Veteran and an Architect - PS - please shred! Forum

[Capt_Beatty]

A grainy picture showing a destroyed building rearranges its pixelated path of destruction and the result is a simple clay hut, with a rooftop for families to sleep on during warm weather. The picture is one of many, an album of destroyed neighborhoods and infrastructure, inanimate victims of war, recorded at the altitude of 18,000 feet above mean sea level from the drone we’re operating. This exemplifies a typical day in my enlistment as a military intelligence analyst at Beale AFB in Yuba City, California, a 7pm to 7am marathon shift with a remote vehicle of war. The digital platforms we used introduced a new paradox of war, for blinding skies and grassy plains speckled with livestock are commonplace in Afghanistan and Northern California. As an 18-year old enlistee I had scarcely a sense of the world, and I contest, this high pressure experience made me search for fulfillment in pursuing an education, serving my community, and developing myself professionally.

Post-military I attended UC Berkeley, majoring in Architecture but I also enjoyed a variety of classes like narrative writing, Arabic, and city planning with an emphasis in disability accommodation. While I found that many of my student veteran peers studied political science and related to international conflict on levels unique but not entirely ubiquitous among student veterans, my academic pursuit in Architecture wasn’t a dissimilar conflation. It was in fact partly due to recollections of simple architectural elements like clay huts, burned or destroyed, symptomatic of conflict and vestiges of home. My response to war took a different form. Post-graduation I began working in my local community, building affordable housing projects in many Bay Area neighborhoods.

“Building fences in the pouring rain” is an allegory I experienced literally and carry with me as a harbinger of discussing job troubles. As a construction crew leader in the Bay Area, I was responsible for organizing volunteers to accomplish tasks related to our mission of service and affordable housing in the community. On a November day in Palo Alto, CA a crew of JP Morgan financial advisors joined us in the pouring rain to build a privacy fence for a low-income apartment building. Rain puddles turned brown with the sloshing of mud, and small arcs of electricity jumped from the frayed ends of a donated electrical cord. When we returned the next day our fence posts had shifted due to the concrete mixture being oversaturated, the result being a double helix shaped fence, more abstract than functional. Though these conditions were adverse, my military experience taught me to rally others past vexations to achieve common goals. We uprooted the fence posts and started over, this time in drier conditions. All told, the satisfaction I felt in contributing to the common good of my community through human effort was blissful, as each fence post, wall stud, and column was a victory over homelessness, community apathy, and housing inequality.

The experience in non-profit construction led me to more complex projects such as hospitals, cultural museums, and high-rises in the New York City landscape, all while completing my professional architecture license requirements of 3,700 specific hours and seven technical tests. Through my involvement in changing the New York City skyline I’ve become aware of the powerful underpinnings that drive that change. I’ve participated in hospital board meetings, community needs meetings, and public forums on the city and growth. It’s in these types of interchange, forums between members of the community and those who are poised to serve, change, or resurface it, that my interest in a legal education emerged. I believe the range of my experiences, from military intelligence to affordable housing, sustainable construction practices to disability accommodations, would add valuable experience and diversity to the University of X school of Law community, in particular the X concentration track. X is now home to my family and I wish to return with my life’s experience and build, metaphorically, a future in law.

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1. Rebuilding homes, communities, and yourself is a great theme.

2. Generally, your personal statement comes across as very sincere.

3. That sincerity is clouded by (a) unnecessary planks regarding your determination, grit, experience, etc. (i.e., your resume), and (b) really, really over-the-top word choice and sentence structure. Stay on topic with clear, simple prose.

4. You don't need to state what you want so explicitly in the first paragraph, or so formally in the last. It's a personal statement. The reader is interested in the journey, and if you tell your story right, talking about law school as the next step should be natural.

5. Also, fix your tenses in the first paragraph.

[Capt_Beatty]

1. Rebuilding homes, communities, and yourself is a great theme.

2. Generally, your personal statement comes across as very sincere.

3. That sincerity is clouded by (a) unnecessary planks regarding your determination, grit, experience, etc. (i.e., your resume), and (b) really, really over-the-top word choice and sentence structure. Stay on topic with clear, simple prose.

4. You don't need to state what you want so explicitly in the first paragraph, or so formally in the last. It's a personal statement. The reader is interested in the journey, and if you tell your story right, talking about law school as the next step should be natural.

5. Also, fix your tenses in the first paragraph.

Thank You!