I need a pesonal statement critque and advice please Forum

[ato308]

I haven't completed my personal statement, but I was wondering if this was a good opener to it.

Personal statement:

As a former foster child I was raised for failure. While other children were nourished, loved, and cared for, I was the property of the government, traveled temporary home to temporary home, and was malnourished. I lived in an abusive foster home for nine years of my life. I saw as that home fell apart. The divorce was the hardest part, as I watched my foster father old a gun tomy foster mothers head. Two weeks later I lived in a trailer park with a complete stranger. Over the next five months I was placed in four different homes. By the time I was eleven I witnessed more violence than the average adult witnesses in a life time. I was a product of a flawed system that allows foster parents to recieve a check with no intentions on loving or adopting said child.

Somtimes the grass is greener on the otherside. My life changed when I was adopted, May, 1999. After checking out of four foster homes, I was taken to the Hosage family. I was only supposed to be a temporary child for the weekend. I arrived with one garbage bag full of belongings. The Sunday that I was supposed to leave to go to a permanent orphanage until the age of eighteen, the Hosage family told me they were going to adopt me. They gave me a life, a home, and opportunties that were only real in my dreams.

Bloomsburg University Spring of 2012 brings another chapter to my life. I join a rare minority of former foster children that have earned their degree. Only two percent of former foster children in the United States graduates college.


I'm going to add to this and talk about how my experiences affects my ambition to be a lawyer. If you take the time to read this thanks, and any feed back would be great.

[CanadianWolf]

Very powerful material. Needs editing, however.

[ato308]

Thanks for the advice. Yeah I need to make to flow better.

[MumofCad]

Very powerful personal story. It needs further editing and coherence to the paragraphs below, but I tried to edit out the grammatical errors and left the content as you wrote it:

"As a foster child, I was raised for failure. While other children were nourished and loved, I was the property of the government, traveling around temporary homes, and malnourished. I lived in an abusive foster home for nine years, watching helplessly as the home fell apart. The divorce was painful and violent, devolving into my foster father holding my foster mother hostage with a firearm. I lived in trailer parks with strangers afterwards and by eleven had witnessed more violence than most see in a lifetime. I was the helpless product of a flawed system, which allows foster parents to receive a check with no intentions of bestowing a child with love or family.

I had no hope of breaking out of this cycle when I arrived at another new home for a short weekend stay. As usual, I came with a simple garbage bag full of all my world possessions, but this time my life would be forever transformed. At the end of the weekend, the Hosage's informed me that they planned to adopt me. I now had a home, fresh opportunities and most importantly the hope that my idle dreams of a happy life were within reach."

You could transition this into college with something simple about their love giving you the confidence to know you could accomplish great things and succeed despite your tough start - college stuff - then on to how your background both in the foster care system and understanding the transformative power of the adoption process drives your ambitions in law.

If you need any help with further edits - PM me. I am happy to help. I know many use professional editing services that are quite expensive, but you can most likely get what you need on here for free to even the odds.

My heart goes out to you. My husband and I have been investigating becoming a foster home with the hopes of adopting a few children. We decided to wait until after I am done with law school, because right now my job requires a lot of international travel. Its no problem for my kids, because I can take them with me, but legally could not with foster children. I refuse to leave any of my children, foster or biological, behind half the year and take others so its just not good timing. We were very upset though in going through the qualifying stages at some of the outrageous people being allowed through the system and the mentality of some of the CPS workers. It makes me livid to even think about. I was also incredibly frustrated with the issues surrounding the termination of parental rights, which effectively subjected children to ongoing instability, insecurity, and abuse while they slowly aged out of prime adoption hope. It is something I def plan to get involved in when I graduate from law school. A good number of the schools I am looking at have Clinics that deal with these issues, and I can't wait to get to my second year so I can dive in.

[thederangedwang]

good topic, but needs serious serious work. There are a lot of mixed and unclear imagery

"grass is greener on the otherside" (you fail to define what is the other side, or what side you are on)

In addition, you transition to fast, everything is a blur. Details you should squeeze out are only vaguely mentioned or ignored altogether.

[sparty99]

Decent start, however, there are grammatical errors and it does not flow well. Better transitions.