55 harvard law school essays

55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays: With Analysis by the Staff of The Harvard Crimson

Harvard Law School is one of the premier law schools in the world. It as well as other top schools draws thousands of applicants from the best colleges and companies. With only a limited number of slots for so many talented applicants, the admissions officers have become more and more selective every year, the competition has become fierce, and even the best and brightest could use an edge. This completely new edition of 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays is the best resource for anyone looking for that edge. Through the most up-to-date sample essays from the Harvard Law School students who made the cut and insightful analysis from the staff at The Harvard Crimson, it shows you how best to: * Argue your case effectively * Arrange your accomplishments for maximum impact * Avoid common pitfalls 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays guides you toward writing essays that do more than simply list your background and accomplishments. These are essays that reveal your passion for the law as well as the discipline you bring to this demanding profession and will help you impress any admissions department. The all-new essays and straightforward and time-saving advice will give you all the insider tips you’ll need to write the essays that will get you into the best law schools in the world.

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55 successful Harvard Law School application essays : what worked for them can help you get into the law school of your choice

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55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays: What Worked for Them Can Help You Get Into the Law School of Your Choice Paperback – June 26 2007

There is a newer edition of this item:.

Separate yourself from the pack Competition has never been more intense for admittance into the nation's top law schools. The application essay represents your only chance to plea your case to admissions officers. Why select you over so many other qualified applicants? Your essay needs to do more than simply list your background and accomplishments. It must reveal the depth of your passion for law, the discipline you bring to this demanding profession, and the strength of character you possess for the ethical and moral challenges that lie ahead. Learn by example Harvard Law School is one of the premier law schools in America. Every year, thousands of elite applicants try for a few hundred slots. Of the dedicated few accepted, fifty-five have shared the application essays that helped them make the cut. * Learn what works. * Structure your essay for maximum impact. * Avoid common pitalls. Each essay is analyzed by the staff of the Harvard Crimson , Harvard's daily newspaper, and accompanied by no-nonsense advice on crafting your own. 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays will give you all the help you need to write the essay that will get you in.

• ISBN-10 0312366116
• ISBN-13 978-0312366117
• Edition First Edition
• Publisher St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date June 26 2007
• Language English
• Dimensions 13.97 x 1.91 x 20.32 cm
• Print length 208 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Griffin; First Edition (June 26 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312366116
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312366117
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 191 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 1.91 x 20.32 cm
• #517 in Graduate School Guides (Books)
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55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays, 2nd Edition: With Analysis by the Staff of The Harvard Crimson (Paperback)

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Harvard Law School is one of the premier law schools in the world. It as well as other top schools draws thousands of applicants from the best colleges and companies. With only a limited number of slots for so many talented applicants, the admissions officers have become more and more selective every year, the competition has become fierce, and even the best and brightest could use an edge. This completely new edition of 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays is the best resource for anyone looking for that edge. Through the most up-to-date sample essays from the Harvard Law School students who made the cut and insightful analysis from the staff at The Harvard Crimson , it shows you how best to: * Argue your case effectively * Arrange your accomplishments for maximum impact * Avoid common pitfalls 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays guides you toward writing essays that do more than simply list your background and accomplishments. These are essays that reveal your passion for the law as well as the discipline you bring to this demanding profession and will help you impress any admissions department. The all-new essays and straightforward and time-saving advice will give you all the insider tips you'll need to write the essays that will get you into the best law schools in the world.

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• Kobo eBook (July 8th, 2014): $11.99

55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays, 2nd Edition 2nd Edition With Analysis by the Staff of The Harvard Crimson

• Publisher St. Martin's Griffin (Macmillan US Trade)

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Fifty-five all-new essays that got their authors into Harvard, showing what worked, what didn't, and how you can do it, too. Harvard Law School is one of the premier law schools in the world. It as well as other top schools draws thousands of applicants from the best colleges and companies. With only a limited number of slots for so many talented applicants, the admissions officers have become more and more selective every year, the competition has become fierce, and even the best and brightest could use an edge. This completely new edition of 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays is the best resource for anyone looking for that edge. Through the most up-to-date sample essays from the Harvard Law School students who made the cut and insightful analysis from the staff at The Harvard Crimson , it shows you how best to: * Argue your case effectively * Arrange your accomplishments for maximum impact * Avoid common pitfalls 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays guides you toward writing essays that do more than simply list your background and accomplishments. These are essays that reveal your passion for the law as well as the discipline you bring to this demanding profession and will help you impress any admissions department. The all-new essays and straightforward and time-saving advice will give you all the insider tips you'll need to write the essays that will get you into the best law schools in the world.

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Six Law School Personal Statements That Got Into Harvard By David Busis Published Feb 10, 2021 Updated Feb 10, 2021

The essays below, which were all part of successful applications to Harvard Law, rely on humble reckonings followed by reflections. Some reckonings are political: an applicant grapples with the 2008 financial crisis; another grapples with her political party’s embrace of populism. Others are personal: a student struggles to sprint up a hill; another struggles to speak clearly. The writers have different ideologies, different ambitions, and different levels of engagement with the law. Yet all of them come across as thoughtful, open to change, and ready to serve.

Jump to a personal statement:

Essay 1: Sea Turtles

I stood over the dead loggerhead, blood crusting my surgical gloves and dark green streaks of bile from its punctured gallbladder drying on my khaki shorts. It was the fifth day of a five-week summer scholarship at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), and as I shuffled downwind of the massive creature, the pungent scent of its decomposition wafted toward me in the hot summer breeze. Aggressive flies buzzed around my head, occasionally pausing to land on the wad of plastic we had extracted from the loggerhead’s stomach. The plastic had likely caused a blockage somewhere, and the sea turtle had died of malnutrition. When the necropsy was finished, we discarded the remains in a shallow hole under a thicket of trees, and with the last shovel of sand over its permanent resting place, its death became just another data point among myriad others. Would it make a difference in the long, arduous battle against environmental pollution? Probably not. But that dead loggerhead was something of a personal tipping point for me.

I have always loved the clean, carefully objective nature of scientific research, but when I returned to the US from my native XXXX to study biology, I began to understand that because of this objectivity, scientific data rarely produces an emotional effect. It is difficult to initiate change based on such a passive approach. My ecology professor used to lament that it was not science that would determine the fate of the environment, but politics. The deeper I delved into research, the more I agreed with her. Almost every day, I came across pieces of published research that were incorrectly cited as evidence for exaggerated conclusions and used, for example, as a rebuttal against climate change. Reality meant nothing when pitted against a provocative narrative. It was rather disillusioning at first, but I was never one to favor passivity. In an effort to better understand the issues, I began to look into the policy side of biological conservation. The opportunity at the MBL came at this juncture in my academic journey, and it was there that I received my final push to the path of law.

After weeks of sea turtle biology and policy debates at the MBL, we held a mock symposium on fishing and bycatch regulations. Participants were exclusively STEM majors, so before the debate even began, everyone in the room was already heavily in favor of reducing commercial fishing. I was assigned the role of the Chair of the New Bedford Division of Marine Fisheries, and my objective was clear: to represent the wishes of my constituents, and my constituents wanted more time out on the sea. However, that meant an increase in accidental bycatch, which could hurt endangered marine populations and fill up the bycatch quota for commercial fishermen before the season ended.

There were hundreds of pages of research data on novel technological innovations for bycatch reduction that I had to wade through, but with the help of my group, I was able to piece together a net replacement plan that just barely satisfied my constituents, the scientists, and the industry reps. Although the issue of widespread net replacement incentives for the commercial fishermen remained, there was no doubt that I enjoyed the mental stimulus of tackling this hypothetical challenge. I was able to use my science background to aid in brokering a compromise that would reduce the amount of damage done to the environment without endangering the livelihood of the people involved in the industry.

By the end of the symposium, I knew that I wanted to bridge the gap between presenting scientific data correctly and effecting change in the policy world. Although there are many ways for me to advocate for change, I believe that only legal and legislative enforcements will have a widespread and lasting effect on the heavy polluters of the world. I want to combine my legal education and a solid foundation in the biological sciences to tackle the ever-growing slew of environmental challenges facing us in the twenty-first century.

The night the symposium ended, we patrolled the beach for nesting females. As I walked beneath the stars, I thought of that sea turtle and of the repeating migration of my own life, from my birthplace in XXXX to my childhood in the US, back to XXXX and now the US again. With the guidance of the Earth’s magnetic fields, sea turtles are able to accurately return to their birthplace no matter how far they deviate, but I like to imagine that they, like me, do need to occasionally chart another course to get there. Standing on a beach in Woods Hole, thousands of miles from home, I knew that I was on the right path and ready to embark on a career in law.

Essay 2: Joining the Arsonists To Become a Fireman

On the morning of the 2004 presidential election, my sixth-grade teacher told me to watch out for John Kerry voters in the hallways because our school was a polling station. I nodded and went to the water fountain, thinking to myself that my parents were voting for John Kerry, and that as far as I could tell, they posed no risk to students. It was a familiar juxtaposition—the ideas at my dinner table in conflict with the dogmas I encountered elsewhere in my conservative Missourian community. This dissonance fostered my curiosity about issues of policy and politics. I wanted to figure out why the adults in my life couldn’t seem to agree.

Earlier in 2004, Barack Obama’s now famous DNC keynote had inspired me to turn my interests into actions. Even at age twelve, I was moved by his ideas and motivated to work in public service. When Obama ran for president four years later, I heeded his call to get involved. I gave money I had made mowing lawns to my parents to donate to his campaign and taped Obama-Biden yard signs to my old Corolla, which earned it an egging and a run-in with silly string in my high school parking lot.

While I knew in high school that I wanted to involve myself in public service, I wasn’t sure what shape that involvement would take until signs of the financial crisis—deserted strip malls and foreclosed homes—cropped up in my hometown. I was amazed by the disaster and shaken by the toll it took on my community. As I saw it, the crisis wasn’t about Wall Street, but about people losing their jobs, homes, and savings. I didn’t understand what Lehman Brothers had to do with the fact that my neighbor’s appliance store had to lay off most of its employees.

Intent on understanding what had happened, I started reading up, inhaling books about financial crises and articles on mortgage-backed securities and rating agencies. Along the way, I also developed an affinity for the policymakers fighting the crisis. I admired how time and again these unknown bureaucrats struggled to choose the best among bad options, served as Congressional piñatas on Capitol Hill, and went back across the street to face the next disaster. I decided that I too wanted to work in financial regulation. I thought then and believe today that if I can help protect consumers and mitigate the downturns that force people from their jobs and homes, I will have done something worthwhile.

Strange though it may seem, this decision led me to join Barclays as an investment banking analyst after college. While in a sense I was “joining the arsonists to become a fireman,” as one skeptical friend put it, banking gave me immediate experience working with the firms and people who had played key roles in the response to the financial crisis years before. I was initially worried that I would discover financial rules and regulations to be impotent platitudes, without the power to change the financial system, but my experience taught me the opposite. New regulations catalyzed many of the transactions on which I worked, from bank capital raises to divestitures aimed at de-risking. Ironically, becoming a banker made me even more of an idealist about the power of policy.

I envisioned spending years in the industry before moving to a government role, and I left banking for private equity investing with that track in mind. When I began making get-out-the-vote calls on behalf of the Clinton presidential campaign, however, I realized that I needed to change my plans. I cared more about contacting voters, about the result of the election, and about its policy implications than anything I did at work. Although I’m grateful for what I’ve learned in the private sector, I don’t want to spend more time on the sidelines of the policy debates and decisions that matter to me.

That’s why I am pursuing a J.D. I want to help shape the policies that will make the financial system more resilient and equitable, and to do so effectively, I need to understand the foundation upon which the financial system is built: the law. The post-crisis regulatory landscape is already in need of recalibration; large banks still pose systemic risks, and regulation lags even further behind in the non-bank world. Advances in financial technology, from online lending platforms to blockchain technology, are raising new questions about everything from capital and liquidity to smart contracts and financial privacy. Policymakers need to confront these issues proactively and pursue legal and regulatory frameworks that foster public trust while encouraging innovation. A J.D. will give me the training I need to be involved in this process. I don’t claim to have a revolutionary theory of financial crisis, but I do hope to be a part of preventing the next one.

Essay 3: Populism

Growing up, I felt that I existed in two different worlds. At home, I was influenced by my large, conservative Arizonan family, who shaped my values and understanding of the world. During middle school, my family moved, and I enrolled in a small, left-leaning school with an intense focus on globalism and diversity. I enjoyed being surrounded by people who challenged my beliefs, and I prided myself on my ability to dwell comfortably in both spaces.

In 2015, American political reality disrupted the happy balance between my two worlds. The Republican presidential primary, in a gust of populism, was proposing ideas that I didn’t recognize and wouldn’t condone, like a hardline immigration stance, opposition to free trade, and a tolerance for harassment. I resented this populist wave for hijacking the party, and the voters who created it. I didn’t understand them, and I didn’t think I could.

Despite my skepticism, I decided to make an attempt. As the founder of the Bowdoin College Political Union, a program that promotes substantive, inclusive conversations about policy and politics among students, I brought speakers with diverse ideologies to campus and hosted small group discussions with members of the College Democrats, the College Republicans, and students somewhere in between. In the winter of my senior year, I helped organize a summit that brought together students with a broad spectrum of views from dozens of universities throughout the eastern United States.

As a resident assistant during the 2016 presidential election, I held open-door discussions for individuals from across the political spectrum and around the globe. Facilitating these discussions felt like a natural extension of my role on campus, and I learned not only that having space for open dialogue can ease tensions, but also that the absence of that space does not erase political difference. Instead, it creates feelings of isolation and fosters ignorance.

But it was the death of a family member in early 2016 that helped me understand another perspective, namely the populist views beginning to overwhelm the Republican Party. After the death of my mother’s cousin from cancer, I called my second cousins, all three of whom are around my age, to offer my condolences. I was surprised to learn that none of them had finished high school. Instead, they had worked to help pay for their mother’s treatment. While I had been worrying about which summer internships to apply for, they were worried about maintaining their family home. In the past, I’d thought that their views on economic policy and immigration came from a place of ignorance or spite. I realized over the course of our conversation that I had no idea what it was like to not have a high school degree and compete for employment in a rural area where wages are low. For the first time, I was engaging with people in the demographic that was generating the populist wave that was sweeping the country. This conversation led me to expand my studies in politics and to think beyond the left-right spectrum to consider class and urban-rural divides within my own party. Ultimately, reconnecting with my extended family informed my decision to write my senior thesis on populist movements and why economics drives them. It also changed the way I thought about politics and its effect on people like my second cousins.

After my college graduation, I took a job with a political and opposition research firm called XYZ in Washington, because I felt that my understanding of 2016’s populism was still lacking. XYZ gave me the opportunity to work with people from different parts of the Republican Party: both establishment operatives and grassroots operations. This enabled me to work within the framework of Republican politics that resembles my own, while being exposed to the perspectives of people working to represent people like my second cousins. My time at XYZ helped me see the power of the populist movement, but also understand the limitations of its proposed solutions, like a resurgence of manufacturing. Now that I have interacted with populist groups, I see that ultimately, the valid frustrations of many working-class Americans need to be addressed by empathetic leadership and challenging but necessary evaluations of policy in the areas of economics, education, and culture.

I want to apply my passion for political discourse in law school and in my career as a lawyer. My passion for engaging with others will serve me well in the classroom and in a career at the intersection of law and politics. I hope to continue to make connections between people of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints and to engage in meaningful, bipartisan discourse.

Essay 4: Pop Warner

One summer, when I was eight years old, I signed up to play Pop Warner Football for my hometown. After the calisthenics, scrimmages, and the rest of practice concluded in the midst of the sweltering early August sun, I would sprint thirty yards up a hill steep enough to go sledding down. I had to lose nine pounds in order to make weight for my junior pee-wee football team. I wanted nothing more than to be on the team, so it didn’t faze me that I was the only one running up and down the hill. A dirt path marked the grassy knoll from my countless trips up and down. I usually managed to hold back the tears just long enough until I got home. As an eight-year-old, this was the most difficult challenge I had ever been tasked with. But the next day, I would get down in a three-point stance and sprint up the hill under the red sky of the setting sun.

When I finally made the team, I was elated; I had achieved a goal I often felt impossible in those moments of sweat and tears. The excitement was, nonetheless, short-lived. The other kids still called me “Corey the Cupcake,” a nickname I thought I’d left behind with the extra pounds. In every game of the season, my first playing football, I received my eight minimum plays and rode the bench the rest of the game. It was an unusually wet September, and I caught a cold a few times from standing there for two and a half hours in the nippy morning rain. I hated it, but I kept playing.

I continued to play every fall through high school. My freshman year, during a varsity practice, I broke both the radius and ulna bones in my left arm and simultaneously dislocated my wrist, which required a plate and four screws to repair. To this day, I can’t help but flash back to that frigid November afternoon when I look at the five-inch scar on my left arm or when the breaking point is hit precisely. Sophomore year, I was introduced to a coach who frequently criticized me for “not being black enough,” or sometimes, contradictorily, for acting “too black.” I was even benched for my entire junior year for being unable to attend football camp over the summer.

Why did I play football for eleven years? It might have been for the Friday nights in front of the school, as there was nothing more thrilling than making a crucial catch and hearing the whole town cheer. It might have been because I wanted to fit in with my athletic classmates. It might have been because I felt that I was improving after each catch, each hit, and each drill. But I believe, above all else, it was because I just don’t like to give up.

My first job as a project assistant at a large law firm was somewhat similar to my experiences as a young football player; both required grit and determination to push through difficult circumstances. Late one evening, two days before Thanksgiving, my supervisor asked me to complete and organize the service of eighteen subpoenas for the following day. The partners and associates were so busy with internal politics—one of the head partners was leaving the firm—that no one was available to walk me through the process. I felt ridiculous when I Googled “How to fill out and serve a subpoena,” but it was important to me that I complete the project properly.

I am appreciative of the challenges that I faced as a project assistant. If it weren’t for those experiences, it is unlikely that I would have been fortunate enough to be hired by the Delaware Office of the Attorney General, where I work today. My job here has confirmed that law is exactly what I want to do. I realized this through several opportunities to draft written discovery. I loved fashioning objections to each individual request in a given set. Developing legitimate grounds for disputing discovery on its merits and intent was inspiring to me. I can’t wait to do this more and on a larger scale as an attorney.

The steadfastness that I obtained as a young athlete defines who I am. I couldn’t see it at the time, but every day on which I gave something my best effort, whether it was on the practice field or in my tiny office on the twenty-seventh floor, I became a little bit stronger, a little bit wiser. I am confident that my perseverance and dedication will facilitate my future success, both in law school and afterwards.

Essay 5: Speech Therapy

When I was very young, I was diagnosed with a severe phonological disorder that hindered my ability to verbalize the most basic sounds that make up words. It didn’t take my parents long to notice that as other children my age began speaking and communicating with each other, I remained quiet. When I did speak, my words were mostly incomprehensible and seemed to lack any repetition. I was taken to numerous speech therapists, many of whom believed that I would never be able to communicate effectively with others.

From the age of three until I was in seventh grade, I went to speech therapy twice a week. I also regularly practiced my speech outside of therapy, eventually improving to such an extent that I thought I was done with therapy forever. This, however, was short-lived. By tenth grade, I realized my impediment was back and was once again severely limiting my ability to articulate words. That was also the year my family moved from Vancouver, Canada to Little Rock, Arkansas, which complicated matters for me.

I knew that my speech was preventing me from making new friends and participating in classroom discussions, but I resisted going back into therapy. I thought that a renewal of speech therapy would be like accepting defeat. It was a part of my life that had long passed. With college approaching, though, I was desperate not to continue stuttering words and slurring sentences. I knew that I would have to become more confident about my speech to make friends and to be the student I wanted to be. During the summer before my freshman year, I reluctantly decided to reenter speech therapy.

I see now that this decision was anything but an acceptance of defeat. In fact, refusing to reenter therapy would have been a defeat. With my new therapist, I made significant strides and the quality of my speech improved greatly. Using the confidence that I built in therapy that summer, I pushed myself to meet new people and join extracurricular organizations when I entered college. In particular, I applied to and was accepted into a competitive freshman service leadership organization called Forward.

The other members of Forward were incredibly outgoing, and many of them had been highly involved in their high school communities—two things I was not. I made a concerted effort to learn from those who were different from me. I was an active participant in discussions during meetings, utilizing my unique background to provide a different perspective. My peers not only understood me, but also cared about what I had to say. I even began taking on leadership roles in the program, such as directing a community service project to help the elderly. My time in Forward made it clear to me that my speech disorder wouldn’t be what held me back in college; as long as I made the effort, I could succeed. The confidence I gained led me to continue to push past the boundaries I had set for myself in high school, and has guided the bold approach I have taken to new challenges in college.

When I first finished therapy in seventh grade, I pretended that I had never had a speech disorder in the first place. Having recently finished therapy again, I can accept that my speech disorder has shaped the person I am today. In many ways, it has had a positive effect on me. My struggle to communicate, for example, has made me a better listener. My inability to ask questions has forced me to engage with problems on a deeper level, which has led me to develop a methodical approach to reasoning. I believe these skills will help me succeed in law school, and they are part of what motivates me to apply in the first place. Having struggled for so long to speak up for myself, I look forward to the day when I can speak up for others.

Essay 6: Ting Hua

“Ting hua!” I heard it when I scalded my fingers reaching above the kitchen counter to grab at a steaming slice of pork belly before it was served; I heard it when I hid little Twix bars underneath the bags of Chinese broccoli in the grocery store shopping cart; I heard it when I brought sticks back home to swing perilously close to the ceiling fan. Literally translated, “ting hua” means “hear my words.” Its true meaning, though, is closer to “listen to what I mean.” Although the phrase was nearly ubiquitous in my childhood, that distinction—between hearing and listening—did not become clear for me until much later in life.

That childhood began in Shanghai, where I was born, and continued in Southern California, where we moved shortly after I turned four. Some things stayed the same in the US. We still ate my mom’s chive dumplings at the dinner table. On New Year’s, I could still look forward to a red envelope with a few dollars’ worth of pocket money. But other things changed. I stopped learning Chinese, and my parents never became proficient in English. Slowly, so slowly I almost didn’t realize, it became harder and harder for me to communicate with them.

Because I didn’t feel like I could talk to them, I could never resist opening my mouth with others. I talked to good friends about Yu-Gi-Oh, to not-so-good friends about Pokemon, and to absolute strangers about PB&J, the Simpsons, and why golden retriever puppies were the best dogs ever. Even alone, I talked to my pet turtle Snorkel and tried out different war cries—you know, in case I woke up one morning as a mouse in Brian Jacques’s Redwall .

The way I communicated with my parents didn’t change until I came back for Thanksgiving my freshman year of college. I was writing for the school newspaper—a weekly column on politics. I had written an article in support of gay marriage. My parents had asked me about it, and in the way I was wont to do, I answered briefly before moving on to talk about my friends and my floor and my classes.

While I was brushing my teeth that night, my dad came into the restroom. He stood in the doorway and said, “Hey. I read the article you wrote about gay marriage… you should be careful saying things like that.”

His words—you should be careful saying things like that— sounded to me like homophobia. I knew that in China, same-sex relationships were illegal, stigmatized, banned, so I thought I understood where my dad was coming from, even though I also thought it was bigotry. I was about to brush him off, to accept that we had different views, but when I looked up, I didn’t see the judgment I was expecting. In the way he stood slightly hunched in the doorway, in the way he touched his chin, in the way his eyebrows drew together, I saw love. So I swallowed down “don’t worry about it” and asked what he meant. He told me about a cousin of his, someone I would have called Uncle, who was expelled from his school and sent to the countryside for his political comments. In that moment, I realized that my dad wasn’t concerned about my politics—he was concerned about me. Had I not stopped to listen , rather than just to hear, I would not have understood that. I would not have known why he told me to be careful.

Although I still enjoy talking to other people about PB&J sandwiches, I have learned to listen, to actively engage with my parents when we communicate. More importantly, whether I’m interviewing witnesses on the stand in mock trial, resolving disagreements between friends, or sitting in a chair while teachers and professors give me advice, I’ve made an effort to remember those words my mom has spoken since I was a toddler: “ting hua.”

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Greta’s Essay

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Successful Harvard Law School Essay: Statement of Purpose

Tantalized by the sight of the finish line, my legs kicked into high gear as I reached the end of my first Sprint Triathlon to the cheers of onlookers on a hot August morning. Almost a year of training had finally culminated in two exhausting hours of swimming, biking, and running. Even though I competitively ran cross country for seven years, my nerves about this day somehow handily surpassed the nerves about any race I had run during those years. For all the months leading up to the event, I was consumed by a nauseating anxiety that I would fail to complete one of the legs of the race and have to forfeit. Yet I was no longer competing for my school’s team; it did not objectively matter how I fared in the race to anyone but myself. However, the growth I underwent to stand confidently on the morning of the race and accomplish this milestone has a far greater worth than any medal or trophy.

Nine months prior to the race, I could barely swim one length of a pool, capable only of a survival-mode tread. As a child I churned through every swim instructor at my local pool, none of whom ended up succeeding in teaching me a proper freestyle stroke. When I returned home to Naperville after my graduation in December 2022, I was driven back to finish the work of those instructors. Wanting to apply myself to a genuine challenge, I committed to train for a triathlon given my lifelong aversion to swimming. My mom, an avid swimmer since childhood, patiently worked with me through the roadblocks of how to breathe properly and build up stamina for longer swims. The initial physical frustrations eventually gave way to aggressive jitters about the race itself— the fear that my heart would beat too fast and that my breath would escape me consumed my thoughts. In the face of every hurdle, she helped me dispel any doubt that I would not reach the triathlon swim distance of 375 meters. After about six months of incremental improvement, I went from struggling with 25 meters to regularly swimming a full mile.

My training ramped up when I returned to Baltimore to begin my new job at the Office of the Public Defender (OPD) in the Felony Division. Although I highly enjoyed my summer internship and was enthusiastic to continue working there, the gravity of the job seemed out of my depth. In my volunteer work at various shelters throughout college, my and the clients’ worlds intersected only for a few hours per week. I subsequently developed an ambition to contribute more wholly to advancing justice and equity in the city. Working at the OPD has further illuminated the dimensions of advocacy that require an even deeper level of trust and understanding necessary to pursue this work as a livelihood. This was never more apparent to me than when I sat alongside an attorney who, when she left the courtroom following her client’s guilty plea, consoled her client’s grieving family and discussed his sentencing hearing that would follow, where he later received the maximum sentence allowed by the plea.

The flexibility, tact, and empathy the attorney exhibited in her representation both inside and outside of the courtroom floored and inspired me. Sitting in the courtroom and hearing his sentence, my breath escaped me like it once had in the pool. It was clear that neither academic knowledge of the law nor a volunteer background would suffice in enduring repeated devastation and still needing to maintain my composure like she had. But just as in my triathlon training, I feel empowered to forgo what is comfortable and familiar in entering the legal practice through affirmation from my network of support. Through emotionally difficult cases and through technical considerations of how to employ the right case law or elicit the most beneficial testimony, the OPD’s attorneys have given me many opportunities for contemplating my own sensibilities as a future lawyer. In combination with the lessons learned in my years of volunteering and community engagement, I am piecing together the principles that will best contribute to my ultimate goal of being in service to others.

I seek an environment where I can engage with people, places and ideas that will push me to think critically and contribute meaningfully.

I am now ready to embrace the new challenge of law school, this time with more resilience and an even stronger desire to excel. Having transformed moments of discomfort and defeat into fruitful strides, I am prepared to walk alongside clients in pursuit of their proper treatment and outcomes despite any obstacles. As a lawyer, I aim to bring the holistic perspective that has informed my volunteer work and employment to any clientele I serve. To become the most effective and tenacious advocate possible, I seek an environment where I can engage with people, places and ideas that will push me to think critically and contribute meaningfully. I eagerly await the chance to add a new node of fellow devoted students to my support network, hoping that we can be vulnerable about our lived struggles and assist one another in realizing our potential. At Harvard Law School, I know I will find the tools to continue my lifelong work in progress, steered by my determination and buttressed by those who surround me.

Professional Review by LSATMax Prep

Many applicants hear “personal statement” and think “hardship story.” While a profound story about overcoming hardship can result in a successful personal statement, we loved that Greta’s essay illustrated one of the many other ways to craft a compelling personal statement. This essay only touches on two points in Greta’s life — training for a triathlon and a courtroom scene — but it succeeds because it’s a cohesive story of an applicant with clear goals and the drive to reach them.

In focusing on these two points, Greta’s essay avoids a common personal statement pitfall: the “résumé recitation.” Personal statements that recite each item in an applicant’s résumé can be dry slogs that don’t say anything deeper about the applicant. Greta’s essay is anything but that. From the beginning, Greta hooks the reader with evocative phrases like “nauseating anxiety” and “aggressive jitters.” She also gives us a sense of her personality, humorously describing her early attempts at swimming as a “survival-mode tread” and recalling how she “churned through every swim instructor” in her childhood.

Moreover, this part of her personal statement displays her empathy and passion, specifically her desire to provide advocacy based on a deeper

Most importantly, Greta’s essay conveys that she has the tools, drive, and personality to be a successful lawyer. Greta doesn’t need to say this explicitly in her personal statement — the essay’s two anecdotes show this. The anecdote about the triathlon shows that she can overcome challenges and knows how to push herself to reach hard goals. Her experience in the OPD shows that she has already thought about the impact an attorney can have and has begun working towards a career in public service. Moreover, this part of her personal statement displays her empathy and passion, specifically her desire to provide advocacy based on a “deeper level of trust and understanding” with her future clients. That she cleverly weaves together both stories with the line “my breath escaped me like it once had in the pool” is icing on the cake.

The Crimson's news and opinion teams—including writers, editors, photographers, and designers—were not involved in the production of this article.

Assistant Dean's Corner / Inside the Black Box

Timeline for the 2025 Application Cycle

Happy July! The J.D. Admissions Office is busy planning the year ahead, and we know many of you are as well. We wanted to share some useful information to help you prepare.

Here is our expected timeline for the 2024–2025 regular J.D. application cycle:

September 15, 2024

J.D. Application Opens

January 6, 2025

First Round of Acceptances

February 10, 2025

Second Round of Acceptances

February 15, 2025

J.D. Application Closes

March 17, 2025

Third Round of Acceptances

May 1, 2025

Deadline to Respond to Offer of Admission

As with past years, we won’t release any decisions until January 2025. Once we have a better sense for what this year’s applicant pool looks like (likely in early January, as we did last year ), we will plan to share deny decision release dates, and dates that we will invite some candidates to join our waitlist.

For those that are hoping to get started on your application, you can find full details on our requirements on our Application Components webpage. We haven’t made any changes from last year’s required materials, and the essay prompts for our two Written Statements remain the same. If you’re still deciding on when to schedule the LSAT/GRE, note that the February 2025 administration is the latest we would suggest taking.

We hope all this information helps to give you the time and space to prepare your application. Interested in connecting with us in-person or on the road next fall? We’ve published dates for our fall travel, on-campus, and virtual outreach on our Connect with Admissions webpage, and registration links will be posted soon. We look forward to getting to know you all in the year ahead!

~ Dean Jobson

Filed in: Assistant Dean's Corner , Inside the Black Box

Contact the J.D. Admissions Office

Website: hls.harvard.edu/jdadmissions

Email: [email protected]

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55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays, 2nd Edition: With Analysis by the Staff of The Harvard Crimson 2nd Edition, Kindle Edition

Fifty-five all-new essays that got their authors into Harvard, showing what worked, what didn’t, and how you can do it, too. Harvard Law School is one of the premier law schools in the world. It as well as other top schools draws thousands of applicants from the best colleges and companies. With only a limited number of slots for so many talented applicants, the admissions officers have become more and more selective every year, the competition has become fierce, and even the best and brightest could use an edge. This completely new edition of 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays is the best resource for anyone looking for that edge. Through the most up-to-date sample essays from the Harvard Law School students who made the cut and insightful analysis from the staff at The Harvard Crimson , it shows you how best to: * Argue your case effectively * Arrange your accomplishments for maximum impact * Avoid common pitfalls 55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays guides you toward writing essays that do more than simply list your background and accomplishments. These are essays that reveal your passion for the law as well as the discipline you bring to this demanding profession and will help you impress any admissions department. The all-new essays and straightforward and time-saving advice will give you all the insider tips you'll need to write the essays that will get you into the best law schools in the world.

• ISBN-13 978-1250047236
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• Publication date July 8, 2014
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Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., 55 successful harvard law school application essays, what worked for them can help you get into the law school of your choice, st. martin's press.

Chances are the "you" of ten, five, or even one year ago looks very different from the person applying to law school today. A full statement about the person you are often requires a look at the changes you have undergone. Essays in this section explain how applicants' mind-sets have been molded and remolded by experiences and by those around them.

As you trace your own personal evolution, be careful to proceed clearly and avoid covering too much ground. The reader should be able to easily follow your growth and development. Sometimes steps and sequences of events that feel obvious to you, the person who lived them, may seem opaque to an admissions officer.

For some applicants, the tale of evolution demonstrates the vital role of the personal statement in an application. For instance, one writer spent three years toiling in a pharmaceutical company's lab. On its face, the sudden application to law school might seem odd or even suspicious. But his essay paints a broader context of evolution, honing in on the more logical leap from compound creation to chemical patent law. Another writer spent years as a bookstore manager before returning to school, an unconventional path to law school. With context though, his motivation becomes far from early-onset midlife crisis. Instead, his essay weaves a narrative of leadership, parenting, and search for knowledge.

Not everyone needs to explain a unique set of circumstances, but a story of change can take many forms and can highlight a variety of qualities, from openness to discernment to strength tested by adversity. Above all, the story of how you have changed should point to who you are, and to who you see yourself becoming. Every other application component offers a snapshot of who you were or who you are — only the personal statement lets you look to the future.

ANNE-VALERIE PROSPER

"Hi I'm Joleen! I'm from Wisconsin! Where are you from?" trills the pretty brown-eyed girl in my dorm room. I sigh. I would love to have a simple answer to give her and, usually, when confronted with such a daunting question, I smile politely and answer some version of the truth. I try to read her. I wonder if it would be enough to give her the "I'm originally from Haiti" retort. This immediately evokes images of me as a little girl sitting at the kitchen table as my mother cooks " Grio " and laughs along to her Maurice Sixto tapes, relishing the Haitian comedian's depiction of Haitian politics. When coming from a country like ours, it's nice to be able to laugh at the folly of it all. This would be an honest answer after all. Although we left Haiti when I was one, my parents enrolled us into a French school in Maryland. We spoke French and Creole at home, I spoke French at school, I ate Haitian food, I listened to Haitian music; we even went back to Haiti twice a year every year — until things got really bad that is. I could always go with a different approach and tell her that I went to high school in Kenya. She might think of me as a world traveler. She might see me as riding matatus and playing with orphans, or, she could look at me as some diplomat's child with a driver and uncanny sense of entitlement; unfortunately, back then she would have been right on both accounts.

The thing is, the world attributes who we are with where we are from, and so, for a long time I didn't know who I was. I didn't know where I was from and so I couldn't know where I was going. All of that changed when I got to NYU.

I moved to the big city alone while my parents remained halfway across the world in Nairobi, Kenya. I chose New York because in fourth grade, on a school excursion, I saw Les Misérables on Broadway and it changed my life. I moved to New York having lived a very contradictory life. On the one hand, I was quite privileged. The international community in Kenya lived in their own world with their own set of rules. On the other, I had always had a heart for children and had spent much of my time in a baby orphanage known as "The Nest." I looked at these two-week-old infants, children of victims of rape who had died from AIDS and I had a piercing sense that something was not right; we were living in a world of disequilibrium and something had to give. I was going to change the world and I knew that I needed to go to New York; the same place that so beautifully told the story of a French orphan girl.

I had moved around before. I had lived in four places by the time I was eighteen and so I hadn't expected the culture shock to hit me; you always get hit harder when you don't see it coming. The city's stresses slowly but surely took their toll on me. I didn't know what I was doing anymore. Among the actresses and models, away from the slums and the injustice, my big plans didn't seem so feasible anymore. It wasn't until the second semester of college, when I joined a Christian fellowship on campus that my vision came back to life. I came to Christ that year and, later, with tentative support from my parents I moved into a house in the Bronx and became one third of the nonprofit organization A House on Beekman. We felt the biblical call to serve the poor and for us New Yorkers, Beekman Avenue was where we could do that. It was a far cry from the Kibera slums but it was the land of single teenage mothers who were victims of domestic violence. It was the place where dozens of kids had absentee parents and appreciated a healthy snack and a good story. These people weren't as poor as the people in Kenya, but they were marginalized. I started to see the other forms of oppression that existed. My roommates and I began to share all of our clothes and as we grew in community, God grew our ministry. More kids started showing up for family dinner on Monday night. More "gang members" started calling us "Ma'am" and pulling their pants up as they walked into our home. Living here has shown me what it is to serve in the United States. God continued to grow my intolerance for injustice when I received an internship at an immigration law firm. We mostly worked with asylum cases and as I walked into the conference room wearing a suit, and sat across a girl my age who was being forced to be the fourth wife of a seventy-five-year-old or who had to undergo female genital mutilation to be eligible for marriage, day after day after day, something in me snapped. I decided I was going to law school. I decided that I couldn't live a life that glossed over the gravest injustices of the world. I realized that I could hold orphans for months or give our Bronx kids healthy snacks for weeks, but that one day, I was going to die. One day, my roommates will die as will the lawyers at the law firm that I work at. I need to be a part of systematic change. I need to be a part of something bigger than the one life I have been given. I knew I was graduating in December, and so I applied to the International Justice Mission. I will be working there as the Human Rights intern in D.C. from January through April. My projects will be in Haiti, Ecuador, and Peru. I finally get to partner with lawyers who are changing the system from the inside out.

Through all of these experiences I finally realized where I was from. I realized that I am a child of God and a citizen of the world and this has led me to where I am going. I am going to law school. I am going to get a degree that allows my voice to be loud enough for all us world citizens. I am going to be part of the redemption that far outlasts the one small life that I have lived.

Admissions officers certainly see many tropes repeated in application essay after application essay. There's the "overcoming adversity" story. There's the "look at my passion" narrative. There's the "I have finally discovered myself" reflection. Without a doubt, these archetypes can get stale, especially for someone who is reading them as part of their fulltime job. The power of this essay arises from its masterful ability to synthesize those well-worn application genres into a compelling story of personal growth. One of the hallmarks of a successful application essay is the ability to capture the reader's attention — to draw him or her out of the monotony of reading prosaic bullet points that do little more than list the achievements that already appear on applicants' résumés.

While Anne-Valerie Prosper does not skimp on her personal accomplishments or her coming-of-age story, she takes those tropes and successfully brings them to life. Rather than account important aspects of her life, she grapples with them vividly, giving the reader a privileged look at both the details of her life and the lucidity of her mind.

Although Prosper does a formidable job integrating the various elements of her identity and development, she occasionally overextends herself. For instance, the reference to Les Misérables is accompanied by minimal interpretation or explanation. And the attribution "it changed my life" sounds odd and exaggerated, especially beside the compelling, real-world examples she provides. Of course, viewing the play might truly have been transformative, but unless the reader can understand and appreciate that influence, a reference like Prosper's can cause more trouble than it is worth.

Nonetheless, after reading this essay, the reader gains unique insight into who this author is and what makes her tick. She isn't as she lays out the case for herself, but she does impart a meaningful message all the same. There it is, right in the essay — impossible to pinpoint but also impossible to ignore.

— John F. M. Kocsis

ERIC T. ROMEO

Eighteen months ago, I viewed my career path as very divergent from that of my parents; both were attorneys, and I was a scientist. I had just entered my third year of employment at a major pharmaceutical company, and I was starting to come into my own as a medicinal chemist and making significant impacts on our drug discovery programs. I was working side by side with incredibly talented people at the cutting edge of my field, and yet I felt strangely unfulfilled. I began to reassess my plans for doctoral study in chemistry and in doing so, reflected on my path thus far.

My scientific career began in earnest in the chemistry lab of Professor William Armstrong at Boston College. Due to a lack of funding and resources at that time, I was given full reign over a research project normally reserved for graduate students. To compound the challenge, the research was centered in bioinorganic chemistry, something I had never studied before. Nevertheless, the prospect of leaving behind my textbooks and designing my own experiments proved sufficient motivation for me to start finding my way. With the generous support of my faculty adviser and labmates, my research grew over the next year and a half to include two other undergraduates, and produced an award-winning thesis project. The collaboration and problem-solving skills I learned in the Armstrong Lab would become invaluable as I moved into the next phase of my career, the pharmaceutical industry.

When I arrived at Merck Research Labs in the summer of 2007, I was excited to finally put to use the teachings from my favorite college class, synthetic organic chemistry. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that doing chemistry on paper is very different from doing it in real life. Because associate chemists at Merck are expected to spend most of their time making compounds in the lab, my lack of experience with organic chemistry techniques meant that I would have to start from scratch if I were to succeed. Thankfully, my experience of being thrown into the deep end at school prepared me well for this dousing, and with the help and patience of my manager, my skills in the lab grew by the day. Eventually, I became comfortable enough making compounds that I was able to think about designing and optimizing them. Delving into the patent literature and finding free intellectual property space to make novel drug candidates became my favorite task at work, and before long I was named as a coinventor on my first of five U.S. Patent Applications. It slowly became apparent that what I really liked about my job was not the chemistry of drug design, but the problem solving and strategy involved. I found myself in a quandary: I had fallen in love with the process of doing science, not just science itself.

The remedy for my dilemma was provided in short order by a "Patent Law 101" presentation given by members of our in-house counsel. There, I was introduced to the idea that intellectual property, rather than internal research and development, is the true life-blood of the pharmaceutical industry. It quickly became clear to me that the ability to create, protect, and manage this resource effectively is essential to generating the necessary revenue to fund all of a drug company's other functions, including my chemistry department. As the session drew to a close, I realized that intellectual property law, in the context of pharmaceuticals, offered me an opportunity to combine my aptitude for drug discovery with my love of creative problem solving. Over the next year, I met with patent attorneys both within and outside of the pharmaceutical industry to discuss my path forward. Additionally, I was able to attend a patent trial in Federal Court, and found the challenge of explaining science to the lay jury fascinating. In sum, these experiences served to further crystallize my desire to enter the field of law.

I intend to pursue a career in intellectual property law with a focus on chemistry and drug discovery. Therein, I hope to leverage my skills and experience as a medicinal chemist to provide clients with the unique perspective of someone who has stood in their shoes. I believe that such enhanced communication and understanding would foster a more collaborative, innovative, and productive discovery environment. I am confident that my past experiences in solving new and difficult problems will facilitate my ability to discover the common ground between the rule of law and the laws of science.

Every good essay makes a point to emphasize the positive qualities of the applicant. This one certainly takes home the trophy, punching out a different theme at the end of each anecdote. The first paragraph ends with an assertion of Eric Romeo's self-reflection and evaluation skills. The second brings out his quick adaptability and independent learning abilities. The third showcases his creativity in producing chemical compounds and willingness to seize and make the most of opportunities given to him. The fourth tells of his enthusiasm for his newfound passion, and his impeccable motivation and drive in pursuing his interests. Each paragraph homes in on a specific trait, and each fits with the others like the pieces of a puzzle that compose and present the ideal applicant.

Still, this essay does take on a fairly daunting task — explaining a career switch — and that comes with its pitfalls. Romeo sets the stage for his switch with the line, "I had fallen in love with the process of doing science, not just science itself." That line raises more questions than answers: Isn't a job in science a fusion of those aspects? Romeo then leaps to a presentation, and in a flash he is a law school applicant. The shift is abrupt. He doesn't need to attribute the shift to a single moment or quandary. The essay is at its best when it tracks his organic interest in patent law and its yearlong evolution.

That said, Romeo appeals to the applicative nature of careers in law by emphasizing his underlying passion for drug discovery, which drives his interest in intellectual property law. He ties this together in the last paragraph, where he specifically states how his indispensable previous experience in organic chemistry will assist him in his law studies, and how it grants him a unique perspective as a law practitioner.

— Luke Chang

ZAIN JINNAH

My university experience tore apart the foundations of everything I believed in.

Three years ago, I entered university with high ambitions but no target. I aimed to work hard, complete my degree in three years instead of four, and then study law to earn my way to a prestigious political career. I had a powerful passion for politics and was quite certain of my political views. I was also quite religious, and held a high degree of certainty in the veracity of my faith. These two elements formed the core of who I was at the time, but my first year of university would completely dismantle these convictions. In their place, it would instill a sense of confusion that persists to this day.

Curious about the new intellectual environment I had entered, I ventured to learn more about the faith of others by engaging in interfaith initiatives. But increased contact with those from within my own religious community bewildered me, as I encountered different perspectives that I found difficult to reconcile with my own. Looking outward to other religious traditions only confounded me further. Concurrently, my courses in political science shattered the positive conception I had of world politics and left in its place a dismal portrait of an international system motivated by power and greed. With my fundamental beliefs broken apart, I delved into the academic study of both of these areas in search of definitive answers. The lack thereof only led me into deeper confusion, and I wandered about in search of something certain to grab onto.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00HY0197C
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Griffin; 2nd edition (July 8, 2014)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 8, 2014
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 753 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 225 pages
• #39 in Law School Guides (Books)
• #66 in College Entrance Test Guides (Kindle Store)
• #72 in Law Legal Education

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27 Facts About J.D. Vance, Trump’s Pick for V.P.

Mr. Vance spilled scores of details about his life in his coming-of-age memoir. We’ve collected the highlights.

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By Shawn McCreesh

Follow the latest news from the Republican National Convention .

J.D. Vance, Donald J. Trump’s choice for vice president, has not lived an unexamined life. Here are 27 things to know about him, drawn from his best-selling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and the many other things he has said or written since.

1. His name was not always James David Vance. At birth, it was James Donald Bowman. It changed to James David Hamel after his mother remarried, and then it changed one more time.

2. He longed for a role model. His father left when he was 6. “It was the saddest I had ever felt,” he wrote in his memoir. “Of all the things I hated about my childhood,” he wrote, “nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.”

3. He had a fraught relationship with his mother, who was married five times. One of the most harrowing scenes in the book occurs when he’s a young child, in a car with his mother, who often lapsed into cycles of abuse. She sped up to “what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both,” he writes. After she slowed down, so she could reach in the back of the car to beat him, he leaped out of the car and escaped to the house of a neighbor, who called the police.

4. He was raised by blue-dog Democrats. He spent much of his childhood with his grandfather and grandmother — papaw and mamaw, in his hillbilly patois. He described his mamaw’s “affinity for Bill Clinton” and wrote about how his papaw swayed from the Democrats only once, to vote for Ronald Reagan. “The people who raised me,” he said in one interview, “were classic blue-dog Democrats, union Democrats, right? They loved their country, they were socially conservative.”

5. As a teenager, he loved Black Sabbath, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin. But then his biological father, who was deeply religious, re-entered his life. “When we first reconnected, he made it clear that he didn’t care for my taste in classic rock, especially Led Zeppelin,” he wrote. “He just advised that I listened to Christian rock instead.”

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School Vouchers Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget

July 16, 2024 at 9:32 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies,” ProPublica reports.

“In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.”

“Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending.”

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About Political Wire

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC .

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