55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays by The Staff of the Harvard Crimson
Author:The Staff of the Harvard Crimson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466847590
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
JUSTIN LU
As I stood in front of my class, ready to begin my first lesson, I felt a flash of déjà vu. I felt as though I had been there before, swimming in that sea of expectant gazes. In fact, I had spent a great deal of my life in front of audiences—I had been a debater all throughout high school, and I had spent the last three years of my life competing on the USC mock trial team. Audiences were no problem.
Painted on top of the sense of familiarity I felt, however, was a thin veneer of uncertainty. Audiences are no problem because you know that they only expect so much from you. They expect you to impress them. They expect you to win the argument with grace and aplomb. All my life, I had stood in front of audiences and put my best foot forward, and most of the time, that had been enough. As I paused to consider the forty pairs of eager eyes staring at me, however, I realized why I felt differently than I had ever felt in the past. I saw in those eyes a different set of expectations: a set of expectations that I had never had occasion to consider before.
As students, these people expected something different from me. They expected me to be a teacher. They expected me to engage with their problems in a meaningful way and to put my vanity aside in resolving them. They cared less about how I performed and more about how they performed. Standing in front of my class, with a staggering number of gazes fixed on me, I realized that it was time for me to step up.
Thankfully, I did. My first lesson was a resounding success. I found inventive ways to explain the abstract material we were dealing with, and my students seemed to respond. They raised their hands and asked insightful questions, all of which I answered with grace and with more than a little aplomb.
After I concluded class for the day, my reward came quickly and in quantities I could not have imagined. Students approached me in numbers and thanked me for teaching them something new. Competing on the intercollegiate mock trial circuit, I was used to being congratulated on a good performance, but I was less accustomed to being thanked for helping someone become better. As the weeks wore on, I began to feel more accomplished than I had ever felt before. My students were improving, and the feeling was indescribable. My focus rapidly shifted from my own performance to the performance of my students.
I realized, somewhat later, that this sense of accomplishment was exactly what I had always been looking for in life. Helping real people with real problems gave me a stronger sense of purpose than public speaking for its own sake ever had. Helping people that I cared about improve themselves gave me a greater sense of joy than winning an award for excellence ever could.
Still, I was careful to let my emotions be tempered by an abiding sense of personal responsibility.
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