Experience/Perspective Essay (Diversity Statement) Deep Dive with Former Law Admissions Officers

Main Ideas

What Experience/Perspective (E/P) Essays Are

E/P essays include prompts that were often previously called “diversity statements.” After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, schools broadened many prompts to ask more generally about applicants’ experiences and perspectives.

The panel’s view is that the underlying goal has changed little: admissions committees want a fuller, more multidimensional picture of applicants beyond their grades, test scores, résumés, and personal statements.

Applicants may discuss how experiences—including those related to race, culture, class, gender, disability, religion, immigration, or other parts of their lives—shaped their perspectives. The essay need not focus on a protected identity or on overcoming hardship.

Common Prompt Types

The panel identified several approaches schools use:

1. Broad, often optional prompts: Ask how an applicant’s lived experience, background, or interests shaped who they are and what they might bring to the community. Examples may include work, caregiving, service, family circumstances, disability, military experience, educational adversity, or an unusual upbringing.
2. Required experience/perspective essays: Ask all applicants to explain how their experiences or interests will affect their engagement with the school and legal profession.
3. Combined personal-statement prompts: Ask applicants to address both their motivation for law and aspects of their experience or perspective in one essay.
4. Expanded addenda: Some schools may use an open-ended addendum prompt for material that would previously have gone in a diversity statement. Applicants should check each school’s instructions rather than assume the addendum is only for test scores, grades, or character-and-fitness explanations.
5. A menu of short essays: Some schools offer several distinct topics, such as equal justice, public service, serving clients, free expression, or ethical leadership. Applicants must answer the selected prompt—not merely submit a general E/P essay.
6. Adversity-focused prompts: These specifically invite applicants to discuss challenges, while often allowing a broader range of circumstances than the examples listed.
7. Communication-across-differences prompts: These ask about a time an applicant encountered a contrasting viewpoint, how they responded, and sometimes what they would do differently now.

How to Decide Whether and What to Write

• For an optional essay, consider whether you have an insight or viewpoint shaped by your experiences that may be less common in a law-school classroom or legal setting—and whether it could contribute to discussion, collaboration, client work, or service.
• Do not assume the essay must describe trauma, dramatic obstacles, or a “distance traveled” story. Ordinary-seeming experiences—such as waiting tables, working retail, commuting, caregiving, or serving a community—can be revealing if they led to meaningful insight.
• Positive experiences can be just as valuable as difficult ones. A supportive community, cultural environment, or family experience may have shaped an applicant’s ambitions or outlook.
• If you have faced significant adversity, you do not need to hide it out of concern that discussing it diminishes your family, culture, or other positive parts of your life. Experiences can be complex and understood from multiple angles.
• Do not manufacture or exaggerate hardship. Authenticity matters more than drama.

A Practical Approach to Brainstorming and Drafting

• Start with the intended takeaway: Decide what you want the reader to understand or remember about you.
• Identify the experience and its effect: What person, event, responsibility, or circumstance shaped you? What changed in your thinking, behavior, or goals?
• Reflect on the insight: Work backward from what you learned about yourself, other people, or the world to the experiences that produced that insight.
• Connect it to law school or legal work: Explain how the experience may inform your participation as a student, classmate, future attorney, advocate, or community member. Do not assume the reader will infer the significance unaided.
• Look for a through line: If you discuss multiple experiences, show what connects them and what you learned. A list of unrelated episodes is less effective than a clear, unifying idea.
• Consider the entire application: E/P essays should complement—not contradict or needlessly repeat—the personal statement and other materials. Reuse material when appropriate, but adapt it to each prompt.
• Use trusted brainstorming partners: Others may help identify what is distinctive or meaningful in experiences that feel ordinary to the applicant. The final topic and interpretation should remain authentic to the applicant.

Writing About Disagreement

Schools may be assessing whether applicants can listen carefully, communicate constructively, and disagree without becoming personally hostile. A strong response can show empathy, maturity, self-awareness, and the ability to remain grounded in one’s views while taking another person’s perspective seriously.

Choose a genuine example and focus on how you listened and responded, what you learned, and—if asked—what you might do differently. Avoid presenting an impulsive or needlessly combative response as a virtue.

Do not force identity-related material into a disagreement essay if it does not naturally belong there. It should feel integral to the story, not inserted to satisfy a perceived admissions preference.

Common Pitfalls

• Writing for drama: Do not invent, embellish, or overplay adversity.
• Oversharing: Even when events were painful, the essay should have a clear admissions purpose rather than read like a therapy session.
• Focusing too much on someone else: Parents, mentors, and other influential people may be part of the story, but the essay must explain how the experience affected the applicant.
• Assuming the conclusion is obvious: Guide the reader toward the intended insight and explain how the experience may shape future engagement.
• Copying an essay across schools without adapting it: Prompts, word limits, and requested topics differ. Read every school’s instructions and answer the question actually asked.
• Including material simply to say more: Brevity and judgment matter; an optional essay should add useful context or perspective, not merely lengthen the application.
• Ignoring formatting requirements: Follow page and word limits, margins, titles, and school-specific upload or header instructions.

Qualities of Strong E/P Essays

Strong E/P essays are thoughtful, intentional, balanced, and specific. They are personal and authentic while remaining clear about why the experience matters. They offer a meaningful insight or lesson rather than simply recounting events, and connect the applicant’s perspective to how they may engage with law school, clients, colleagues, or the broader community.

They should also fit coherently with the rest of the application and help the reader understand the applicant more deeply.

Speakers and Sources Mentioned

Featured Speakers

• Anna Hicks-Jaco — Host and president of Spivey Consulting.
• Anne Dutia — Spivey consultant and former assistant director of admissions at the University of Michigan Law School.
• Sir Williams — Spivey consultant and former director of admissions at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
• Tom Robinson — Spivey consultant and former Harvard Law School admissions officer/manager.

Other Sources or People Referenced

• Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) — Supreme Court decision discussed as background for the shift in admissions-essay framing.
• Dean Manning — Cited for the phrase “listen generously and disagree strenuously”; a speaker also suggested the phrase may trace to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
• Jordana, a Spivey colleague — Mentioned in connection with writing about perfectionism and high expectations.