My Personal Statement (First Draft)-Thoughts and Criticisms? Forum

[mrvinyl007]

Hello, this is my first post on the board but I've been doing a lot of research on this site for a couple of months now. I just wanted to post up my personal statement that I am working on for applications that I'll send out this November after I take the OCT LSAT. Any comments and or criticisms on it would be greatly appreciated. I want this to be as good as it possibly can be, so please don't hold back. I probably went a different direction in writing it then most people do for their PS. Thanks!


I walked into my house after getting out of one my last days in ninth grade. Walking into the kitchen I seen my father sitting at the table with his heads in his arms. This was only the second time that I had ever seen him crying with such emotion. He immediately sat up from his seat and looked at me with weary and broken eyes. I broke the silence after a few seconds and asked, “what's the matter?” The silence reentered the room and a few more tears streamed down his pale face. Finally, he responded, “It's Paulette.” At the very mention of the name the tears seemed to pour out of his eyes as if they were an everlasting stream. A few more seconds passed and the river of tears subsided somewhat and allowed him to finish his sentence. With complete disbelief, he distantly said, “she's been murdered.”

Paulette Litzan had been a close friend of my father for a couple years before her murder. She was constantly over and I was able to get to know her very well during this time period. I still remember the set of bongos I had lent her, because one day when she was over she enjoyed the sound they made. Hearing that she had been killed was one of the most devastating things that I had experienced up to that point in my young life. My initial question after hearing the news of her untimely death was, why? Why would someone intentionally murder this thirty-nine year old mother? As I would learn, she had had a psychologically disturbed ex boyfriend, also her son's father, who for an eight year span constantly harassed and stalked her. Over the years she was granted restraining orders against her ex boyfriend, but none of it was enough to stop the late night threatening phone calls or the continued stalking and assaulting of her own boyfriend.

Only a few months before her death, the court had granted her the right to leave the state and move to Florida with her eight year old son. However, the court also during this same time period denied her request for a personal protection order until the move to Florida was complete. All the signs that would warrant a PPO were clearly there. Her ex boyfriend had had previous felonies of assault and a history of harassment against Paulette, but yet the court still denied her this one thing that would prove to be imperative to her survival. A couple months later Paulette would be found in her kitchen dead, shot in the head by her deranged ex boyfriend, who four days later would kill himself in a wooded area in Northern Michigan. The front page newspaper headline of her murder is still seared in my brain, “some say system is flawed but don't know what else can be done.” I had no interest in law at this point in my life and this moment would become one of the defining moments in my life. It made me want to perfect the flawed system and find solutions for a problem such as the one Paulette experienced in her sententious life.

Another defining moment in my life came two years prior. It was as if it were the same day as the day when I walked into to the kitchen to hear the news of Paulette's death. My father was on his knees in the kitchen crying as I walked into the house from a friends house. Eventually after pleading him to tell me what was going on, he explained with extreme depression etched into every syllable he spoke. He would go on to explain to me that he had confronted my mother with regards to her infidelities while they were still married. During the confrontation between my father, my mother, and her boyfriend, my father witnessed my mother thrown to the ground with no remorse from her boyfriend. For quite some time before this confrontation occurred, my mother had become distant with my sister and I while still married to my father. She would make excuses as to why she was staying at a friends house, instead of spending the night at our house. My father, sister, and I would also start to see constant bruises on my mother that would be explained by her with unbelievable excuses.

My father immediately filed for divorce after definitively finding out of her extramarital affair and asked for full custody of my sister and I. My mother didn't even attempt to fight for the custody of her children. I would come to find out that her boyfriend during her marriage had been convicted three times of domestic abuse on three different women. Soon my mother would fall into a comatose of prescription pill drugs and the time that my sister and I would be able to visit her became few and far in between until the visits all together stopped. To this day she is still romantically involved with the man that beats her. Every year or so I do visit her to try and persuade her to get some sort of help and get her back on her feet again, but denial is the only thing that she seems to accept anymore. During these visits I still see the bruises that run up and down her arms.

When Paulette's murder happened, I immediately started to think about my mother and the abuse that she knowingly accepts for reasons unbeknownst to me. Then I thought distinctly about all of the women in this country, and the world for that matter, who go through these types of suffering with little to no assistance from the law. I wouldn't choose to pursue a law degree definitively until my second year of undergraduate, but these memories of my mother and Paulette were constantly on my mind at all times. They are not the only reason, however, these particular defining moments are the predominant reasons as to why I want to pursue a career in law. These events shaped myself in ways that are difficult to describe in simple words. They have shaped my outlook on life and the way that I look at the world in a ponderous fashion. To simply put it, I would like to spend the rest of my life right the wrongs that I encountered during my previous twenty years. It is my profound belief that pursuing a career in law is the way to right those monstrous wrongs.

[You Gotta Have Faith]

First of all... you need to shorten it. Unless this is for Berkeley, or one of the other few schools that permits (or even encourages) 4 page personal statements, most schools don't want you to go beyond 2 pages or so. This is about double that. That said, I think you can keep a lot of the main points and tone it down.

Second, try to get the focus less on your father and more on you. You can still get the central theme of the story and how this affected him as well while accomplishing this. You just need to re-work it a little bit. Admissions committees are looking to learn more about you, not so much about the people in your life unless it is specifically how those people affected/impacted you.

Third, you kind of want an overall theme that brings everything together. For starters, you seem to have multiple things you are trying to tackle here. There are two "defining moments" in your essay, for example. Not that you can't mention both, or more, etc. But try to make one particular theme the "central" part and build on it.

And that's all I have after an initial glance. Don't have time to thoroughly critique it at the moment. Perhaps later when I'm not about to go to bed.

[CanadianWolf]

This is a very well written, convincing & powerful essay. Don't change a word regardless of page limitations. You have much to say & much to share & have done so in a persuasive fashion! This is remarkably well done, although it seems as if I have read this before.

[ShuckingNotJiving]

This is a very well written, convincing & powerful essay. Don't change a word regardless of page limitations. You have much to say & much to share & have done so in a persuasive fashion!

Umm, Canadian Wolf, I'm really beginning to wonder if you are just telling people what they want to hear, OR trying to avoid bolstering your the work of your competition (sneaky, sneaky you). "Don't change a word regardless of page limitations?" What?

OP, this is much too harrowing of a portrait for a PS. You want to highlight your strength as an individual, not simply bemoan the trauma of your past. It's almost manipulative in a way: "let me into law school because I've been through so much." You have, to be sure, but don't make it your central focus. Of anything. PS or otherwise.

The murder of Paulette is powerful, but when you go into the abuse, painkillers, divorce, domestic abuse, you take it too far. I was almost expecting a paragraph to begin: "And then, as I was thinking of my mother's addictions, Godzilla came, and wreaked havoc on our town." You might just want to generalize your family's issues, "After the murder of Paulette I started to think about the less-than perfect elements of my family. The abuse, divorce, substance abuse--then I started thinking of others facing similar situations in this country THIS IS HOW IT RELATES TO ME AND LAW" (Honestly, in my opinion, that's still overkill, but I guess that's your style).

The bottom line is this: stop writing so much about your family's dysfunction and start writing about how you are not defined by their actions, but rather regarding their mistakes as an impetus for your success. As a poster above said, there isn't hardly anything about you.

Also, why do you have the girl's full name on your online posting visible to THE WORLD?

Aaand, that's all the time I spending on this. Good luck.

[CanadianWolf]

Umm shuckingnotliving: The OP's essay is a professionally done piece; the fact that you don't recognize is...umm.... Several graduate schools use programs to check essays & personal statement type writings for "originality". Regardless, it is a powerfully written & highly effective piece.
P.S. @shuckingnotliving: Did I tell you what you want to hear?

[CanadianWolf]

P.S.S. As an aside, on another website posters have placed award winning writings on threads just to see who would critique them. One such essay, a highly acclaimed, ultra prestigious award winning composition, was torn apart by other posters.
@shuckingnotliving: I think that the OP made a fool out of you, although you did help it along quite substantially with your silly attacks and snarky remarks. The irony, of course, is that because you fell for this, you are the one who told the poster what he or she wanted to hear. Also, if you think that I write what other posters want to hear, then there are a lot of masochists applying to law schools. Nevertheless, a few words should be changed, e.g. " I seen my father...", which are obvious typos.
Also, when I use the phrase "professionally done piece" it is not intended to suggest anything improper. The writer or the writer's editor/proofreader/professor or both are highly skilled at crafting effective & polished compositions.

[esq]

I think that 'shucking' and 'you gotta' hit it right on the nose OP. While the content that you have is certainly compelling, it does little to make a logical connection between experiences and exactly how they have prepared you for the study of law.

The focus needs to shift away from your father and more towards you. You might focus more on how these incidents affected your viewpoint, rather than the harrowning details of the incidents, and because they have affected you in such a manner, you began to understand how limited the law was in domestic abuse cases. Because of this, you might enjoy working in a domestic violence clinic and then taking that experience into a career where you could shape policy as as a domestic violence attorney. It would be a good way for you to show your motivation because of these experiences, and even if you don't ultimately pursue these goals, nobody is going hold you to what you said in your PS.

I also think that 'shucking' is absolutely right. You are writing to academics who are looking for a tight knit argument, and want to see the ability that aplicants have to prusuade them that they would be good candidates for a legal education. Because of this, simply conveying that you are a candidate who has gone through some difficult experiences is not enough. While I admire you for what you have written here, it is much more than I have had to face in my life, you need to convey less of a "woe is me" point of view and more of a sophisticated argument for why certain experiences in your background necessarily connect with your potential ability, drive, and dedication as a law student. In short, you still have some work to do before you connect this PS with certain specifics that admissions will be looking for, but good start.

[mrvinyl007]

Thank you all so far for all of the helpful comments. My intention was never to make it so that the admissions folks reading this would feel sorry and let me in to their school. My main intention was to show that at some point in my life I realized that there was something wrong and one of the things wrong in the system got a family friend murdered. But after reading it again and again, I definitely agree that it sounds kind of sad and depressing, in a negative way. My next draft will definitely be shorter to hit that two paged double spaced limit. I think I'll shorten the time spent talking about my mother and make that portion much more concise. I'll also go back and make the statement more about myself and make a more persuasive argument that will convey my drive and ability to perform exceedingly well at law school. Thanks again everyone. I certainly appreciate it and any more comments were also be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[thecilent]

Would you really submit this as your ps? It makes no sense to me. This tells NOTHING about you

[ShuckingNotJiving]

P.S.S. As an aside, on another website posters have placed award winning writings on threads just to see who would critique them. One such essay, a highly acclaimed, ultra prestigious award winning composition, was torn apart by other posters.


@shuckingnotliving: I think that the OP made a fool out of you, although you did help it along quite substantially with your silly attacks and snarky remarks. The irony, of course, is that because you fell for this, you are the one who told the poster what he or she wanted to hear. Also, if you think that I write what other posters want to hear, then there are a lot of masochists applying to law schools. Nevertheless, a few words should be changed, e.g. " I seen my father...", which are obvious typos.
Also, when I use the phrase "professionally done piece" it is not intended to suggest anything improper. The writer or the writer's editor/proofreader/professor or both are highly skilled at crafting effective & polished compositions.

Canadian Wolf, notice how the part of your comment I quoted was not your use of the word "professional" to describe the OP's essay. I agree that the essay is professionally written in that it contains little /no grammatical, spelling errors. It's technically sound. I would imagine, however, that most individuals applying for law school can write a technically sound essay.

The part that I did quote, was your contention that the OP should not "change a word regardless of page limits." That is not the best advice. I would assume that one reason page limits exists is to assess how well applicants can concisely convey their ideas. With that in mind, you wouldn't want to just ignore them and write too much. Also, you contradict your contention that the OP "shouldn't change a word" by commenting on the "I seen my father" sentence, which is, in fact, one of the several words that should be changed.

I also quoted the part of about the essay being "persuasive." Although in reading the essay I am persuaded that she had a rough upbringing, I am not persuaded that she would be a good candidate for law school. Which of the two do you think matters most in an application for law school?

Lastly, your comment about the "ultra-prestigious" essay that was "torn to shreds" is laughable. Just because one essay that was highly-acclaimed, received harsh criticism, does not mean this essay that has received that has received some criticism will go on to be highly-acclaimed. I'm reminded of the "flaw" questions on LR with that one. Don't mean to be snarky, though.

To the OP, 1) I apologize for hijacking your thread with frivolous arguments and 2) I think you know what you have to change to make this the strongest essay possible. Again, good luck.

[CanadianWolf]

To me, it clearly shows one of your motivations for attending law school. Equally as clear is that I disagree with the above posters, but everyone is entitled to their own opinions. The worst personal statements, in my estimation, tend to be those that are simply chronological factual restatements of what should already be in your law school application and/or resume. The writing is beautiful, despite several minor grammatical errors involving tenses & improper use of plural or singular words, and evidences clarity of thought, is well organized & adds an additional aspect to your application that reveals much about your motivation & formative experiences.