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kmj12 wrote:REMEMBER, It is not an adversity statement. It's a DIVERSITY statement.

Could you clarify the difference between an adversity and diversity statement?

Is a DS simply describing aspects of your life that makes you different from others? What if that aspect of your life involved overcoming adversity?

Anyone want to swap diversity statements?

xephyr3 wrote:

kmj12 wrote:REMEMBER, It is not an adversity statement. It's a DIVERSITY statement.

Could you clarify the difference between an adversity and diversity statement?

Is a DS simply describing aspects of your life that makes you different from others? What if that aspect of your life involved overcoming adversity?

I think, and I am certain admission counselors would agree, that the DS is about demonstrating your socio-economic disadvantages for many schools. For instance, UCLA Law has a Disadvantage Addendum asking applicants to describe the socio-economic disadvantages they have overcome. For UCLA, the Disadvantage Addendum is what the DS is to other schools (I asked UCLA Law, so that's how I know this). So it's not merely about describing aspects of your life that make you different from others. It's asking: within those aspect of your life, tell us specifically about the social and economic hurdles you had to overcome to get to where you are today. For instance, if you are a super rich kid with a learning disability or you are disabled in some other way, then for SOME schools you have no reason to write a diversity statement.

This brings me to my final point: SCHOOLS DEFINE DIVERSITY IN DIFFERENT WAYS. Harvard's definition of diversity is far broader than UCLAs. Harvard just says tell us how you would bring diversity (and leaves it open-ended), UCLA is specifically talking about socio-economic diversity. Read this and you will see what I mean:

http://tippingthescales.com/2014/01/wri ... ity-essay/

Hope I've helped at all!

If anyone wants to swap DS samples, please PM me!

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I would be more than happy to share my adversity statement (grade addendum) and my personal statement (which is kind of like a diversity statement because it is centered around how my experiences as a gay man informed my decision to pursue law and policy change). Just send me a PM- if you want more details, my adversity statement is about being a first generation high school/college/potential professional school student/growing up with an undocumented parent in a low socioeconomic class and how it initially hindered my pursuit of higher education because of the lack of resources/culture shock I experienced. My personal statement is, as mentioned above, about my being gay but specifically centers around me coming of age during same sex marriage going to ballot in CA and realizing how many people really did disagree with the idea of marriage of same sex couples.

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So I think this is the best place to ask this question for now.

I just made a first draft of my DS and I'm happy with it, but it's sitting at about 2.25 pages (size 11 double spaced 1 inch margins). Very few schools if any seem to put a word or page limit on it, but I intend to trim it down to maximum two. Should I instead go further and try to get it down to under 500 words?

principalagent wrote:So I think this is the best place to ask this question for now.

I just made a first draft of my DS and I'm happy with it, but it's sitting at about 2.25 pages (size 11 double spaced 1 inch margins). Very few schools if any seem to put a word or page limit on it, but I intend to trim it down to maximum two. Should I instead go further and try to get it down to under 500 words?

Get it down to one page. Legal writing is about being concise and to the point. Law schools review thousands of applications each year, an extra long package may be off-putting.

Americanengine wrote:

principalagent wrote:So I think this is the best place to ask this question for now.

I just made a first draft of my DS and I'm happy with it, but it's sitting at about 2.25 pages (size 11 double spaced 1 inch margins). Very few schools if any seem to put a word or page limit on it, but I intend to trim it down to maximum two. Should I instead go further and try to get it down to under 500 words?

Get it down to one page. Legal writing is about being concise and to the point. Law schools review thousands of applications each year, an extra long package may be off-putting.

Can we absolutely not go over 1 page? I'm debating on whether to use the topic for my diversity statement as a personal statement, mainly because I'm not confident I can write a 1-page DS.

tuna_wasabi wrote:

Americanengine wrote:

principalagent wrote:So I think this is the best place to ask this question for now.

I just made a first draft of my DS and I'm happy with it, but it's sitting at about 2.25 pages (size 11 double spaced 1 inch margins). Very few schools if any seem to put a word or page limit on it, but I intend to trim it down to maximum two. Should I instead go further and try to get it down to under 500 words?

Get it down to one page. Legal writing is about being concise and to the point. Law schools review thousands of applications each year, an extra long package may be off-putting.

Can we absolutely not go over 1 page? I'm debating on whether to use the topic for my diversity statement as a personal statement, mainly because I'm not confident I can write a 1-page DS.

You can go over one page but I would not go more than two. Honesty I would write everything you want to say about yourself out, and see where it all fits. Try to be as concise as possible, you are trying to show the reader that you understand how to write with precision. Message me if you want me to take a look at what you have. I don't check this website that often but I will try to help if i can.

Would anyone mind looking over my diversity statement?
It’s similiar to my personal statement, though w/ a lot less humor.

Here is my first draft DS.
If anyone can offer a critique I would appreciate it.

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It is a little over 1 page (non double spaced.) on word and I would like to keep it to one page if I can.

I'm not going to line edit this but rather give you my overall impressions. I feel like it's not personal enough. I learn that you are, without a doubt, Indian. I learn about your family's impressive history. What I didn't learn much about was you. How has your heritage shaped you? How has the skepticism of others impacted you? Has it driven you?

There are a lot of ways you can develop these ideas. You could, for example, finish up the anecdote from the tavern. Did you say anything? Did you educate him? Did it make you feel bad? Did it change how you understood yourself in some way? I'm just throwing some questions out there so don't feel limited by these.

I just wish that, in general, the personal statement was more "personal". It doesn't give me a lot understanding about who you are, how you think or what you (not your family) are going to bring to the class.

I'm a fan of a narrative style with a beginning, middle and end. Tell me a story that helps me understand who you are. You start out with that, but don't finish that.

Law School Native wrote:Here is my first draft DS.

It is a little over 1 page (non double spaced.) on word and I would like to keep it to one page if I can.

TripleM wrote:I'm not going to line edit this but rather give you my overall impressions. I feel like it's not personal enough. I learn that you are, without a doubt, Indian. I learn about your family's impressive history. What I didn't learn much about was you. How has your heritage shaped you? How has the skepticism of others impacted you? Has it driven you?

There are a lot of ways you can develop these ideas. You could, for example, finish up the anecdote from the tavern. Did you say anything? Did you educate him? Did it make you feel bad? Did it change how you understood yourself in some way? I'm just throwing some questions out there so don't feel limited by these.

I just wish that, in general, the personal statement was more "personal". It doesn't give me a lot understanding about who you are, how you think or what you (not your family) are going to bring to the class.

I'm a fan of a narrative style with a beginning, middle and end. Tell me a story that helps me understand who you are. You start out with that, but don't finish that.

Law School Native wrote:Here is my first draft DS.

It is a little over 1 page (non double spaced.) on word and I would like to keep it to one page if I can.

Thanks for the input! I will keep that in mind and submit another draft. However, this is my DS and not a personal statement. My personal statement will be about me.

I'm adding my diversity statement here. If you've read my 250, you'll see some of that here (enough that I didn't send both the 250 and my DS to YLS). Aight here goes:

[+] Spoiler

As a Black, undocumented philosopher, I am an amalgam of contradictory terms, a whole stranger than the sum of my parts. Not because Black people or immigrants don’t like philosophy, nor because we don’t do philosophy. Rather, the deep inequality reflected in our institutions manifests itself in ways devaluing our thought and our persons such that whatever it is that we do when we put thoughts on paper, it is not considered philosophy. With every acquittal, mistrial, and hung jury in cases of police officers accused of shooting an unarmed black man, Blackness continues to be criminalized. With every noose hung on campus, or every white supremacist descending on campus ostensibly to promote “free speech”, blackness and Black thought are deemed inferior. And the obstacles that undocumented students face in pursuing an education convey the idea that illegals should not be part of the debate around what is legal, nor should they have the analytical tools to offer critiques of the institutions rendering them as illegal. Thus, aware that my existence is protest, I am particularly positioned to do work on critical jurisprudence at the intersection of race, immigration status, and epistemology.

For example, we talk about the 12 million people without status in the United States, language is key. Depending on whom you ask, I am either “illegal” or “undocumented.” “Illegal”, though dehumanizing, is accurate. Though Elie Wiesel asserted that “No human being is illegal” (I read him normatively, i.e., no human being ought to be illegal), the law can and does speak about us as “illegal aliens.” This usage is important because the terms of art that the law uses to refer to us shape how the public understands what and who is “legal” and what is right.
The term “undocumented”, however, suggests that lacking status is not always a choice, on the part of the immigrant, but rather a circumstance of escaping poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity. Even though the term “undocumented” succeeds in humanizing us, however, it is not faithful to lived experience. First, undocumented immigrants have documents: diplomas, medical records, certifications. The issue is bigger than documents. Second, what happens if we do get status? What then? As the Black Lives Matter movement makes clear, citizenship status means nothing if some are systemically oppressed, prevented from enjoying basic rights.

Capturing realities of fact and feeling that the terms “illegal” and “undocumented” do not, I, through my work with [Organization X] propose the terms “illegalization” and “illegalized”. The forum [Organization X] presents gives illegalized people the chance to write trailblazing political critiques of the dynamic processes by which legal institutions marginalize people based on their social identities, thus denying them due legal recognition.  
Consider the following example. When then-President-Elect Donald Trump promised to deport 3 million “criminal” immigrants, he avoided defining who the “criminal” immigrants would be. The last thing that I expected from someone who called Mexicans rapists was nuance, but I still expected some definition of the term. The lack of definition, it turns out, is its own decree. By leaving the term “criminal” immigrants undefined, the president made it abundantly clear that immigrants in his America are criminals first. Illegality became not just a mere descriptor of one’s immigration status; it defines the immigrant as essentially foreign, and ought to be legislated against as such. The burden is on the immigrant to disprove their “illegal” or “criminal” status. This is what it means to be illegalized.

In sum, whereas the terms we use must recognize our humanity, those same terms—and the analytical frameworks that drive them—must also challenge, the world in which we live. Combating illegalization is an international, intersectional, and interdisciplinary mission that I aim to undertake; law school is thus a critical part of how I realize that mission. Though I am seeking to develop a more comprehensive philosophical theory countering illegalization, my guiding principle is that I live in a world with other people, whose well-being is as important to me as my own. And though my advocacy, legal scholarship, and teaching, I am committed to defending their well-being as well as my own, by seeking to train lawyers to counter illegalization in all its forms.

TripleM wrote:I'm not going to line edit this but rather give you my overall impressions. I feel like it's not personal enough. I learn that you are, without a doubt, Indian. I learn about your family's impressive history. What I didn't learn much about was you. How has your heritage shaped you? How has the skepticism of others impacted you? Has it driven you?

There are a lot of ways you can develop these ideas. You could, for example, finish up the anecdote from the tavern. Did you say anything? Did you educate him? Did it make you feel bad? Did it change how you understood yourself in some way? I'm just throwing some questions out there so don't feel limited by these.

I just wish that, in general, the personal statement was more "personal". It doesn't give me a lot understanding about who you are, how you think or what you (not your family) are going to bring to the class.

I'm a fan of a narrative style with a beginning, middle and end. Tell me a story that helps me understand who you are. You start out with that, but don't finish that.

Law School Native wrote:Here is my first draft DS.

It is a little over 1 page (non double spaced.) on word and I would like to keep it to one page if I can.

Draft 2:

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