55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays

Very good. Thank you.

I went through all the essays in this book and flagged the ones that really stuck out to me. Then, I tried to figure out what was so great about my favorite essays. This helped me find out what I liked as a reader -- the first step to becoming a good writer. After that, it was just a matter of practicing getting my essay to sound like me.Aside from inspiration, a great way to use this book is to help the people (and there should be MANY of them) who will be critiquing your personal statement. For friends who didn't understand what a law school PS should look like, I'd ask them to read one of the essays in this book, then read my PS. This gave them context for what they should be looking for and helped me get good feedback! And it worked -- I'm going to a top 3 school in the fall (:

It’s definitely helpful to have a collection of successful essays in one book. I also like the way the essays were structured by the themes. Makes you look at the application process from a different angle.

It looks exactly like a new book!

These are supposed to be some of the best law application essays. But I disagree. Maybe a third or a 4th of the essays are not that well written. Maybe I expect too much from Harvard.The essay examples remain helpful as it gives you ideas on how to go about developing your own law essay. It is reassuring that a significant number of the essays are about ordinary experiences; sometimes they are about a single moment of a few minutes in their lives and they use that to elaborate on their thoughts and how that led them to their desire to become lawyers. So, not everyone has a mother Theresa type of experience that they wrote about. Essays are written by people who entered from different majors and ages, including older applicants who were working for several years and decided on a complete career change. The critiques by the Crimson staff are helpful and usually they are the similar to my own critique. The essays are grouped into general topics.