“They ate his dog.”

That was the memorable summary of one applicant’s personal statement, probably five or six years ago. I remember that the line fairly leapt off the first reader’s sheet of notes, which was doubtless her point, and that I quickly flipped through the file to read the essay.

The personal statement itself was less pulp-fictiony than the summary, but was nonetheless dramatic. It told the tale of a Peace Corps posting in a very rural area of a country I will not name. (It’s not a country that is in the news much, and I can all but guarantee that you will have a paucity of information to counterbalance the story I’m about to tell. That seems a little unfair to the country.) The volunteer was making fairly good progress with acclimating to his new environment, but was dealing with a huge cultural and language divide. When a stray dog came across his path, therefore, he befriended it. He fed it part of his own daily ration, being sensitive to the importance of not asking for any extra food to feed a dog that the village was likely to view as a senseless consumer of goods better devoted to humans. No one voiced any objection to the arrangement, and he had no idea that it rankled. So when Peace Corps administrative business required him to leave the village for a full day, he was both surprised and horrified to return and find that his pet had become dinner.

What really made this a great personal statement was the way he used it to describe his own evolution; he had understood at one level how his relationship with the dog might be perceived by the villagers, but hadn’t really grasped the degree to which they were coming from entirely different places. And when he wrote about the incident, 18 months after the fact, he managed to combine fealty to his own values with a lack of bitterness for the villagers. All told, he exhibited a fundamental understanding of the degree of the divide he had been trying to bridge. It was a nuanced bit of work.

I’m often asked what post-graduate jobs are good pre-law-school experiences, and my answer is pretty unspecific: There are lots of jobs that will prepare people for law school and the world of legal practice in a variety of ways, and the right fit depends on the person. But it is nonetheless true that when I see the Peace Corps on someone’s résumé, I am prepared to be impressed. The Peace Corps does not actually guarantee a page-turning personal statement (although certainly there’s a greater likelihood that your two years there will result in something more lively than what was produced by my pre-law-school time as a legal assistant for a sole practitioner), but I don’t think it’s possible to go through the experience without undergoing enormous personal growth. And after two years in the Peace Corps, things like getting cold-called in class tend to roll right off of you—always a plus.

I’m thinking particularly about the Peace Corps these days because here at Michigan, we’re celebrating the Peace Corps’ 50th anniversary. Why should we celebrate particularly? Because it was here, on the steps of the Michigan Union at 2 in the morning, that JFK announced the creation of the program. Since its inception, more than 2,200 Michigan graduates have participated in the program (out of about 200,000 total volunteers)—and I’m proud that in the Law School, we count almost 20 Peace Corps alumni among our current students.

-Dean Z.
Assistant Dean for Admissions
and Special Counsel for Professional Strategies