is good than something that is merely adequate. Science Ph.D.s go for patent law enough that admission committees will likely assume that's why I'm applying. I'm fine with that. Michelle over at ask.com read my statement, and she thought I should address my law school motivations to make the statement really solid. I thought I needed to address my motivations as well. That is why I've been working so hard to get a statement that conveyed my reasons for pursuing law school. Unfortunately, those statements were usually more about the pharmaceutical industry than me.

The point of this blog is to see how soft factors like the personal statement impact law school admissions decisions. We'll see how I do with a statement that does not directly discuss my motivations for law school.

W&L Personal Statement Advice

Washington and Lee has a nice blog entry on writing a personal statement. It's nice to hear what the people reading the applications are looking for in the personal statement. It makes me feel good about my one decent statement (I'll post it after all of my decisions are in). Good luck to everybody with their personal statements. They're tough to write.

Personal Statement Tip

I just finished up what I think is a very solid first draft for my latest personal statement. I started it on Friday afternoon. I had a good chunk of it written in 4 hours of fairly consistent effort. I spent 45 minutes or so on it last night, and just wrapped it up while watching football on TV and the computer. This is much different than the hours of effort I needed to put in to generate my previous PS drafts. My tip is this, if you need to work and rework a statement to make it work, just drop it and start over. I finally found a hook that allowed me to express three themes that I have been trying to work into my previous statements. Hunt for an approach to your topic until you find one that lends itself to the themes you want to develop. This statement basically wrote itself. I feel like I can write again.

Personal Statement Help

The hardest thing about the personal statement for me is all the doubts that enter my mind about the topic, the tone that is used in the essay, and saying something that will actually help my application. There is some great advice about writing the personal statement at the about.com law school guide. The best part is an offer for free help with the statement. I have sent a draft PS to Michelle. She replied a couple of days later with some very helpful words. It was reassuring to have somebody with some experience give me positive feedback on what I had written. Her feedback is actually why I started working on second statement as soon as I got her feedback on my first one.

Personal Statement Topic Trouble

I have one good personal statement prepared. I took a look at it a few days ago and was satisfied with what I had written. I've been trying to a second one that deals more with my motivation for applying to law school. For whatever reason, every time I've tried to write about this I get off on totally unrelated tangents that add nothing to my statement. I think I've been focusing too much on the external factors on why I've been thinking about becoming a lawyer with a science background rather than a pure research scientist. Maybe that will be a good place to start. My identity as a scientist and how that identity formed. Maybe I can note a couple of things that made me start to take a second look at my career and what I want to achieve. I switched to this venue to break my brain lock over in word. Maybe it actually helped.