Almost every law school will ask for a personal statement as part of your admissions application. These statements are an integral part of your application, but what about the optional essays? Should you write these or not? They do say “optional,” after all. 

Bottom line: View these as additional opportunities to showcase your writing skills, but more importantly, as ways to provide a more layered picture of you as a person. Optional essays give you new ways to sway the admissions decision in your favor – plus you are demonstrating a proactive and determined attitude toward your application. This is something law schools like to see.

Optional Essay Prompts from Duke and Georgetown

Here are the optional essays offered by two law schools:

Duke University School of Law

Duke Essay #1 (Optional)

You may submit an essay providing additional information about why you have chosen to apply to law school in general and Duke in particular. We are interested in the factors that have prompted your interest in a legal career and the ways in which you think Duke can further that interest. If you have already addressed the reasons for your general interest in legal studies in your personal statement, it is not necessary to repeat that here; you may concentrate on the specific opportunities at Duke related to that interest. Please use 1-2 pages, double-spaced, for this optional essay.

Duke Essay #2 (Optional)

Our application process is designed to learn about you from multiple perspectives to better understand the unique and distinctive qualities you would bring to our community. Ideally, we would conduct personal interviews with each candidate to probe these questions. Since we are unable to offer interviews due to the large application volume, you are invited to write a short essay that tells us what you would hope to share if you were meeting with us on campus that we have not already learned elsewhere in your application. Please use one page, double-spaced, for this optional essay.

Georgetown University Law Center

Optional Statement

At Georgetown Law, we have always taken great pride in having an admissions process that focuses on the individual – we do this one at a time. If you would like to share any additional personal perspectives, reflections, or experiences – whether positive, challenging, a combination of both, or something else entirely – that have contributed to who you are as a person and as a future legal scholar and lawyer, we invite you to do so in an additional statement.

Optional Responses

An optional response is another way for the Admissions Committee to get to know you. If you wish, we encourage you to submit a maximum 250-word statement for any of the following:

1. What’s the best (or worst) piece of advice you ever received?
2. If you could “uninvent” one thing, what would it be?
3. Tell us about a moment in your life that you regret.
4. Describe your perfect day.
5. Share a top ten list with us.
6. One-minute video. Submit a one-minute video that says something about you. Upload the video to an easily accessible website and provide us the URL in an attachment to your application. The video must have permissions set so that anyone with the link may view the video. Please note that we are unable to watch videos that come in any form other than a URL link.

Perspectives and Tips on the Duke and Georgetown Optional Essays

In the optional essay prompts from both Duke and Georgetown, applicants can share their lived experiences or a statement of perspective. Many schools offer this type of optional essay. In reality, most everyone has had experiences that have significantly impacted their perspective and helped form certain personality traits. Be introspective. Take the time to consider how your unique experiences set you apart from everyone else.

Duke also allows you to tell the admissions committee “Why us?” (optional statement #1). Similar to the lived experiences or statement of perspective essay, many schools offer this option. Try to answer this prompt with as much personal specificity as possible. Avoid regurgitating details from the school’s website. Instead, tell the admissions team how specific aspects of the school’s culture, curriculum, faculty, and/or location are particularly suited to you and your goals. 

Aside from the more common optional essays outlined above, some schools offer applicants unique opportunities. For example, Georgetown allows applicants to respond to any of five optional prompts or to submit one video essay – in addition to writing the optional statement. Our advice: do both.

Place yourself in an admission officer’s shoes. If you have two applicants, and one has written only the personal statement, and the second, equally qualified applicant has gone above and beyond and created two optional essays that are well thought out and articulated, which applicant would you be more likely to endorse? 

We know it’s a lot of writing and effort, and we know it is easier to submit only the personal statement. But if you were looking for easy, you wouldn’t be applying to law school! Consider the extra writing good preparation for the years ahead.

If you need further guidance on writing optional essays for your law school application or the application process in general, schedule your free consultation with an Accepted admissions expert today!

Related Resources

• How to Approach Optional Essays to Strengthen Your Law School Application
• The Resilience Factor: How Flaws and Failures Can Strengthen Your Application
• Law School Letters of Recommendation: Expert Guidance and Samples