Personal Statement Torture Chamber (Ep. 314)
Thinking LSAT
Nathan Fox and Ben Olson
4.8 • 868 Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2021
⏱️ 141 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The personal statement queue continues to grow. This week, the pod received a special request for a good personal statement example. Unfortunately, most statements submitted to the show are not so good—some might even be described as torturous.
Today, the guys review six more personal statements. One is great but could be better. The others are confusing, irritating, or worse. (Hint: Don’t use blood metaphors in a law school personal statement.) But first, it’s back to some classic Thinking LSAT content, including an Excuse of the Week, Pearls vs. Turds, and a Logical Reasoning question. Read more on our website!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains language that some people describe as unsavory, but the first definition of savory is belonging to the category that is salty or spicy rather than sweet. |
| 0:12.0 | So I guess we use unsavory language. spicy rather than sweet. |
| 0:12.5 | So I guess we use unsavory language because it's so damn savory. Hello, and welcome to episode 314 of the Thinking El-Sat podcast. Today on the show we talked |
| 0:30.6 | about, a lot of things things a bunch of personal statements which you have coined the |
| 0:36.1 | personal statement torture chamber because there was some there was some good today. I thought Wendy's personal statement was, |
| 0:45.0 | it wasn't perfect, but I thought it was great. |
| 0:46.9 | I really, I just can't imagine not admitting her |
| 0:49.8 | to law school based on that personal statement. |
| 0:52.0 | Like, is it boring? Yes. Our lawyers |
| 0:54.7 | boring? Yes. Would I admit her a thousand percent. I think it's an example of |
| 1:00.6 | a fairly straightforward boring but good personal statement. of a |
| 1:05.0 | sample of a fairly straightforward, boring but good personal statement. And I do think, hey, we could be wrong, but we read, well, we don't read literally thousands of these. The law schools do. We read hundreds of them and the ones that |
| 1:14.6 | stand out the most I feel like are the ones that we would like deny. We're |
| 1:20.6 | basically wanting to admit you and you need to just not you need to not get all crazy with your personal statement I think anyway |
| 1:29.3 | We did some good ones, but there was a bunch of ELSAAT content before that. Yeah, we talked about some concerns that people have about the quote |
| 1:36.3 | Elsat definition of some words and how that's silly. |
| 1:39.8 | We also talked about conclusions, finding conclusions. |
| 1:44.0 | Well, hunting down keywords in arguments and like these kinds of gimmicky |
| 1:48.4 | shortcuts that people try to take. |
| 1:50.6 | Yep. |
| 1:51.6 | Yeah. We had a Pearls versus Turd candidate, which was about personal statements. We also then went into a logical reasoning question. It was a reasoning question, it turns out, in which case you have to defend your answers as if you were in |
| 2:05.6 | court and explain why they would be true. Yep. We did a whole shit ton of more |
... |
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