Peace Corps Personal Statement - Input Needed Forum

[zdravo]

Almost done with it, but it'd be great to get some outside feedback. Doesn't have a punchy enough conclusion yet, kind of tapers off without the right tone, but please let me know what you think, thanks!

Personal Statement

Once you get back to the states, you tend to get asked similar questions about the Peace Corps. Whether it’s, “How was Mongolia?” or just, “Wow, Mongolia,” you learn quickly that condensing your service into an elevator pitch can’t be done. So you tell stories. When someone asks, “How cold was it?” you tell them about waking up with your Nalgene frozen through; when someone asks, “What was the craziest thing you ate?” you tell them about working with reindeer herders in the taiga, and how much fresh reindeer cheese tastes like parmesan; but when they ask, “How’d you do it?” you simply say, “small victories,” because that’s one thing all Peace Corps volunteers have in common. Our patience and flexibility waiver, but it’s the ability to motivate oneself in the face of continual defeat, through an unabashed appreciation for the smallest of victories, which defines the Peace Corps.

It must be a natural reaction to living in a developing country, where —by necessity— “tomorrow” is not really so much of a set date as a rough concept, and the stereotypically American insistence on planning and organization buts against unpredictable conditions. As such, you fail. Often. Your large projects, your classes, even your most mundane plans are continually undermined in seemingly ever-more-creative ways —like when you’re studying for the LSAT, but have to compete with your neighbor, the shaman, beating her drum. So you bend, embracing your failures as a process rather than an outcome, or you break. But when you spend every day facing an array of setbacks —from a daylong blackout, to a class with only one textbook, to a recent snow that’s made your firewood wet— you grow especially attuned to the things that do go well: the small victories. It’s the student who volunteers to read aloud from that one textbook; it’s the lunch your school workers make for you, because you’re busy and “too skinny for the cold;” it’s the kids you pass on the street who say, “Hi” in English; it’s the small victories in your day that keep you motivated enough to fail again tomorrow. But then there are the rare instances —moments made all the more significant because of this perspective— where you stop and realize that those small victories have added up to something big, and that you’ve failed your way to a win.

I had one of those moments last spring, while working with a team of American dentists —from the non-profit, *********— who came to my rural, provincial capital in Mongolia to provide free dental screenings and procedures for children. I was in one of my school’s math classrooms, which we’d turned into a functional operating room, with assistants in the back soaking and rinsing surgical tools in water I’d fetched from the river. The classroom was built in the Soviet style: narrow, with heavily painted wood boards, and cracked, rebar-lined windows running along one side. Through the glass, I could see students lined up around the building, their parents and grandparents —some still wearing fur-lined winter robes— waiting nearby. The room was all movement. The classroom’s janitor-cobbled wooden desks served as operating tables. On some, students were sitting up, looking nervous while waiting for the Lidocaine to take effect. On others, they were lying down, with a dentist in blue scrubs perched over them, and a translator —some English teachers from town, and a couple of my high school students— at their side.

I was resting against the wall, taking a rare lull between procedures to look out over the room. We’d been working almost non-stop, a pace that would continue, as we’d screen more than 2000 children over the week. That morning, I’d been teaching short Mongolian-language classes on dental hygiene —asking about eating habits and having kids demonstrate brushing techniques on a set of dentures— both to children as they waited, and to one of my high school students, who took over teaching for me. Since then, I’d been assisting in the operating room, hopping from procedure to procedure, translating for the dentists and their patients —my students. They were mostly primary and middle school kids, but almost all of them had never seen a dentist before. So I stayed during the extractions, holding a flashlight, translating questions and commands from the dentist, grabbing gauze and clean tools when needed, and trying to console my kids through the unfamiliar and scary experience.

Earlier that week, as the dentists were preparing to leave the US, I was in Ulaanbaatar at my “Close of Service” conference. As such, at that moment, leaning against the wall, my mind was primed to view things through the lens of my service. I was leaving my adopted town in two weeks. I was leaving Mongolia and the Peace Corps in four. What had my two years meant? What sustainable change had I encouraged? Who had I affected? What had I learned? That last one clicked, as I realized that this was the peak of my Mongolian. After two years of looking like an idiot while struggling to learn, I’d somehow ended up being a fairly competent speaker. So I was congratulating myself —for being able to switch between technical vocabularies, for translating in a demanding environment, for having taken every small victory I could in order to continue motivating myself to learn a foreign language— when the true moment of realization struck me: looking around, I was watching my students do the same.

Next to each dentist was a Mongolian, translating. A few of them were teachers, women who I had worked with closely during my two years, who had come to my seminars, who helped me twist the right arms to get projects completed, who invited me to their homes for dinner and holidays. Others were my high school students, a few about to leave for college, kids who I’d seen grow over two years, who’d come to my speaking classes every weekend, often walking miles in sub-zero temperatures to do so, who’d always been the kids to volunteer to read in class, who’d help craft most of those small victories that kept me going over two years. I watched them work alongside professional American dentists, struggling to do the same work I was doing, and not only succeeding, but excelling. I was so focused on a small personal victory, that I had almost ignored the large one that had been developing before me: this was the end of my service, but for them, it was just the beginning, and while I didn’t have ownership of their success, I can take pride in having helped get them there.

******Removed the name of the organization for this post

[to116]

this has the potential to be a fantastic personal statement. You provide rich description, it reads really easily, you avoid most of the over the top cliches. LIke all in all, i wasn't bored for a second reading it. But you don't really explain why you want to go to law school. That could be a personal statement for dental school, if anything. Maybe just add one paragraph at the end linking up those experiences with the desire for law.

[estamosjuntos]

I was also in the Peace Corps before law school and this is excellent. Don't overthink it. This is a unique story 99% of applicants won't have and the admissions staff will enjoy reading it.

[zdravo]

Thanks for the replies! I've done some significant retooling since I posted this, trying to pare down the length and make it a little punchier, but --like to116 said-- I was caught up about whether or not to have a "why law" statement.

Even on this forum (http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 8&t=234894), there are pretty differing opinions on whether or not to state it bluntly or implied, or not at all. But I think i'm leaning towards the latter. I remember reading, "your job is only to tell your story." Hopefully that's true, because I think I'm just going to operate with that as my assumption.