Dear world:
By way of introduction, I thought I’d reproduce, with some modifications, the personal statement which I composed during my application to various law schools. Enjoy!
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One of the defining moments of my career both as a student and, more importantly, as a person, was my joining the High School drama club in the Fall of 1998. It was here that I began to come to terms with the age-old paradox between law and freedom, these two concepts ever in tension, yet, upon further reflection, inextricably intertwined.
Prior to my becoming an adult, I had always been something of a hell-raiser, the perennial “black sheep” of the family. I wasn’t malicious per se, but I shunned structure and discipline, did not take well to correction (fraternal or paternal), and manifested my discontent with authority frequently by petty defiances and (later) truancy from the classroom. Still, for all my childhood behavioral problems, I had done well academically from kindergarten until mid high-school. But while I may have been naturally bright, I was no blossoming philosophos, but an egotistical brat intent on proving to the world that I knew everything, and was smarter than the person sitting next to me. By the time I reached my junior year of high school, I’d worn of this mental masturbation, taking little to no regard for my studies and instead seeking emotional release in the school drama club.
I adored the stage, and was soon being assigned major and even lead roles in school productions. I found, strangely enough, that the theatre was providing me with that structure and discipline I had lacked for so long. I was amazed, even mystified, by how my artistic output was enhanced to the extent that I was faithful to the lines of the script, the characterization provided by the playwright, and the direction of my instructors. To adapt a line I would later pick up from the great G. K. Chesterton, the theatre did have its boundaries, but they were those of a playground. Within the limits set for me, I had infinite room to develop my character. This sublimation and transcending of the self also gave me a renewed appreciation for the mysterious and spiritual dimension to the human experience, which I have carried with me and developed in the years since.
In fact, I did not enroll in college immediately after high school. Rather, (much to the chagrin of my parents) I joined a Catholic religious order [an order of canons regular], submerging myself into the monastic regimen as intensely as I did that of the theatre. Within the walls of the canonry I encountered the same paradox I had years earlier on the stage. Whereas many of my colleagues and peers today see dichotomies between action and contemplation, between dogma and mysticism, I came to appreciate the extent to which a spontaneous, mystical spirituality could and did flourish within the boundaries set by the monastic regula of prayer, manual labor, and study. Within the respective environs of theatre and monasticism, the Script and the Rule are true legis, obedience to which are necessary preconditions for the well-ordered proliferation of that creativity which makes possible both the performing arts and religious mysticism. My intuitions on how law was a necessary precondition for liberty would be confirmed and deepened in my later reading of Plato’s Republic and Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law. I left the order after about six months. In the course of those months I was for first time in my life exposed to the Great Books of the Western World, and there were sown the seeds I have since cultivated, first on my own while I studied theatre performance at Broward Community College (BCC), and then as a Humanities/Classics major at Florida International University.
Having been graduated from BCC with my AA in Theatre Performance, I decided that what I wanted to do my last two years of college was to further cultivate, in an academic setting, my study of the Great Books. I would find my particular vocational “niche” during the course of my studies, and pursue it in graduate school. In the meantime, I wanted an education which would expand my horizons, expose my intellectual preconceptions, and force me to confront what the greatest minds of the world have had to say about questions of human purpose, political polity, life and death, faith and reason, and the other subjects whose study were once the foundation of what it meant to obtain a liberal education.
Through many sleepless nights, drilling myself in the accentuations of Attic Greek, committing to memory the minutiae of the design on the shield of Achilles, and preparing 30-page mock apellee briefs for my Constitutional Law courses, I’ve risen to the top 9% of my class with a 3.76 GPA, managing all the while to co-found FIU’s Humanities Club, of which I have recently been elected President. In the process, I have come to the conviction that my life’s work should be the continual, ever-deepening exploration of that to which I owe so much of my human growth and development: the law.
I strongly believe that I have much to contribute to the program of any prestigious law school: nearly ten years of performing arts, unique experience of the disciplines of a monastic regimen, a background in classical languages (Attic Greek and Latin), a year of academic excellence in the study Constitutional Law, and a genuine humanistic perspective to bear on my legal studies, cultivated by formal and sustained study of the Great Books and the Classics. My life experiences thus far have singularly equipped me with the social and intellectual tools with which I will thrive wherever I choose to pursue my graduate studies, as I continue to probe and reconnoiter that exciting dynamic between law and freedom.
