Application Question: Allocating experiences to the application form

[H48]

I'm struggling slightly with Shepherd and Wedderburn's application form, namely how best to allocate my experiences to the application questions. Three of the questions are:

1. Why does a career with Shepherd and Wedderburn particularly appeal to you and how would it suit your skills?
   
   
2. Describe your greatest achievement and outline what skills you believe were demonstrated in the attainment of this achievement.
   
3. Describe how your personal planning and organisation resulted in the successful achievement of a personal or group task

For the first question, I'm finding it hard to relate different aspects of the firm back to my own skills without talking about experiences that I want to talk about later in the application form. If I understand correctly, it's best to take a "show, don't tell" approach when it comes to skills and competencies, but is this the case where it'd involve repetition of experiences (even if from a slightly different angle/very briefly in comparison to the more focussed question).

Second, I am undecided as to which of my experiences to use for the other two questions. In terms of my greatest achievement, I haven't achieved anything spectacular but I'm probably personally most proud of my involvement with my university's widening participation programme, as I made a tangible impact on school pupils' lives and encouraged them to follow a legal career themselves. However, at the law fair I was told by grad recruitment that one of the main things the firm is looking for is to be able to put trainees in front of a client, and for them to have the confidence/independence to do so. Therefore, is using the example of my Erasmus year and the independence involved perhaps a better example?

Similarly, for the third question I could potentially Erasmus example if not used in question number 2 (focussing more on the planning involved, the fact I independently developed my language skills before and during the year etc). Alternatively, whilst I was on the committee for my university's law society I organised various events throughout the year including a pub quiz event that ended up selling out and raising £600 for a refugee charity. I was wondering if you could help me to decide which of these examples would fit best with the above questions?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Jessica Booker]

I'm struggling slightly with Shepherd and Wedderburn's application form, namely how best to allocate my experiences to the application questions. Three of the questions are:

1. Why does a career with Shepherd and Wedderburn particularly appeal to you and how would it suit your skills?
   
   
2. Describe your greatest achievement and outline what skills you believe were demonstrated in the attainment of this achievement.
3. Describe how your personal planning and organisation resulted in the successful achievement of a personal or group task

For the first question, I'm finding it hard to relate different aspects of the firm back to my own skills without talking about experiences that I want to talk about later in the application form. If I understand correctly, it's best to take a "show, don't tell" approach when it comes to skills and competencies, but is this the case where it'd involve repetition of experiences (even if from a slightly different angle/very briefly in comparison to the more focussed question).

Second, I am undecided as to which of my experiences to use for the other two questions. In terms of my greatest achievement, I haven't achieved anything spectacular but I'm probably personally most proud of my involvement with my university's widening participation programme, as I made a tangible impact on school pupils' lives and encouraged them to follow a legal career themselves. However, at the law fair I was told by grad recruitment that one of the main things the firm is looking for is to be able to put trainees in front of a client, and for them to have the confidence/independence to do so. Therefore, is using the example of my Erasmus year and the independence involved perhaps a better example?

Similarly, for the third question I could potentially Erasmus example if not used in question number 2 (focussing more on the planning involved, the fact I independently developed my language skills before and during the year etc). Alternatively, whilst I was on the committee for my university's law society I organised various events throughout the year including a pub quiz event that ended up selling out and raising £600 for a refugee charity. I was wondering if you could help me to decide which of these examples would fit best with the above questions?

Thanks in advance!

1) the main part of the question is why them. This is more about aligning your motivations and your skill set to what they can offer. In this instance I don’t think you do need to go heavy on explaining where you have developed those skills (unless the word count is exceptionally long).

2) the widening access answer already sounds a hundred times better from the brief description

3) is the Erasmus planning going to be any different to the 1000s of people who go on Erasmus each year? If not, it probably isn’t suitable