My Personal Statement (First Draft)-Thoughts and Criticisms?
Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2010 3:28 am
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.
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.