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Job Resource Guides >>
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Lesson
Four: Issue-based Essays 
Issues-based essays come in many different forms. The best kind of issues-based essays are written by applicants who have a strong passion for a specific cause and can show why the cause is important to them and what actions they have taken to further it. If there is an issue that dominates your thoughts, studies, or activities, it is natural that this issue will also dominate your essay. This applicant, for example, begins: "I am an activist with a commitment to fighting for progressive causes through legislation, policy, and grassroots organizing." She continues to demonstrate that she has been an active advocate for citizens' right to sexuality education and health care on many fronts. This applicant also writes about a single issue but does not focus on her own political activity. Rather, she uses the essay to argue against the injustice that currently exists in the court system regarding the issue of gay rights. She then relates her points to her motivation in the last sentence with:
Other issues-based essays focus more on analyzing all sides of the issue rather than taking a stand from one viewpoint. If you do this type of essay well, it will show the committee that you are a person of reason and logic who can make mature, educated decisions based on a thorough analysis of issues. It is not even necessary that you come to any final conclusions-just showing that you can see and analyze all sides of an argument has validity. This applicant, for example, analyzes the issue of Latin American labor laws. She offers a nonstandard viewpoint based on her first-hand experience in the Peace Corps, but acknowledges the other side of the argument as well, without coming to any final conclusion:
The pitfall inherent in any of the above issues-based approaches is that applicants who write about their commitment to a social justice issue without backing it up with real evidence or experience risk appearing insincere. One admissions officer had this comment:
If your beliefs are genuine, you will be able to support them with clear evidence of your involvement in activities that demonstrate your commitment. Note: This essay appears unedited for instructional purposes. Essays edited by EssayEdge are substantially improved. For samples of EssayEdge editing, please click here. I am an activist with a commitment to fighting for progressive causes through legislation, policy, and grassroots organizing. While I have participated in many varied projects from editing a sexuality education curriculum to campaigning for gay rights as a local boardmember of [the statewide gay rights organization], I am most concerned with reproductive health issues. In this statement I will explain how I gained expertise in this field through both academic and professional work from 1988 to the present. Through this work I have acquired the intellectual foundation and the concrete experience to be an effective advocate for citizens' right to sexuality education and health care. At [school] I began my commitment to reproductive health. I earned the right to design my own major in women's studies and legal issues, for which I took courses in feminism and wrote on the developing legal precedent recognizing fetal rights. During my year at [school] I studied the impact the abortion pill RU 486 might have on the National Health Service, researched the evolving debate about the drug in the European press, and presented my findings at a Women's Studies Department seminar upon my return to the U.S. In my senior thesis on the legal treatment of pregnant substance abusers, I addressed the difficulties associated with prosecuting these women and proposed alternative approaches. While I was a student, I gained professional experience as a birth control counselor at the University health clinic. I also worked as a Planned Parenthood educator, for which I edited a sexuality education curriculum and designed and taught community programs on contraception, AIDS, puberty, and sexual abuse prevention. When I moved to a small desert town in the Western United States, I volunteered for a democratic congressional campaign, where I briefed the candidate on abortion rights and sexuality issues in health care reform. I met the executive director of the regional Planned Parenthood, and convinced her to hire me as the agency's first Director of Public Affairs. I coordinated grassroots lobbying efforts on pending legislation including the state's health care reform bill, clinic access bill, and anti-gay rights legislation. I quickly learned that this small town was far more conservative than my university's eastern college community. Many of Planned Parenthood's efforts to promote sexuality education were thwarted. I decided to discover who opposed the agency and what their tactics were. My research uncovered a network of local activists, some of whom had connections to state and nation-wide Conservative organizations. I attended many meetings and followed public right-wing activity such as the campaign to teach creationism in our local schools. I published my findings in an op-ed piece for our local paper, and as a front page article for a west-coast human rights newsletter. I have enclosed copies of these publications for you. When my State Senator asked me to manage his reelection campaign, I eagerly accepted since I knew he had worked hard in support of health care and civil rights. The position also offered me greater professional responsibility. Even though we lost the election, the campaign was an invaluable lesson in creating an effective political message, managing hundreds of volunteers, working in coalition with other campaigns, designing advertising, and fundraising. I had hoped to work in the state capitol after the campaign, and I am now working for a state level health care advocacy organization which employs a lobbyist and coordinates grassroots strategy. In my new position I am researching legislation, helping the director design lobbying strategies, and keeping affiliated organizations throughout the state informed about evolving policy and bills. While I believe that I have developed both academic and professional expertise in reproductive health policy, health care reform, and political organizing, I would like to acquire the skills and power to make a bigger difference. Law school would provide me with the technical skills and professional influence to be more effective in confronting right-wing litigation and initiatives and in designing and advocating for progressive social policy. After law school, I envision working for a non-profit organization such as the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, or working in government drafting and analyzing reproductive health policy and legislation. Note: This essay appears unedited for instructional purposes. Essays edited by EssayEdge are substantially improved. For samples of EssayEdge editing, please click here. In December of 1988, Texas state District Court Judge Jack Hampton sentenced a man convicted of double homicide to a term of thirty years. After the hearing, Judge Hampton explained the light sentence with the statement "I don't care much for queers cruising the streets picking up teenage boys. I put prostitutes and gays at about the same level. If these boys had picked up two prostitutes and taken them to the woods and killed them, I'd consider that a similar case. And I'd be hard put to give somebody life for killing a prostitute." Ideally, the American judicial system provides equal treatment to all parties. After working in the New York City jail system and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, however, I am dismayed by the disparity between ideology and reality. The court system which should treat all individuals equally consistently falls short of this goal. Because of various biases which exist within the court system, and within society as a whole, gays and lesbians in this country have historically been neglected or even persecuted by the law. In many ways, this neglect can be attributed to the social construct of the "closet." Because homosexuals in this country have been forced by society and the courts to suppress their own identities, their places within society are undermined. When gays and lesbians are told by society that they have a "lifestyle" rather than lives, and that this "chosen" lifestyle is abnormal and unacceptable, then they have been effectively forced out of society. Since the court system fails to address issues of discrimination in employment and housing, and neglects to punish perpetrators of hate crimes, gays and lesbians lose the one recourse which is supposedly guaranteed to all individuals. Justice Warren Burger writes in the Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986 decision, "condemnation of those practices [homosexual sodomy] is firmly rooted in Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical standards...To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching." When the highest court in the country condones the use of sexual orientation as a means to marginalize individuals, and people must conceal their identity to avoid societal discrimination, then gays and lesbians have truly lost their identities. Although the judicial system has made progress in correcting its ills, it is impossible to deny that inequality in the application of justice still exists. As an individual considering a career in the law, I have a responsibility to recognize the disparity between ideology and reality, and to condemn it. Through obtaining a law degree, I hope to join many others in the struggle for our rights and dignity, and strive within an imperfect court system toward the goal of greater equality within the law. Note: This essay appears unedited for instructional purposes. Essays edited by EssayEdge are substantially improved. For samples of EssayEdge editing, please click here. After college I served for two and a half years in Honduras with the U.S. Peace Corps. During my time there I worked on several development projects. My experiences left me with mixed feelings about development and what is realistically achievable. Projects often proved only thin band-aids against larger endemic problems. I found potential for changing some of the larger problems of development in a surprising arena, maquiladoras, or textile factories. While in Honduras, I talked to many women who worked in maquiladoras. Unlike what I had read in classes, these women were happy to have their jobs and suffered no health problems or abuse. They earned more money working in the factories in the cities than picking coffee in the mountains. Women could leave their homes and find work without having to depend on husbands or families to survive. The factory jobs had other positive side effects. I saw wealthy families driving to the countryside to find maids because all the city maids quit to work in the factories where they earned more. Wages for domestic workers had already risen and these families were trying to avoid paying an even higher salary. Also, factories required a sixth grade degree. This, if nothing else, could motivate an illiterate farmer to keep his daughters in school. How to balance these positive factors with the often exploitative and abusive methods of the factory managers, or how to control the problems of rural-urban migration are questions I am still investigating. However, economic opportunities outside of the home, such as those in maquiladoras, could play a key role in changing traditional attitudes that prevent women from developing and using their full potential. With the new U.S. policy focus on trade with Latin America and with more and more businesses using labor abroad, labor conditions in maquiladoras will be a growing human rights issue. At the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), I have been able to write letters to the USTR pushing for the continued review of the Generalized System of Preferences in Guatemala, to the President of El Salvador to encourage the enforcement of their labor codes, and lobbied for a labor petitioning amendment to the Caribbean Basin Trade Security Act. A law degree would give me a tool to continue to work effectively and realistically on this and other issues that contribute to the well-being of people affected by U.S. policies and investments in Latin America.
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