ps draft, please help tear it down Forum

[letmk]

No need to sugarcoat it. I was hesitant about posting it here, not confident at all, but I realize that the admission committees would be much more critical and must have seen a lot more of them.

Since English is not my native language, grammar mistakes and links between sentences are especially welcomed. Also, is the story convincing? They were all true, just don't know if I've made it interesting.

A small, lean boy stood behind a classroom podium, reading a letter to his classmates, yet he could hardly speak with tears in his eyes. That would be me apologizing for sneaking into a movie theater a few days earlier. I was eight and became enamored with the kung-fu movies such as Shaolin Temple by Jet Li. With my family barely made ends meet and could only eat meat once a month, however, I had no money to spend on movies. As I knew it clearly, I didn’t even try to ask my parents. Since the theaters in China at that time were as crowded as NYC subway, a couple of neighborhood friends and I found a way to sneak in when the inspector checked the tickets. Because we were so little and small, we just followed the crowds and got unnoticed. When my parents later found out about it, they made me write an apology letter and read it in front of my teachers and my classmates.

Actually things went way more back than that. It started when I was born to a farmer’s family, just a mile away from Yangtze River. My mom and we four children lived with my grandma who had serious tracheitis all her life, while my father, who was an electrician working under a coal mine in another province, could only see us once or twice a year. To survive, everybody needs to pitch in, both housework and fieldwork. My mom had to go back to do the fieldwork within two weeks of giving birth to us; my eldest sister was in charge of cooking for the whole family since age 7; since age 3 or 4, I started to do the work like pulling out the weeds, picking the cotton bolls, and collecting animal excrements on the road for fertilizers, anything that I was able to help.

Yet none of these hardships and adversities broke us down as I actually prospered from them. While we didn’t have any modern toys, we played many kinds of games using rocks and mud. Because nobody could babysit me, I used to sit in the last row of my sister’s class; hence I mastered hundreds of words and second-grade math before I started my first grade. Although I didn’t have a father figure by my side, I didn’t feel insecure or inferior to anybody at all due to my grandma’s optimism toward life. I got along with everyone as I’m a natural born people’s person.

So when my father finally got a chance to unite us with him to the coal mine town, I found lots of new and fun things I’d never seen, including the movie theaters. The fancy pictures and flyers outside the theater alone made me wander around for hours. That’s when the story in the beginning started. I was crying not because I felt grievance, but because I let my parents down. That I was always a good kid and did everything right didn’t give me one shred of right or excuse to make a mistake. I took it the right way as it turns out to be the one and only "lesson" my parents ever give to me. Since then, honesty and integrity have been carved in my bones. Whatever I crave, I know I can only get it by my two hands, not any other way.

With my ever-increasing self-awareness and self-motivation, my parents just let me be who I am and never interfered with any of my decisions again. They know they can trust me, and I repay them by being THE star student in high school, playing in many kinds of sports, and making lots of friends. Only on the eve of leaving home for college, my father gave me advices about three first priorities I need to place as: others come first, take care of your health, and find what you love the most and do it. I keep those in mind throughout my life. From an electrical engineering student in a top 10 university in China, to pursuing further graduate study and research in the U.S., to applying to law schools, I work extremely hard to fulfill my goals and dreams, without sacrificing others' interests or my own conscience and peace of mind.

[Gotti]

Yeah your sentences need some serious restructuring. I can help you later on tonight when I'm not at work but just glancing through it, I didn't want you to like submit tonight or anything with your PS looking like this. I'll PM you.

I'm not trying to be mean...just honest.

[Saltqjibo]

There's actually some pretty interesting stuff in here, but it is structured poorly and it is clear english is not your first language.

You might want to look into a professional editing service, or maybe just get TLS to help you. But make sure it get a final read through for grammer before you even think of submitting (I hear adcomms can be tough on those types of mistakes)