The Wisdom of Naivete
By Derek Haskew

It may have been a few years since you applied to law school, or perhaps you sent your last application by overnight mail in February. Either way, you don't ever want to deal with application essays again. But there's good reason to keep those essays, and reread them as your career progresses.

Of course, application essays are tailor made for admission committees, and as an applicant, I spent many hours trying to find words to show how worthy I was, and how uniquely talented, ambitious-yet-humble, scholarly, and ripe for the virtues offered by the ever-so-perfect fit between me and the [school name here] law school.

So why bother keeping those horrendous monuments to tortured and tortuously self-glorifying prose? (Or do I speak for myself?) Perhaps because there is something in those essays worth keeping, though perhaps more for some of us than for others.

If you worked earnestly to produce essays on which you were willing to pin your hopes for a career, chances are good that there is more of you expressed in those essays than in anything else you have ever written. That's an accomplishment worth remembering. As Lao Tzu said, "Real words are not vain; vain words are not real."

If you began with grand ideas, it would be a loss to us all if you were to forget them.

The sentiments one describes in an application essay may be noble, grand, hopeful, idealistic, earnest...and endangered. You have heard the idea more than once, and as a law student you have learned the element of truth behind it, but it bears repeating: the person you are before you enter law school is certain to be different from the one who leaves three years later. Given that, the question becomes, what part of you do you wish to have around to celebrate at graduation?

In retrospect, it is easy to see how nearly anyone who is accepted can graduate from law school. The challenge is in not being changed so much by the experience that you forget why you went there in the first place. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that one is being indoctrinated into a belief system incompatible with the person you described in your essays. If you began with grand ideas, it would be a loss to us all if you were to forget them.

If that sounds too grandiose, here's another reason to keep those essays: you may be your own best counsel when faced with life-changing decisions. Are you really committed to the ideas in your application essays? You may well be, and if so, you won't feel any sense of reproach from the old self when you take the position with a non-profit organization...though you may need a tangible reminder of your original goals to help you make that decision.

As an undergraduate more than a decade ago, I vowed I would never become a lawyer. So have I failed to follow my own counsel? Well, I do not fit the image I had attached to the word "lawyer" - and I hope I never do.

The lawyer I had in mind was a hollow man, who had given his mind to interests in which he could not invest his own beliefs or desires. He was a pawn, a man whose business suit defined who he was, as if created from the outside in. He was a grey-topped miser, dusting off sad accounts of old conflicts, seeking justification in the poor behavior of others for the poor behavior of his client. He was a necessary evil, from whom even his clients distanced themselves as soon as possible.

If my idea of a lawyer was a caricature that no person could ever fully become, it remains a reminder that nonetheless I have become the practitioner I am through choices which have not always been the most profitable ones. And occasionally, I will read an essay or two by that nave author whose sense of purpose set me on the course I follow today.

ABOUT DEREK HASKEW