THE WORLD

If you want to attend law school and become a lawyer, you need a desire to learn. For many applicants, the greatest opportunity to learn has been time spent in diverse parts of the world, and the content of that learning has shaped who they are. These essays jet from Madagascar to El Salvador to Korea and back to the United States, showing how their writers have grown by engaging the multifaceted world around them.

But these essays also run a very real risk of coming across as trite and cliché. Simply having an experience (or even many experiences) outside your home country doesn’t stand out on its own, and the list of essays involving service activities abroad is a long and at times monotonous one. Statistically speaking, you’ve probably lived the majority of your life within U.S. borders, and it’s more than fine to draw from domestic life. No need to include an experience abroad for the sake of including an experience abroad. Trust us, admissions officers have seen it before.

As a general rule you should consider shying away from this sort of topic, especially if your experiences say more about the place you’ve visited than they do about you. Not even the successful essays in this section are immune from this essay type’s pitfalls. However, if you have had a fresh experience worth sharing, and if you frame it right, showing how you’ve learned from the heterogeneity around you can make for a worthwhile essay.