Admission Essay

Every now and again, someone gets real impressed with the fact that I go to Harvard Law School and asks me about my college grades and LSAT scores and such. But a couple in the know also ask me about my admission essay. What did I write about? Did I combine my political science and psychology degrees into a comment about the benefits and flaws of the current American Jury System? What impresses Harvard?

If you think for a moment that I wrote a comment on the American Jury System, you have another thing coming. But to ease the curiosity of those of you who really want to know how I wowed Harvard into accepting me in two weeks flat, I am reprinting the first paragraph of my admissions essay. I swear to you on my sister's gave (sorry, Boo) that what you are about to read is what I actually submitted to Harvard with a straight face (or what I can pull from memory- the actual copy is on a computer at home in Boston. I reserve the right to change this post if I get home and see an error).

"Law was not my first, or even second choice for a career. When I was a child, all of my friends and I knew exactly what we wanted to be when we grew up. Josh wanted to be a CIA agent, Jennifer wanted to be a novelist, and I wanted to be Queen of a small, tropical and fabulously wealthy island nation. Upon later inspection, I realized that the queen-market was a very difficult one to break into, and set my sights on something more managable: becoming a famous actress."

Obviously, the admissions folks at Harvard scrambled all over each other to be the one to type up my admissions letter.

The point is this: Harvard is chock-full of serious people who write about serious things. And that is great. And if you are that type of person, Harvard has a spot for you. But I am not that type of person. And I wasn't about to write a phony admissions essay about the intersection of law and interstate commerce. I wrote about why the law interested me, and I didn't take myself too seriously. And Harvard had a spot for me, too.