Essays That Worked for Law Schools: 40 Essays from Successful Applications to the Nation's Top Law Schools

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Very helpful for me

A helpful book but could have been better

Boring Essays

Perfect for applicants

Completely out of date

Essays That Worked for Law Schools: 40 Essays from Successful Applications to the Nation's Top Law Schools
Boykin Curry , and Emily Angel Baer
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0345450426
Release Date: 2003-07-29

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While almost anything goes in a college-application essay, law-school applicants are expected to be a little more sophisticated. No navel-gazing allowed. But please, no pontificating, either. Like admissions officers everywhere, those at law schools are looking for something fresh. That means, says Boykin Curry, that unless you are quite certain that you've got a spectacular new approach, you should avoid such topics as "Why I want to be a public defender," "I have always wanted to be a lawyer since I was ten," and "What I think about justice" ("lecturing on the law--before you have studied it--" Curry warns, "is likely to bore and irritate the reader"). Instead, be honest, and be creative. Use these essays for inspiration. One essayist here demonstrates his bargaining skills by relating his Peace Corps experiences haggling over goat meat in Niger. Another writes touchingly of his stated goal: to practice law with the same integrity that his grandfather brought to his carpentry business.

A chart at the beginning of the book illustrates just how much importance various schools place on the essay (the University of Washington gives it little consideration; Harvard and Yale say it's a vital part of the application). --Jane Steinberg

Book Description

“Law school applicants should consider this a guide to producing a competitive, superior essay. . . . These successful examples speak louder than any written how-to instructions could.” –The Book Watch

Each year, thousands of people apply to the most prestigious law schools across the country, competing for an ever-smaller number of spaces. But each applicant gets one chance to distinguish himself or herself from the pack: the law school application essay. In the essay, you can spotlight the qualities you possess that transcripts and LSAT scores cannot reveal.

Essays That Worked for Law Schools shows that winning essays come in a variety of styles and voices. One student writes about running a day-care center. Another tells a harrowing story about driving a cab in New York City. And a third gives an incredibly convincing argument for why the world needs one more good lawyer. From the thousands submitted each year, the essays in this book were considered some of the best by admissions officers at the nation’s top law schools.

If you’re facing essay anxiety, this book will educate and inspire you–and most important of all, help you write an essay that will give you the best chance of getting into the law school of your choice.

Customer Reviews:

Very helpful for me.......2006-06-21

I have a biology and computer science background and was very nervous about my ability to write an impressive essay compared to other applicants with a background in english, history,and political science. I quickly identified with the essays of non traditional applicants, but also learned a great deal from the wit, charm, and literary styles of the other essays. I found the book to be invaluable in my application efforts. Thank you.

A helpful book but could have been better.......2005-11-04

I personally found it helpful to see what other applicants had written. The forty essays in this book are separated into seven categories. They are essays about: Character, the school and you, important changes, entering the legal profession, contemplative, crimes, and applicants with colorful backgrounds. I found about half of the essays to be of little help to me personally as they were more the result of an applicant's specific abilities than a good essay. For example, I did not find essays about being a congressman's son, growing up as a Native American, or living in Niger to be to helpful. It would also have been nice to know which essays worked at which schools. It mentions the schools on the cover but does not tell which essays went to each school. This would be especially helpful since some worked at Florida State and Tulane while others worked at Harvard and Stanford an obvious difference. Personally, I found How to get into the Top Law Schools to be more helpful but this is good as supplementary reading.

Boring Essays.......2004-07-11

The book has its helpful points, but the overwhelming majority of the essays in this book are boring and don't stand out in too many ways, in my opinion. I'm having a hard time seeing why the various admissions officers chose to submit the essays in this book--probably because most applicants write boring essays, as even the admissions officers in this book will tell you. I also guess it's because the title of the book is "Essays That Worked," not "Essays That Are Impressive." And I'll bet the essays mainly "worked" because everything else in their admissions files was stellar and they were written in a decent fashion.

One of the essays I remember particularly well basically read like a laundry list of things that can easily be found ELSEWHERE in his application, which I specifically remember reading in just about every other book/advice about law school essays NOT to do. There don't seem to be many truly revealing essays (interesting life events), essays that grab at you or cultural essays--all of which, in my opinion, are the absolute best ones. The essays do tell you something about each person's character and most are well-written, which probably contributes to why they worked, but the way in which most of the authors acheived their ends is not exemplary. Their methods are plain, as if they are too scared to really open themselves up or talk about something very personal. I believe you can write much better essays than these.

Perhaps the most exemplary and interesting essay in terms of writing style, topic and revelations about the author is the last one in the "Essays About Character" section where a young woman wrote about, what I will call, her conflicts with her mother. Her essay is an example of what I mean by very interesting life events that reveal something about the authors in a much deeper way than the average essay does.

The most helpful parts of the book, for me, were the questions in the beginning about essays that were answered by admissions officers and the chart that shows how much estimated importance each of the top schools places on essays. It's truly eye-opening to see how much schools like Harvard and Yale value personal statements while schools like Duke and Boalt place the least amount of emphasis on it out of the top schools listed on the chart (I don't consider Indiana a top school, and their were rated as seeing essays the least important). I would, perhaps, buy the book just for this information and maybe to get an idea of how much better you can do on your essays...and also for the one stand-out essay I mentioned.

Even if you're not a minority, I believe the best essays I've read are the ones in the upcoming book by Evangeline Mitchell entitled "Profiles and Essays," a book that is basically targeted at African Americans. Not all the essays are about being Black--in fact, most aren't--so you can still get some good ideas and see good, race-neutral essays. The book is likely officially coming out this fall, but you can probably order a rough copy of it now at hopespromisepublishing.com as I did. The essays I've read in other books are, more or less, boring as well...although Richard Montauk's "How To Get Into Top Law Schools" and Willie Epps's "How To Get Into Harvard Law School" present SOME good essays.

Perfect for applicants.......2003-08-14

I am an educational counselor and received all four of the new "Essays That Worked" books recently. These newly revised editions are perfect for any applicant stumped by or anxious about writing a personal statement. The essays are inspiring, and the advice is frank and fresh. The authors did a great job of updating these classics, and I highly recommend them to anyone applying to college, law school, business school, or med school.

Completely out of date.......2003-03-23

This book is completely out of date - but perhaps may oil the creative gears - no modern essay question addressed - the content on Essayedge.com is free & far better.. Another Ivy League lawyer doing things besides practicing law .. you gotta love it ..

Book Description

In 1907, American coal mines killed 3,242 men in occupational accidents, probably an all-time high both for the industry and for all laboring accidents in this country. In December alone, two mines at Monongah, West Virginia, blew up, killing 362 men. Railroad accidents that same year killed another 4,534. At a single South Chicago steel plant, 46 workers died on the job. In mines and mills and on railroads, work in America had become more dangerous than in any other advanced nation. Ninety years later, such numbers and events seem extraordinary. Although serious accidents do still occur, industrial jobs in the United States have become vastly and dramatically safer.

In Safety First, Mark Aldrich offers the first full account of why the American workplace became so dangerous, and why it is now so much safer. Aldrich, an economist who once served as an OSHA investigator, first describes the increasing dangers of industrial work in late-nineteenth-century America as a result of technological change, careless work practices, and a legal system that minimized employers' responsibility for industrial accidents. He then explores the developments that led to improved safety--government regulation, corporate publicizing of safety measures, and legislation that raised the costs of accidents by requiring employers to pay workmen's compensation. At the heart of these changes, Aldrich contends, was the emergence of a safety ideology that stressed both worker and management responsibility for work accidents--a stunning reversal of earlier attitudes.

Safety first: technology, labor, and business in the building of American work safety, 1870-1939.: An article from: Labour/Le Travail

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Safety first: technology, labor, and business in the building of American work safety, 1870-1939.: An article from: Labour/Le Travail

Manufacturer: Canadian Committee on Labour History
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B00098DMB2
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Labour/Le Travail, published by Canadian Committee on Labour History on September 22, 1998. The length of the article is 1378 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Safety first: technology, labor, and business in the building of American work safety, 1870-1939.
Publication: Labour/Le Travail (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1998
Publisher: Canadian Committee on Labour History
Issue: 42 Page: 273-5

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

This unique book combines the experience of a professional chef with the expertise of a registered dietitian, offering readers a valuable guidebook/resource tool for preparing healthy food. The science of nutrition and the art of cooking are fully integrated to illustrate the infinite possibilities of healthy cooking that achieves quality in all areas of taste and customer satisfaction.

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I am the photographer, not Eleanor M. Mainella.......1999-04-24

I would just like to say that I am the photographer of this book. Seriously, I took all of the photographs included. See for yourself, pick up the book.

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The Art of Nutritional Cooking (2nd Edition)
Eleanor Mainella Michael Baskette
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It's Readable, but not much else.......1998-11-26

Well Onslaught will perhaps forever be Marvel's most controversial storyline. I only gave this chapter three stars because it focuses on the Hulk's side of the war with the mad mutant. Peter David tried as much as he could, to make the Hulk chapter of the Onslaught war, interesting and he mostly succeeds. The Hulk takes part in the battle, but he somewhat regards this whole affair as a waste of his time. I wonder if that's how Peter thought of it too?

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Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Music in American Life)
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Rap Music and Street Consciousness
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Book Description

From Russian filmmaker Tengiz Abdulaze (March 6, 1994) to film executive Eugene Zukor (December 21, 1994), the obituaries of 497 performers and filmmakers, musicians and producers, dancers and composers, writers and others associated with the performing arts who died in 1994 can be found. For each, the date, place and cause of death are provided, along with a brief recap of their career and citations from major newspaper and periodical stories reporting the death. Filmographies are given for film and television performers, and photographs of many of the individuals are included.

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Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 1995: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture (Obituaries in the Performing Arts)
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Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 1996: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture (Obituaries in the Performing Arts)

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A great - but sad - series!

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 1996: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture (Obituaries in the Performing Arts)
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Manufacturer: McFarland & Company
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The obituaries of over 540 people associated with the performing arts are in this heavily illustrated work. For each, the date, place and cause of death are provided, along with a brief recapitulation of their career and citations to major newspaper and periodical stories reporting the death. Filmographies are given for film and television performers, and photographs of many of the individuals are included.

Customer Reviews:

A great - but sad - series!.......2000-04-09

This is a truly remarkable series of books for anyone interested in the final "whatever happened to" for celebrities. Lentz does a great job at noting the deaths of just about everyone you could think of that were involved in films, television, etc. during the course of each year. I'm always amazed at how many of these folks have died during a year, and at how few have been mentioned in the regular media. Kudos to Lentz for giving a final tribute to the many others. The detailed filmographies are also very helpful, as are the many sources he notes to make further research helpful for the reader. The books are also heavily illustrated, which is very helpful in identifying those actors with a familiar face, but an unfamiliar name. A+ to Lentz.

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2000: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture (Obituaries in the Performing Arts)

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Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2000: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture (Obituaries in the Performing Arts)
Harris M., III Lentz
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Book Description

This classic book of tools and methods for the analyst brings order and precisions to the specification process as it provides guidance and development of a structured specification. Covers functional decomposition; data dictionary; process specification; system modeling; structured analysis for a future system. Suitable for practicing systems analysts.

Customer Reviews:

Still very valuable........2007-04-30

I first read this book when it was new, and it made a world of difference in my results. In addition, I was introduced to distributed system design and finite state machines at about the same time, and that turned out to be a genuine winning combination.

Some of the difficulties of Demarco's approach are tied into the use of single-threaded code, which was entirely normal at the time, but in the distributed, event-driven world, one escapes those design constraints, and then dataflow diagrams really come into their own. They work best when the processing nodes in a dataflow network can be treated as independent threads that run asynchronously to one another. Better yet, when those processes are designed as state machines, then the asynchronisms can be handled naturally. In addition, state machine tables make it easy to ensure that all possible combinations of state and input have been considered explicitly.

Thus, I would not worry overmuch about "structured English mini-specs", because they are too caught up in the single-threaded programming model. Use state machines instead.

However, the best part of dataflow diagrams is that the customers actually UNDERSTAND them. They are paying good money for our work, and they certainly deserve to be kept fully in the loop. No other way of representing a system does this well. Only dataflow diagrams.

Bear in mind also that most object-oriented designs are still single-threaded, but the problems of single-threading when translating dataflow into executable code and those encountered in object-oriented work are different, so, paradoxically, it is not always easy to implement a classic dataflow diagram with object-oriented methods, and I think this is why dataflow diagrams have received so much less attention in the last ten or fifteen years than they did in the nineteen-eighties.

Again, the key is to think in asynchronous, multi-threaded terms, and then dataflow diagrams and objects can fit together quite well.

Typically I have a class called "task" or "process" with a "run" method that can be called by a simple round-robin scheduler, which is usually a very simple loop of just a few lines. Each instance of the base process class is a straightforward subclass containing an appropriate state machine, and the process objects are connected by queue objects for transmitting datapackets from one process to another. The end result is that I can often map a dataflow diagram straight onto very similar object-oriented code with little chance for misunderstanding.

There are lots of variations on this basic theme, but the general idea is very widely applicable, and also runs very efficiently, since the scheduling overhead is trivial. Each process simply decides if it has any input waiting, and if not control returns to the scheduler almost instantly. No need to design a one-size-fits-all scheduler, when each process is best able to determine its "run-ability" in terms of its own unique requirements.

The foregoing is hardly the whole story, but this general approach has worked well for me for almost thirty years. Thus, I heartily recommend Demarco's book to all software designers and system analysts. If you are not already fluent with dataflow design, then you should waste no time becoming so. Your clients will be much happier for it, and that is always good for business.

Simply a classic in the field.......2005-06-19

This book is a classic in the field. In its area may compare in clarity and rigor to the monumental "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth.

With the advent of OOP and UML, writing clear specifications (or "use cases") is crucial for the success of a design. Structured Analysis is an invaluable tool for deriving use cases from the flux of data. It is simply amazing that UML does not build on the solid foundation of Structured Analysis when it comes to use cases.

This book has one significant drawback, though: it does not include events; in fact, it descourages their use. One possible excuse: the material is from 1979. Perhaps at the time the importance of events hadn't become clear yet.

Recommended to be used in corroboration with newer books on the topic (such as "Structured Development" by Ward and Mellor).

How to figure out and document what your system needs to do.......2005-05-02

Computer systems are best understood, designed, implemented, and documented when they are thought of as primarily information flows. The reason should be obvious- at the most essential level, that is all that they do and all that we humans need them to do.
This book is all you need to learn how to understand, design,plan, and document the fundamental processing that will be involved in your system. Get this part right and you are well on your way to success with a system. Mess this part up, and no amount of Object Oriented buzz words will save your ass.

Changed the way I look at programming.......2002-08-09

This book offers data flow as a simple and powerful metaphor for programming. The idea is this: look at a program as a black box that takes information in and spews information out, then at each stage refine this black box by breaking it out into individual ones. I read this book many years ago and it remains the most useful book on program design that I have read. It was written before object oriented programming but it adapts to it in an obvious way. Forget about UML. Data flow is the best way of presenting the elusive big picture view, that view of the forest that gets obscured by all those trees. It has the following virtues offered nowhere else: 1. It serves as a design tool that you can work with and refine to identify object classes. 2. It is easily understood by computer illiterate clients. 3. It allows programmers new to a project to quickly come up to speed.

Now I understand what college tried to teach!.......2001-05-29

Many of the concepts adressed in Systems Analysis and Design classes are explained here in an easy to read and easy to understand format. The concepts are backed up with examples that help the reader to conceptualize the main points. I used to struggle with what I though I learned from my college classes, this book turned on the light!

Structured Analysis and System Specification

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Structured Analysis and System Specification
Tom de Marco
Manufacturer: Yourdon Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000H9MXP4

Product Description

Structured Analysis and System Specification is a book of tools and methods for the analyst. Its objective is to bring order and rigor to the specification process, to guide the analyst step-by-step in his development of a "structured specification". The method of this book is to complement the description of each concept with numerous examples. There are nearly 200 such examples (108 diagrams), and an extensive case study that shows the use of Structured Analysis in a commercial environment.

Information Systems Engineering: An Introduction

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Information Systems Engineering: An Introduction
Arne Solvberg , and David C. Kung
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

This book deals with the development and evolution of computer-based information systems. It is an introductory text and presupposes only an elementary knowledge of programming. The purpose of the book is to explain in a simple way the main components of information systems, how they arerelated to each other, and how one develops and maintains such systems. The emphasis is on relating informal approaches to systems design with formal mathematical models of information systems. The book advocates a top-down approach to information systems design, and brings together such topics as structured systems analysis, software design, user interface design, database design, object oriented approaches, performance evaluation, CASE tools, common systems, project management, and formal systems specification models. The book covers most of the relevant aspects of information systems development. It aims to provide a basis for understanding how various approaches to information systems engineering fit together, rather than to advocate one particular development technique. Whenever new and untested techniques are mentioned, they are solidly based on well known and tested approaches such as dataflow analysis and entity-relationship modelling. Most of the book can be understood without much knowledge of mathematics.

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Structured Analysis and System Specification
Tom de Marco
Manufacturer: Yourdon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000IWE218

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Structured Analysis and System Specification
P. J., Plauger
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall PTR
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OIZGWA

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