Jader wrote:draft #3 -- its about loving logical arguments and how much growth as a person is related to that love or whatever
A few weeks ago I had my final African dance performance. After it, I never felt more confident about my future. Let me explain: I was not anything special. It was just a simple fact that as I mediocre as I was, people were counting on me, and I did not let them down. It does not seem remarkable at first, but if you take an inventory of a successful undergraduate career, you find it is filled with term papers, finals, volunteerism, research projects and first jobs. There is a lot of training, safety nets and second chances and not many make-or-break moments. I found out that when one comes along, even from the most unlikely of sources, it can justify or discredit a lot of what you have done.
I was brought up being told that I was a “math and science kid.” So of course, I began my college career as a neuroscience major with medical school in the crosshairs. However, In about 2 weeks, to the expected dismay of my family, I was nostril-deep in Plato, Kant and Aristotle. I told myself that I was doing real learning. Looking back, I see that I just took pride in understanding things that other people simply could not. As I matured, I stopped taking pride in any perceived superiority to others, and I began judging my work on its own merits. Nearing the end of my undergraduate education, my greatest tangible achievements include individual projects with professors spanning multiple semesters that produced research papers on modern philosophy that greatly developed my analytical abilities. These abilities eventually became an unlikely influence on my personality.
During my sophomore year, I started working for the campus newspaper. This was when I truly began to uncover greater meaning in my scholarly abilities. I was the opinions editor, which was quite a challenge. The skills I learned, and the work I did, will carry me to success for a long time. I learned to understand that content sometimes does not matter. As an editor, a logical argument was really the only thing that mattered to me. I believed, and still do, a bad argument is not only worthless, it damages any idea you are trying to support. I had a personal responsibilities to my own ideas that appeared within my section to make sure they were expressed logically, but that was instantly overtaken by a professional duty to judge (and correct) an argument by its form no matter the content. Before I learned this, I would bounce from libertarian to socialist, from atheist to Buddhist. What I never realized was that it was not the ideas themselves I appreciated and valued, but the method and rigor of their presentation.
Yet there was always something missing, even while I worked as an editor and basked in this apparent utopia of detached reason. It was the same thing that prevented me from seriously considering at a career teaching and writing papers about Heideggar and Derrida even though the opportunity was there. It was suspicion that none of it really mattered. Not many people actually read what I was doing. Even if they were, I could not say even a fantastic argument in either a philosophy journal or a campus newspaper really helped people. I do not have that thought when I think about studying law.
While I cannot confidently say how precisely I will help people with a legal education, I know it will be the reason why I choose to attend. Like all applicants to top law schools, there are many choices in front of me seem, but everything other than a world-class legal education seems superficial, even immature, in comparison.
Leaps and bounds better than your first draft. Still some awkward lines in here:
Before I learned this, I would bounce from libertarian to socialist, from atheist to Buddhist.
Unless I'm mistaken, atheism and Buddhism aren't mutually exclusive.
It was the same thing that prevented me from seriously considering at a career teaching and writing papers about Heideggar and Derrida even though the opportunity was there.
I assume there's a typo in there.
However, In about 2 weeks, to the expected dismay of my family, I was nostril-deep in Plato, Kant and Aristotle. I told myself that I was doing real learning.
a)I don't know if you should say you disappointed your family by not going pre-med.
b)I think you need to explain WHY you switched more in detail. In my first PS which I sent out to a few schools, I talked about switching from Electrical Engineering to Political Science and emphasized that while I excelled in the engineering classes, I felt intellectually unexcited about these classes, while history and political science classes seemed more interesting and socially relevant to me.
