The primary difference between optional explanation statements and obligatory ones: give serious thought to whether you are actually enhancing your application or will simply be cluttering up the application file and drawing attention to a minor negative which might then receive more attention than it deserves.
Many applicants seem to believe that there’s a corollary to the “disclose, disclose, disclose” rule that runs something like, “When in doubt, explain.” The idea (often expressed by applicants in forum discussions) that “it can’t hurt to explain” isn’t entirely accurate. Remember to think about your application package as a whole, as it will be viewed by a stranger. Determine how significant the negative you’re opting to explain is, how much difference you believe your explanation will make in the way it’s interpreted and how the additional explanation statement will fit with the other materials you’re submitting.
Targeted Optional Statements - Understand the Question
The first step toward writing an effective optional statement in response to a specific prompt like “How will you add to the diversity of the student body?” is to understand exactly what the school is looking for in asking that question. To be clear, though, I don’t mean that your first task is to figure out what the school wants to hear. Asking yourself that question, attempting to guess the answer to that question and tailor your response to fit that guess, can be paralyzing. Much like the personal statement process, the brainstorming and early draft phase of optional essay preparation requires that you let your thoughts flow and get something authentic out on paper. That can’t happen if you’re focused on writing what you think someone else wants to hear.
Rather, when I say it’s important to understand what the school is looking for, I mean that it’s important to understand the question. Confusion over the purpose of the question is common with regard to diversity statements in particular. Yes, having overcome difficult circumstances may indicate that you’ll be a dedicated student and able to perform well under pressure.
But in most cases, that’s not what the prompt has asked. You’ve had ample opportunity, including your personal statement and perhaps other optional essays, to provide information about the personal characteristics that will make you a good student, a good lawyer and/or a valuable member of the bar. And if those characteristics happen to shine through in the diversity statement as well, that’s great. But too often, applicants see this prompt as “looking for” the same type of insights the personal statement is meant to reveal.
That’s problematic for a few reasons. The first, and most significant, is that it means those applicants never address—at least, not in any depth—the issue the prompt was actually intended to draw out. A closer look at the language of those questions will reveal that in most cases, what the school is really looking for is some insight into how you will add diversity to the law school class. That’s not just a demographic issue for law schools; a law school class spends a lot of time together in an insular community, and the educational pedagogy is very discussion-dependent.
In other words, the quality of your education depends, to some degree, on the other people sitting in the classroom with you, entering into the discussion and adding their own insights, analyses and perspectives. That doesn’t just mean that it’s important that they’re good students who read the assignments and think them through, but also that your discussion and thus education will be greatly enhanced by a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, political views, manners of expression, knowledge levels and a host of other factors.
When the school talks about diversity, it’s not just about statistics to publish or a good balance on the cover of the brochure; it’s about the atmosphere in which you will learn for the next three years.
This is just one example of a prompt that’s often misinterpreted and therefore an opportunity that’s often missed. The reason it happens, though, has broader applications: it happens because applicants go in with those predisposed notions about “what they want to hear” and see each prompt in that context rather than truly analyzing the question to fully understand what’s being asked.
In addition to missed opportunities, misreading the question or attempting to turn it into an opportunity to talk about something other than what was asked can also backfire simply because careful reading and the ability to make focused arguments is critical in law school and the practice of law. There are two likely reasons an applicant would submit an essay not responsive to the prompt: she didn’t understand what the question was asking, or she decided to ignore the question and tell the school what she wanted them to hear instead of what they asked for. Neither interpretation is favorable to the applicant.
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