To conquer worlds with your Personal Statement, accomplish these six things:

1. Find a story to tell.

Somewhere in your life, there is a story that indicates who you are, and why you're you. Think until you find that specific, true story, and then use this space to tell it. Your personal statement should be a narrative; it should show the reader why you're a good fit for her school, instead of trying to explain anything.

2. Demonstrate leadership.

Your story should indicate that you have an impact on your world. Show how you've changed your environment. This tells the reader that you are a go-getter; that you make your life happen instead of watching it happen to you.

3. Show why you're a good fit.

Your personal statement should show the school that you're a natural fit. It's like a first date; you need to show the school why you'll be compatible. You’ll do this foremost through strong writing. Think 4 C’s: your statement must be Clear, Cogent, Compelling, and Correct (free of all error).

4. Avoid cliché.

Everybody wants to change the world. Everybody wants to make the world a better place. Why, specifically and individually, do you want to do those things? By keeping your statement as specific and detail-oriented as possible, you'll avoid the tropes that every other applicant trots out come personal-statement-time.

5. Don't mention your weaknesses.

Readers have an emotional connection to well-written essays. You don't want that connection to be pity or scorn. Use the addendum to your application to talk about your low GPA (if you must). In your personal statement, keep the focus on all the things that make you wonderful, and that show what a great addition you'll be to the school(s) you're applying to.

6. Put yourself in their shoes.

Your personal statement is a sales pitch. If you want to convince someone that they need what you're selling, you have to first understand what it is they need. Admissions officers want bright, active, diverse, accomplished student bodies. Keep those attributes in mind as you write, and use this space to show how you are all of those things.

So first, plan and write an essay that does those things.

For a door-opening Diversity Statement, do these things:

1. Tell me where you come from. Your Personal Statement is about who you are. Your Diversity Statement is about how your background shaped you. It’s usually about your culture (ethnicity, religion, shared interests, etc.), but it can be about any aspect of your background that will show the admission committee how you will make their law school more diverse by your presence.

2. To frame your statement, it may help to start with these two questions: 

1. How are you different from your peers? What facts of your history—your own experience or family or culture—make you different from the people around you? Or, if you come from a strongly unitary cultural enclave (you’re a Mormon from Salt Lake, or an African American attending Howard), it may help to phrase the question like this:

2. How are you and your peers different from the larger American culture? What cultural (or other) factors set you apart? Does your religious belief inform your culture or history? Are you stereotyped by others?

3. Show me how those differences have made you who you are. Was being different hard for you? Did it make your life easier? Did it improve your ability to assimilate or did it provide challenges you had to overcome? What does your diversity teach me about who you are and what you'll do at my law school?

4. Show me that you’re not a stereotype. If you have cultural influences that make you different from the majority, how are you different from other people who share your cultural influences? Imagine a small box (your cultural heritage) inside a bigger box (the majority culture). You need to talk about how the small box changes your relationship to the big box, and you also need to talk about how you fit within the small box.

5. Don’t lecture me, particularly on cultural differences. Yes, the current state of American cultural intolerance seems to be at a low ebb, but this is not the appropriate venue for your treatise on race- or gender- or religion-relations in the US. This is about you. Keep the spotlight on how your diversity has shaped you and what you will bring to law school, not how you think things ought to be in the world.

Do those things, and you’ll accomplish your goal of a winning Diversity Statement that gives law schools more information about you and more reasons to want you.

Look; you're a winner. You've used Kung Fu on the LSAT and beat it into submission. You've written an outstanding, tear-jerking, action-provoking, world-conquering Personal Statement. You wear sunglasses, even inside. Everything's going your way.

But you're doing your Law School application résumé wrong.

Here are 6 mistakes people commonly make—and how you can avoid them!

1. You forgot it was supposed to be an academic résumé. Law schools don't care that you were salesperson of the month three months running while you worked at Plain Jane's Whips and Chains ("Your Pain is Our Gain!"). That doesn't tell them that you're likely to succeed in an academic setting. You aren't applying for a job, so don't résumé (totally a verb) like you are. Job listings are important on your résumé only inasmuch as they tell schools what you've been spending your time doing. Put your academic credentials up top, and expand them; instead of listing your work achievements, list your academic achievements. This is probably the only place on the résumé that warrants expansion. Your job is to highlight that you're good at school. It's parallel to how you'd try to impress a prospective employer, but the important parts are about college, not work. [NOTE. This advice should be mitigated by theamount of time you've spent outside of college. If you graduated many years ago, it's appropriate to put more weight on your career. Still, even in this case, start from the perspective that academics matter here].

2. You brought up old stuff. Schools don't care what you did in high school. Why would they? In the same way that a career after college erodes the importance of the academic sections, the fact that you've graduated from college erodes your high school achievements. When we talk about your educational history, we mean your college and post-grad work. Here, let's try it like a cheer: When I say Academic Résumé!, you say College!

3. You included a skills section. Why on earth does it matter that you're proficient in MS Paint? Who cares that you can manipulate an Excel spreadsheet like Dexter handles a Thermo Scientific Shandon Rachiotomy Bone Saw? (Yeah, I looked that up). Skills are important to employers; work skills are not very important (if at all) to law schools. Now, if you have learned to do legal research and write strong legal synthesis, that would be worth mentioning.

4. You omitted an awesome "Interests" section. Now, don't fake interests. That's gross, and law schools have excellent BS detectors. But, if you do have a deep abiding love for scuba photography, this is useful to share. Law school admissions officers are like everybody else in the world; they're attracted to passion. Show them what you're passionate about, and then your Personal Statement will help them see that your passion can translate into performance in school (and on the bar!).

5. Your résumé doesn't match your Personal Statement. In that incredible Personal Statement we were talking about earlier, you told the committee that what you really want to do is change the world (but you didn't say it like that, because you took my advice and wrote it mo' better). OK. Cool. THEN WHY HAVEN'T YOU DONE ANYTHING TO CHANGE THE WORLD? Seriously, to be effective, every aspect of your application should tell schools about the best version of who you actually are. In other words, the separate pieces of the app should corroborate each other. Your résumé should remind the reader of the person they met in your Personal Statement. I mean, the two should at least look like they came from the same person.

6. You wrote a damn novel, not a résumé. Almost nobody needs more than a single page for their law school résumé (if you think you do, revisit points 1, 2, and 3 here). Getting it all on one page shows schools that you're good at an essential lawyerly skill; analysis. It shows that you were able to comb through all the information scattered behind you like a tail, and you picked out the important parts. Your résumé should make you seem like a curator at a great museum; it highlights the important facts and leaves out the extraneous crap.

So, avoid those 6 common errors and you'll be on your way to the kind of résumé that opens doors instead of shutting them to you.