Here are essays written personally by us. There are two Personal Statements for university applications. For law students, we have included a legal memo and an Appellate Motion Brief below.
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Application Essay 1
"So as to achieve happiness, prosperity, and progress for our nation," while powerful and moving ideas, to a child, these words are meaningless. I used to feel that reciting this line was nothing more than a model waste of time, a way that the faculty ensured everyone got to school on time. The rote memorization of lines and the reciting of our national anthem held no meaning for me and the chasm of separation, between the words and the meaning, was never fully breached until much later in my life.
In the final year at the University of Washington, I began to seriously consider furthering my education. I wanted a career that valued my engineering skills and abilities but did not want to narrow my field to only one aspect of engineering. Through my experiences as an intern, I knew I would do well with a job that was driven by the needs of others. In addition, I wanted to talk and write about technology and began investigating the possibility of pursuing a career in intellectual property law. Besides reading books on this subject, I talked to intellectual property lawyers at career fairs and wrote to several law firms in the Seattle area. I felt a strong inclination that this was the career choice I had been searching for but continued to wrestle with the thought of going to law school because of the commitment involved with such a decision.
At this time, the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (FTA) had just came into effect, establishing one of the highest standards of intellectual property protection and enforcement for copyrights ever achieved in a bilateral agreement. As a keen observer of politics, I had closely followed the passage of this bill from its initiation to its conclusion. What struck me was the vast influx of technology and investments that U.S. companies poured into Singapore after the conclusion of the FTA. It occurred to me that the strong intellectual property protections, guaranteed to U.S. companies, laid the groundwork for stiffer competition throughout the country and poised companies to release technologies that have greatly benefited Singaporeans. Yet it was not too long ago that Singapore, as a third-world nation, was engulfed in a seemingly hopeless DVD pirating conundrum. As I witnessed the change that intellectual property law could provoke in a knowledge-based economy such as Singapore, I began to see intellectual protections as a way for me to apply my engineering skills to benefit society.
It was in my final quarter that one of my professors suggested entering our group’s power design project into the annual Electric Energy Industrial Consortium (EEIC) design competition. Our project was borne out of a simple need – to enable a flashlight to maintain its brightness even as the batteries wore out. The process of documenting our inventive design seemed strikingly similar to the process of drafting patent applications. I realized then that I could make very good use of my technical background as a patent attorney. Although my partner and I won the first prize in the EEIC design competition, I later discovered that someone else had already come up with a design based on the same principle as ours and was already marketing their product to interested companies. I was charged by the fact that our design was winning patents. The realization of the complexities of the legal world, when applied to invention and patents, propelled my ambitions into the realm of law which effectively cinched my desire to enter law school.
Discontented with my performance on the LSAT but unshaken in my determination to attend law school, I temporarily withdrew and accepted a job at Fluke Corporation as a test engineer. To facilitate my transition to the working environment, I knew I had to develop the ability to write well, make persuasive arguments and be guided by reasoned analysis’s. At that time, Fluke was in the final stages of a partial acquisition of Advanced Test Products, Inc. (ATP). I asked to join the integration team. My position on the team was to document the manufacturing process of the product lines at ATP that Fluke intended to acquire. The time I spent working with senior executives and management from both companies allowed me to gain an appreciation for the challenges involved in getting two parties to work together. For my competent work individually and my abilities to perform various tasks with confidence, I was rewarded with the responsibility of implementing and sustaining the ATP product manufacturing lines back at Fluke. Yet I never abandoned my aspiration to become a lawyer, and, with a renewed sense of purpose, continued taking night-classes in preparation for my second LSAT.
My decision to attend law school is based on a career goal developed from both research and self-examination. With the legal tools made available to me through a law degree, I will be using my background and my training in varied applicable fields. Moreover, the application of engineering, through the medium of law, will allow me to focus my talents in a uniquely productive way. The funny thing is that I can clearly see that desire that drives me today and it is “to achieve happiness, prosperity, and progress for our nation.” Through law I will be uniquely positioned to aid in the progress and accomplishments of others and their victories will be my own.
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Application Essay 2
Airplanes are cool! They are huge, powerful and can take you up, up away from that nasty old Earth. That impression motivated my initial foray into the world of science. I have always had a passion for questions. Why do planes fly? Why does a light bulb glow? Why do seeds sprout? What was the answer to life, the universe and everything? Now combine this predilection to ask every and any question under the sun together with a fascination of airplanes and you can probably envision me as a boy, with an infatuation for encyclopedias, the sky, and the stars.
I have since learnt that for most of us down-to-earth folks, the more useful question to ask is not ‘why’, but ‘how’. How can I make this faster, better, stronger? How do we increase efficiency? How can we apply the laws of aerodynamics? You can learn all about ‘why’ birds fly, but if the Wright Brothers had not discovered ‘how’, we might still be drifting around the globe in hot air balloons. An answer is only as good as the solution it provides. Such a belief led me to devise new (and to the chagrin of my parents, sometimes awkward-looking) creations in an effort to bring simple conveniences into my daily life. The search for solutions to the little things in life evoked a constant cycle of striving and fulfillment within me.
My interest in basic principles of science remained throughout college and I was happy to be learning them. But unlike my peers moving on to higher learning, I was not ready to emulate what I saw as the inevitable specialization of an engineering career. My ideas were broader. I wanted to talk about my design, write about it, present it to others and put it on the internet. The idea of being shipped off to a large corporation to work on a minuscule component in the next generation of microprocessors was less than appealing. This is not to say that such work is undesirable or unnecessary; I simply feel that communicating and interacting with people of varying disciplines is important in my overall development as a person.
An architect I worked with once said that architects learn less and less about more and more whereas engineers learn more and more about less and less until finally we knew everything about nothing. This is possibly true in philosophy, where students often get epistemologically depressed (they argue that the theory of knowledge proves that no one can know anything and then they get depressed about it), but I take the stand that this is not the case for most other disciplines. What you study may indeed be very in-depth and highly abstract, but the end result should be a deeper understanding of how this world works, which regardless of the many applications this knowledge may have, I find to be of intrinsic value. And nowhere is this quest more true and the resulting revelations more natural than through an acute awareness of the people around us.
In 1998 I made preparations to study abroad. I wanted to gain the character of an independent individual and sought the global perspective cultivated through the diversity of U.S. campuses. After a short detour through hell (a mandatory 30 months military service) I went on to complete a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington and accepted a position with Fluke Corporation as a Test Engineer. During this time I had the opportunity to do some of the actual looking for answers to life that I had talked so much about on a more profound level. I have also learnt many things from my stay here, from the basics (at any red-light intersection, the through lane only gets to go after the filter lane) to solving supply chain issues on the other side of the world. However, I believe the most important thing that I took away from these experiences was not so much a set of skills, but a mindset, a way of thinking about things which moves beyond what is stated and what is observed and what is happening, to what is unstated, what is unseen, to what might be happening and to the questions that must be asked in order to move beyond what has been done to what can be done.
The desire to understand more about the society we live in and the rules that govern its organization first motivated me to explore the field of law. Living under the dominion of the law as a child, I now seek to comprehend the law as an integral part of society’s politics, economics and culture. I feel it is a necessary study – one that is integral to the fulfillment of my purpose as a reasonably conscientious being. This want to become a knowledgeable and useful person is a task I have come to view as a personal responsibility.
From airplanes to architecture to engineering, the avidity to seek solutions to the little things in life has been invaluable to my analytical and logical development. And I have enjoyed my work and the tangible difference it makes to others. But a recent conversation with an In-House Patent Counsel at work confirmed an intuition that I might find interests other than the study of patent law (which I had originally intended to pursue because of my penchant for science) more fulfilling. Having yet to begin law school, professing to know how to best use the legal education made opportune to me seems unduly early. The study of law as I see it is constituent to applications both within and outside the framework of legal practice. In years to come, I intend for this study to have a wider application to society through my service in whichever field I am called to.
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