NervousChemicalShrew '22–'23 app cycle Class of 2026 class year

It’s taken some time for me to figure out what I want to leave behind here on LSD as I end my cycle. I spent hours upon hours on this site for 8 months from the moment I decided I wanted to attend law school and stumbled on this site from r/lawschooladmissions until the day I got my admission to UCLA. I agonized over scores and statistics. I messed with the calculator after every single practice test trying to see the potential for me making it into the best schools. I didn’t enter my cycle with the best stats. In fact, with my actual stats, I had about a 12% chance of gaining admission to UCLA according to the calculator. Now I’m headed there 100% tuition free. I’ve been awarded the Achievement Fellowship and now I’d like to share what that is and a little bit about myself which might give you some insight into the sort of people they give it to.
I’ll summarize my essays (they were much better written than what I can fit here, I promise haha)

My Personal Statement: Born into an anti-science, young earth creationist, christian dominionist cult, I found myself growing up in an environment that drilled arguments into you. In the search of creating more effective arguments, I argued myself out of the cult programming as I found irrefutable, observable evidence of the age of the universe. Basically, light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum. The exact speed didn’t matter, only that it was not instantaneous. I performed experiments that proved this in school.Then I learned about redshift. The universe is expanding at a rate fast enough that the wavelength of visible light emitted from a body is shifted to be more “red”. [Longer wavelength (stretched) <-ROYGBIV-> shorter wavelength (squeezed)] based on the nature of the redshift, we can calculate the distance between celestial bodies. Because light does not travel instantaneously… those celestial bodies had to exist X number of years ago for us to see them. So a million-lightyear-away galaxy had to have existed a million of years ago for me to see it now with the light it emitted. This inspired my passion for science and I soon found myself in engineering. Why Law? I was born arguing for the sake of an argument, now I’d like to apply the skills impressed upon me arguing for something true. (There was a bit about the abuse of power that religion allowed to be wielded over my life and how important the law is when it is the only thing that can bring justice to the powerless.)

My Diversity Statement (for context, I am a white, heterosexual*, man who was born into the middle class, but diversity is defined in such a way here that it can come in many forms):
After we left the financial support of the cult and moved from LA to Austin, my father was turned in to the SEC for running a ponzi scheme by the cult leader (which is really the only way you support 9 children and financially subsidize a cult in southern California.) My family of 11 suddenly found ourselves homeless and struggling to find enough food to support 9 kids between the ages of 7-17. I won a writing competition in Mandarin which awarded me an all expenses paid trip to study at Shanghai University for a summer.

I was 14, but without a clear source of consistent food this seemed to be the perfect opportunity for me to no longer present as a burden to my family which already had too many mouths to feed. While in China, I met my mentor, Bill Fields, who was the former president and CEO of Walmart US while I was performing a tea ceremony for my class final in a historic tea house. He offered me a job after hearing my story and put me to work in factories in Dongguan, China. After a year, I started working as a sourcing agent in Shanghai and learned all I could from him about the global supply chain. Two years later he brought me back to the US to be his protege and finish high school. I worked full time for him while in my last year of high school. He then asked that I go to college so I would be a more appealing candidate to take over his business empire when he retired and paid for me to earn my ChemE and Nanotechnology bachelors in 3 years. (ASAP so I could get right back to work). (Some other shenanigans happened between attending college and high school due to my odd high school experience and not technically having taken all the classes necessary to “finish high school” and enter college. This was where I had to dual enroll in CC (lowered my LSAC GPA from 4.0 to 3.65), did a year with Americorps, and started rowing)
*married to a women, but we are both bi

Ok at this point, it’s clear to the admissions committee I’ve been through some stuff, but the Achievement Fellowship was “designed specifically for a small number (10) of academically talented, high-achieving applicants who have also overcome significant obstacles in life, such as socio-economic disadvantage, disability, being the first in their family to attend college, attending under-resourced schools, or other major hardships or challenges.” I’ve had some experience being socio-economically disadvantaged, but not for that long. I just honestly lucked my way out of it with an opportunity people just don’t get on purpose. I’m not the first in my family to attend college. In fact, before the cult got to them, my mother was a Harvard M.D. Oncologist, and my dad had an MBA from Pepperdine. (I guess they still had those things but… cults are wild). No, for the achievement fellowship I wrote about a significant obstacle that, since read AFTER essays about the things I had been able to achieve, hits a bit harder.

Achievement Fellowship Essay:
Diagnosed with a series of congenital brain tumors at age 3, I lived with constant headaches due to high intercranial pressure. Basically my brain didn’t have enough room in my skull from the tumors’ displacement and the pressure was high. (60 on a scale where 0 is “normal” and 90 kills you) That eventually caused me to drop out of school at age 10 due to an inability to spend more than 15 minutes sitting upright and focused on anything. I had 4 experimental craniotomies over the course of a year (age 10-11) with various goals at UCLA Neurosurgery which eventually led to a transformation of the last remaining tumor (still on my brain stem now) from malignant to benign. During the third surgery, a mistake was made causing severe damage to a portion of my brain that controls visual language recognition. At 11 years old, I lost the ability to read and write in English. Luckily, I had started learning Mandarin at age 8 due to a dream of becoming a fighter pilot (lol I can barely fly commercial with the pressure in my brain) and found my Mandarin reading/writing was completely unaffected. I spent the next 3 years relearning English reading/writing using Mandarin as my base language with my Mandarin tutor. I basically had to rewire my brain not to recognize individual letters, but rather the image of a word as a whole. When I handwrite, I basically draw the word, not write the letters if that makes sense. This experience made my Mandarin incredibly strong which is why, when I moved to China at 14, I was perfectly fluent.

This was my application. Each essay was connected to each other not just in the timeline of my life experience, but also in how something learned from one experience was clearly used to succeed in another. Lessons were learned, skills were developed and employed etc. I submitted my applications in mid-October and waited…

and waited…

and waited some more…

Got denied from all the schools I expected to basically in order of their ranking. Yale was first. All the way down till a PWL with Georgetown. Finally, the same day I got denied from Harvard, I got the fateful call from a (310) number. It was Dean Schwartz. I cried. He also let me know I was a finalist for the Achievement Fellowship and “more information would be coming soon”.

All Finalists (picked based off your essay and application as a whole) are interviewed by a panel of UCLA Alumni and a member of the admissions team. My panel in mid-february had a Black female civil rights lawyer, an East Asian male M&A attorney, and a White female member of the admissions committee. They asked a lot of questions about the lessons I learned and what I would name as the hardest struggle I had overcome. However, the final question was: “what are you most proud of?”. I talked about losing Bill. He died when I was 2 months away from graduating college (in the onset of the pandemic, March 2020) and I basically lost a father. However, his twin 13 year old daughter and son really did lose their Father. For the last two years since moving back to the same city they live in for my engineering job, I have had the opportunity to spend every weekend with them. I take them lifting and we just talk. I let them ask me about everything. I answer all their questions as best as I can, and I try to act as a role model for them. I’m most proud of the chance I’ve had to pass on the wisdom their father shared with me before he died to his kids who never really got to know him like I did. I’m most proud of the lovely young adults they’ve become and I’m so happy I get to be a resource in their life just as their family has been to me throughout mine.

Everyone cried.

I attended every admitted students event I could find. I attended their first ASW the first week of February (where I actually happened to speak with a member of my panel unwittingly a week before my interview), I attended their Alumni networking event in San Fran first week of March (and got to speak with the admissions person who had been on my panel) and finally attended their second, larger ASW a week later (I met a 1L awardee of the Fellowship, a fellow admitted student who had already been offered the Fellowship and got to learn more about their incredible stories). The deadline for the first 10 awardees to accept or decline the award was April 1st. By April 1st, 10 people had already received their offer and many finalists who had been interviewed had been told they were no longer being considered. I had heard nothing. I was told silence was a good thing. If someone does not accept the award, then the spot opens up and they award it to someone still on the list. Sure enough, someone didn’t accept their award and I received my phone call a few hours later. A 2nd round draft pick, but I was drafted. 4/03/23