55 Successful Harvard Law School Application Essays

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“Hi, I’m Joleen! I’m from Wisconsin! Where are you from?” trills the pretty earthy colored eyed girl in my dorm room. I sigh. I would love to have a simple answer to give her and, usually, when confronted with such a daunting question, I smile politely and answer some version of the truth. I try to read her. I wonder if it would be enough to give her the “I’m originally from Haiti” retort. This immediately evokes images of me as a little girl sitting at the kitchen table as my mother cooks “Grio” and laughs along to her Maurice Sixto tapes, relishing the Haitian comedian’s depiction of Haitian politics. When coming from a country like ours, it’s nice to be able to laugh at the folly of it all. This would be an honest answer after all. Although we left Haiti when I was one, my parents enrolled us in a French school in Maryland. We spoke French and Creole at home, I spoke French at school, I ate Haitian food, I listened to Haitian music; we even went back to Haiti twice a year every year—until things got really bad that is. I could always go with a different approach and tell her that I went to high school in Kenya.