critique my rough draft ps Forum

[PearlGood]

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[crysmissmichelle]

It just feels forced. The opening paragraph is irrelevant and you never go back to it. The PS could make the same point without it. The Wikipedia quote could be condensed, not all of it is pertinent.

Honestly, it lost me from the very beginning. I'm sorry.

Also, the PS is really supposed to tell something about you. . .this tells about your goal but doesn't tell me anything about you.

[orangebluewhitered]

Yeah dude. Cut all of the irrelevant details- they confuse and bore the reader.

[mst]

Super awkward transition between the 2nd and 3rd paragraph. And by super awkward I mean non-existent.

[mr_toad]

I learn a lot about community planning. Are you sure you don't want to go into city planning? Great profession, have a friend doing that for a firm in Portland, OR, and she loves it.

No, seriously, telling a story is great if we learn about YOU from it, but I don't feel like I learned much until you spelled it out explicitly at the end. Agree with first poster, feels forced. If you could expand a part of the anecdote into a gripping first-person narrative, then maybe. Don't tell me you're a leader, show me how you led.

It sounds like you're doing really interesting work. But show clearly that this makes you a really interesting person.

[PearlGood]

All valid points, i had been struggling trying to somehow weave the two elements together. I feel like if I focus more on myself and my experience that it just becomes a narrative of a job I had... I feel that going straight from college to being in charge of a group of people twice my age in a brand new place was a tough challenge and I excelled at it but I cant think of how to convey it without it becoming boring and cliche. Some schools say write about whatever basically, but others ask for more concrete why you want to study law etc etc which makes it hard to combine the two.