t in exchange for the knowledge I have received. I want these lessons in openness and compassion to shape my understanding of medicine and allow me to become the type of doctor I admire.

三、為什么你會(huì)獨(dú)特，與人不同，比別人優(yōu)秀？

從“與人不同”這個(gè)意義上說，例如，如果你是個(gè)年紀(jì)較大的申請(qǐng)人，是個(gè)少數(shù)民族，外國學(xué)生，運(yùn)動(dòng)員或音樂家，殘疾人，或具有不尋常的學(xué)術(shù)或職業(yè)背景，利用從對(duì)你有利的這個(gè)角度，說明你的特別的背景將會(huì)給該學(xué)院和你申請(qǐng)的領(lǐng)域帶來的好處。例如，對(duì)外國學(xué)生來說，一個(gè)有趣的題目可能是談?wù)撨@個(gè)國家的教育制度如何不同，為什么他們寧愿選擇它而不想在自己的國家和/或用自己的語言學(xué)習(xí)。

但是，必須注意，在許多情況下，玩不同的牌倒會(huì)得到適得其反的結(jié)果。

如果你是個(gè)“多樣性”的學(xué)生，當(dāng)然就利用這一點(diǎn)。但不要為了多樣而多樣而反復(fù)地提，也不要認(rèn)為由于“不同”本身就夠你被錄取。那樣會(huì)使得我們覺得自己在被玩弄，同時(shí)也可能說明你不知道如何利用一次好的機(jī)會(huì)。只有那些能證明有重大殘疾的人才應(yīng)該寫進(jìn)文章里。我是說不是目前流行的診斷過分的殘疾 du jour，在我的時(shí)代，這叫ADD。

其中的訣竅是把你的多樣性與你的動(dòng)機(jī)或品質(zhì)，或你能給班級(jí)帶來什么緊緊地結(jié)合起來。如果你不能做到，那你可能只是簡單地提一提你與眾不同的特點(diǎn)、背景或才能，而不是把它作為重點(diǎn)。這可是一個(gè)很有效的方法，因?yàn)樗�說明你對(duì)自己的條件和能力有信心，而且相信這些條件和能力會(huì)起作用。這就好象你只提到你是個(gè)盲人，或是從戰(zhàn)爭蹂躪的國家逃出的難民，或是一位提琴鑒賞家，但這些是為了在你那幅已經(jīng)十分迷人的多彩的肖像上增加效果。

然而，有些申請(qǐng)人的問題正好相反。他們覺得強(qiáng)調(diào)自己與別人的差異很不自然。例如，職業(yè)換景員或年紀(jì)較大的申請(qǐng)人，有時(shí)覺得把自己的經(jīng)歷寫進(jìn)文章不一定保險(xiǎn)，認(rèn)為他們這樣只能使別人注意到自己的大部分經(jīng)歷都在別的領(lǐng)域。如果你也象這樣的話，不要忘記你過去的經(jīng)驗(yàn)給你一個(gè)獨(dú)特的觀察問題的方法，因此你可以用你的文章把這個(gè)變成有利的一面，而不是不利的條件。還有一種選擇，你可以取其相同點(diǎn)而不是不同面，通過對(duì)你目前工作領(lǐng)域所需要的技能和你將來在研究生院所需要的技能進(jìn)行比較，使你的不同的職業(yè)經(jīng)驗(yàn)變得有關(guān)了。這位作者（例5）就學(xué)習(xí)英國文學(xué)和當(dāng)美國公民自由聯(lián)盟志愿者的經(jīng)驗(yàn)進(jìn)行了比較。

例5：美國公民自由聯(lián)盟（ACLU）志愿者

注意：為了教學(xué)目的，該文發(fā)表時(shí)未加修改。
When I began volunteering at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, I was a doctoral candidate in English literature, a budding scholar of the early novel. By the time I stopped volunteering ten months later, I had learned that I wanted to become a litigator, a lawyer who brought his political beliefs and persuasive writing to bear on some of the most important social issues of the day. My experiences at the A.C.L.U. opened my eyes not only to the complexity and urgency of impassioned legal work but also to my own professional aspirations.
Under the supervision of the A.C.L.U.'s generous and busy legal director, I was quickly exposed to many aspects of practical lawyering. My first job-assessing and responding to the organization's voluminous mail-required me to analyze the fact patterns that various correspondents presented. The many incoming accounts of police brutality, judicial indifference, and prison rape were often moving and frequently suspect. They forced me to temper my emotional responses and determine whether the complaints seemed both factually plausible and within the A.C.L.U.'s limited purview. After this challenging introduction, I was then asked to assist in the discovery phase of a prisoner's rights case. This work was detailed and intricate: my job was to reconstruct the specific events of a day in 1991 while searching for conflicts between the prison's official regulations and the actual conduct of its guards. As I called Michigan prisons for information, sifted through ten years of our client's prison records, and helped endlessly revise our pleadings, I learned a good deal about the small chores and thankless legal persistence that go into building cases.
At the same time, I found considerable overlap between my new legal tasks and my ongoing academic work. In an A.C.L.U. case I assisted in, for example, a judge overturned a state ban on partial birth abortion because the procedure had no precise meaning in the graduate lexicon, and the legislation might thus chill a wide variety of graduate practices. What fascinated me was that when confronted with the task of interpreting a knotty and important text, the twentieth-century legal system made many of the same interpretive moves as the eighteenth-century novel readers I had studied in my English graduate work. As the case unfolded, the pleadings debated the legislators' authorial intentions; the relevant Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedents; the contradictory testimony of various graduate experts; and, finally, the language of the statute itself. Like my eighteenth-century readers, modern textual interpreters were attempting to make sense of a silent, ambiguous document by finding ways to situate it within different historical, intertextual, and linguistic contexts. While particular interpretive conventions have changed over the centuries-modern lawyers cite prior cases and not Biblical parables to bolster their arguments-I came to realize that the broader task of comprehending texts (whether artistic expression or legislation) has not. Moreover, as I roamed through the stacks of Michigan's graduate and law libraries, I increasingly began to believe that it is precisely through interpretation, through embracing particular readings of Robinson Crusoe over others or through fighting over the legal standing of terms such as "partial birth bortion" that a society obliquely expresses its priorities and values as well as its blind spots.
I began making these connections partly because my work on the prisoner's rights case had forced me to question my own values and unspoken assumptions. Was I being co-opted by working on behalf of an unrepentant racist and murderer who complained at having some writings and a swastika confiscated by prison officials? Or was I defending the

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