Is this decent?
Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2012 5:19 pm
Hey guys so I was thinking of working the character sketch angle on my PS along with some light personal experience. If it helps I have a 3.92 UGPA and I don't know my LSAT but I think its (~170). Thank you for your criticism.
His face had clearly changed tone since he was born. He was no longer a particularly Irish pasty white but had developed a reddened skin. His physical features are otherwise relatively bland: average height, average weight, patches of grey hair. However, he has a devil-may-care smirk that was approximately as effective as Captain Kirk’s phaser at disarming most people. In a weird way, he was good at making people believe they were on his side, even when he was not. I suspect he would've made a great salesman.
To be clear this man is my father. When it came to discipline he had an unnatural ability to play the good cop. As kids, when we asked him how he was able to settle disputes like that. Apparently, it was a Hand secret transferred from generation to generation from which our (very distant) cousin Learned’s wisdom sprang. Sure, growing up I saw bursts of anger occasionally but like a splash in calm seas they had a certain way of fading away.
At the same time he had it, something I always worried I lacked: the Hand Charm. In my awkward years when I saw the ease with which he was able to use his wit with everyone around him from acquaintances to waitresses. Having been the first in his family to go to college he eventually earned a Master’s Degree which made him seem like the smartest person ever when I was 11.
However, my father didn't live happily ever after. He became a public sector worker, just like his father and his brother, and worked in wide array of fields. At various points in my childhood he had been a social worker, high school teacher, Board of Elections employee, Assembly ombudsman, and judicial employee. We were never rich. He always worked hard often times working a second job as a process server or doorman or security guard to make ends meet.
Somehow, it all didn't seem fair. It didn't always seem like education was worthwhile watching him do what he did with his Master’s degree. I kind of aimless drudged on knowing what I wanted. I wanted the American Dream: something better than my parents had.
When I got to college I had the option of working in the Chambers of Justice Peter J. O’Donoghue over a summer and landed an occasional gig helping out a small process serving firm in my neighborhood. In both positions I got to meet and work with attorneys and in many ways a lot of them reminded me of my father. They had the same self-assuredness I had noticed, and admired, years ago and carried the same intellectual with the regular guy polish that comes from working with the public often.
There was one huge difference: they may not have all been graduates of Law Schools as esteemed as yours but they all had a license to work in the field of their choice and to shape their services to please clients and make society a better place. They didn't seem like they had to please any political machine just to stay in business and put bread on the table for their family. I learned more and more of their field, from drafting orders for the judge, to locating flaws in attorneys’ submissions to doing legal research on WestLaw to noticing details about how they wrote as I explained documents to defendants with little education I learned one thing: this stuff was interesting. It reminded me of my Game Theory, Research and Industrial Organization classes.
For the first time in my life I felt confident. I know there isn't an exact one-to-one correlation between my work experience and an attorney’s job. Still I felt that I had found something: a career that would fulfill me intellectually and take me beyond where my father got stuck. I still remember what he told me when I told him I wanted to go to law school: “Son, I know you can do something great with it.”
His face had clearly changed tone since he was born. He was no longer a particularly Irish pasty white but had developed a reddened skin. His physical features are otherwise relatively bland: average height, average weight, patches of grey hair. However, he has a devil-may-care smirk that was approximately as effective as Captain Kirk’s phaser at disarming most people. In a weird way, he was good at making people believe they were on his side, even when he was not. I suspect he would've made a great salesman.
To be clear this man is my father. When it came to discipline he had an unnatural ability to play the good cop. As kids, when we asked him how he was able to settle disputes like that. Apparently, it was a Hand secret transferred from generation to generation from which our (very distant) cousin Learned’s wisdom sprang. Sure, growing up I saw bursts of anger occasionally but like a splash in calm seas they had a certain way of fading away.
At the same time he had it, something I always worried I lacked: the Hand Charm. In my awkward years when I saw the ease with which he was able to use his wit with everyone around him from acquaintances to waitresses. Having been the first in his family to go to college he eventually earned a Master’s Degree which made him seem like the smartest person ever when I was 11.
However, my father didn't live happily ever after. He became a public sector worker, just like his father and his brother, and worked in wide array of fields. At various points in my childhood he had been a social worker, high school teacher, Board of Elections employee, Assembly ombudsman, and judicial employee. We were never rich. He always worked hard often times working a second job as a process server or doorman or security guard to make ends meet.
Somehow, it all didn't seem fair. It didn't always seem like education was worthwhile watching him do what he did with his Master’s degree. I kind of aimless drudged on knowing what I wanted. I wanted the American Dream: something better than my parents had.
When I got to college I had the option of working in the Chambers of Justice Peter J. O’Donoghue over a summer and landed an occasional gig helping out a small process serving firm in my neighborhood. In both positions I got to meet and work with attorneys and in many ways a lot of them reminded me of my father. They had the same self-assuredness I had noticed, and admired, years ago and carried the same intellectual with the regular guy polish that comes from working with the public often.
There was one huge difference: they may not have all been graduates of Law Schools as esteemed as yours but they all had a license to work in the field of their choice and to shape their services to please clients and make society a better place. They didn't seem like they had to please any political machine just to stay in business and put bread on the table for their family. I learned more and more of their field, from drafting orders for the judge, to locating flaws in attorneys’ submissions to doing legal research on WestLaw to noticing details about how they wrote as I explained documents to defendants with little education I learned one thing: this stuff was interesting. It reminded me of my Game Theory, Research and Industrial Organization classes.
For the first time in my life I felt confident. I know there isn't an exact one-to-one correlation between my work experience and an attorney’s job. Still I felt that I had found something: a career that would fulfill me intellectually and take me beyond where my father got stuck. I still remember what he told me when I told him I wanted to go to law school: “Son, I know you can do something great with it.”