Critique my PS please!
Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2017 3:42 pm
Hey TLSers...if anyone could be bothered to critique my PS here, it would be greatly appreciated (warning: it is a bit long)
Please please please be as harsh as possible...my numbers aren't going to blow anyone away so my essays must be on point. Any and all criticisms are welcome.
---------------------------------
When I received the letter officially notifying me that I had failed out of college a little over six years ago, I responded in the same way I responded to most things at that time: with indifference.
Looking back now, I truly wish that I could have someone to blame, or a set of mitigating circumstances that I could point to in order to absolve myself for what constitutes the single greatest failure of my life. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t. I had all of the tools, all of the advantages, all of the resources necessary to help me succeed, and I still managed to throw it all away for no reason whatsoever. Worst of all, I just didn’t care. Not a day goes by now that I don’t regret the series of choices I made which led me to that point, a series of choices characterized by a lack of responsibility and a nonexistent sense of purpose.
Aimless and with my life derailed from the path I had assumed it would take, I returned home to suburban St. Louis and began looking for a job. After a brief stint handling packages at a UPS facility across the city, I eventually found work delivering pizzas for a Domino’s franchise just a few minutes from my house. Going through the motions as I generally did at that time, I expected little from this job other than a meager paycheck, the primary purpose of which was to placate my parents’ demands to do something other than sit around the house all day.
Though it took me only a six-minute drive from my house to reach the store, I arrived on the day of my interview fairly shocked at the change that had occurred in the short commute to my new workplace. Trim lawns and well-dressed neighbors had been replaced with squalor and beggars; a string of tenements that I would learn to be Section 8 housing lay adjacent to the store. Growing up in northern St. Louis County, even in its further reaches as I did, one can never entirely escape the destitution that always lurks only a few mere miles down the road, festering nearby in places like the now-infamous Ferguson. However, like most St. Louisans I always had the ability to make my interaction with this aspect of the city relatively brief, experiencing it only momentarily as the backdrop for a shortcut to the downtown district or fleetingly as a series of images on the nightly news. I figured that the nature of the job for which I was applying would be similarly unable to interrupt the illusion I had constructed for myself. Hoping never to need to stray too far from the comfort of indifference, I took the job.
Unexpectedly though, as the weeks became months the squalor was gradually proving inescapable, and daily experiences with poverty, crime, and stark disenfranchisement became the norm rather than the exception. With every answer to my knock on the door as I went from delivery to delivery, it became more difficult to remain apathetic to the environment I now found myself in. One door opened to reveal a room entirely barren, save for a mattress on the floor and an overturned box-turned-ad hoc table beside it; another opened to reveal trash strewn across the floor and heroin paraphernalia on the table. In both cases, there were young children in the room. Such sights became sadly commonplace as I became more familiar with the area, and inescapable slowly morphed into suffocating.
However, what was perhaps most striking to me was the manner in which my coworkers reacted to this state of affairs, casually accepting each story I would recount to them and every event that we would witness: a gun pulled on a neighboring shop owner in the parking lot, an overdose behind the store, drug deals made in plain sight, etc. My new friends, having grown up just minutes away from where I did, nevertheless did not share my reality, nor indeed anything with me on paper: we differed by education, we differed by class, we differed by race and identity and any other litany of defining characteristics. Yet in spite of our seemingly disparate backgrounds, my co-workers and I quickly became close. My experiences communicating with my family, among whom I am an outsider of sorts as a native English speaker, helped me connect with people who otherwise might have considered me an outsider due to any one of our many divergent traits. I eventually became particularly close to my manager Michael: we would end up spending hours chatting in the store lobby after close, talking about our lives, our upbringings, and practically everything as time went on. He told me with tears in his eyes about his father’s (and his) struggles with alcoholism, about watching his best friend get shot and killed for a Michael Jordan jersey, and about the general lack of hope he had that things would ever truly get much better for him.
The continual juxtaposition of my life, defined by relatively good fortune, with his, defined by a lack thereof, increasingly engendered a feeling of deep self-loathing within me. My experiences with the area only amplified the effect, and soon, for the first time in my life, nagging questions began to spring up in my mind. How did I let myself get to this point? How could I have so callously refused to take advantage of what my friend would have killed to have had but a fraction of? How could I continue to justify my indifference to life and the resulting worthlessness I had thus condemned myself to? For a time, I genuinely hated myself: for the arrogance of having disregarded my opportunities, for the selfishness with which I had approached the world and my role within it, and for the lack of responsibility that was threatening to ensure that I never amounted to anything.
The pain of this series of realizations was debilitating at first, but slowly gave rise to something that I had so desperately lacked all along: a sense of purpose. I came gradually to believe that I owed it not just to myself to make something of my life and my intellect, but more importantly to others who did not have the ability or means to make much of theirs. Though I had been blessed with parents who embedded within me an empathy for the less fortunate, I realize now that it was only effectively an abstract appreciation of poverty and disenfranchisement. It was a detached compassion which demanded little more than my sympathy, yet the multitude of things I had witnessed called for a response as substantive as the hardship that had so moved me. A career in law therefore increasingly beckoned, its immense role in a society organized by rules seeming all the more important in light of my experiences.
Although I had previously toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, I now finally had a reason to undergo the long journey to reach that point, a reason to get out of bed in the morning to go to class, study for my exams, complete my papers, and so on. Eventually, my newfound sense of purpose brought forth a corresponding sense of responsibility, both of which served to guide me as I gradually made my way back to college. Over time, each would grow ever stronger as I progressed from those shaky first days back at community college to now being on the verge of obtaining a bachelor’s degree with honors from a respected university. Looking ahead, I fully expect the pattern to continue as I progress through law school and eventually embark upon my career as an attorney.
Please please please be as harsh as possible...my numbers aren't going to blow anyone away so my essays must be on point. Any and all criticisms are welcome.
---------------------------------
When I received the letter officially notifying me that I had failed out of college a little over six years ago, I responded in the same way I responded to most things at that time: with indifference.
Looking back now, I truly wish that I could have someone to blame, or a set of mitigating circumstances that I could point to in order to absolve myself for what constitutes the single greatest failure of my life. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t. I had all of the tools, all of the advantages, all of the resources necessary to help me succeed, and I still managed to throw it all away for no reason whatsoever. Worst of all, I just didn’t care. Not a day goes by now that I don’t regret the series of choices I made which led me to that point, a series of choices characterized by a lack of responsibility and a nonexistent sense of purpose.
Aimless and with my life derailed from the path I had assumed it would take, I returned home to suburban St. Louis and began looking for a job. After a brief stint handling packages at a UPS facility across the city, I eventually found work delivering pizzas for a Domino’s franchise just a few minutes from my house. Going through the motions as I generally did at that time, I expected little from this job other than a meager paycheck, the primary purpose of which was to placate my parents’ demands to do something other than sit around the house all day.
Though it took me only a six-minute drive from my house to reach the store, I arrived on the day of my interview fairly shocked at the change that had occurred in the short commute to my new workplace. Trim lawns and well-dressed neighbors had been replaced with squalor and beggars; a string of tenements that I would learn to be Section 8 housing lay adjacent to the store. Growing up in northern St. Louis County, even in its further reaches as I did, one can never entirely escape the destitution that always lurks only a few mere miles down the road, festering nearby in places like the now-infamous Ferguson. However, like most St. Louisans I always had the ability to make my interaction with this aspect of the city relatively brief, experiencing it only momentarily as the backdrop for a shortcut to the downtown district or fleetingly as a series of images on the nightly news. I figured that the nature of the job for which I was applying would be similarly unable to interrupt the illusion I had constructed for myself. Hoping never to need to stray too far from the comfort of indifference, I took the job.
Unexpectedly though, as the weeks became months the squalor was gradually proving inescapable, and daily experiences with poverty, crime, and stark disenfranchisement became the norm rather than the exception. With every answer to my knock on the door as I went from delivery to delivery, it became more difficult to remain apathetic to the environment I now found myself in. One door opened to reveal a room entirely barren, save for a mattress on the floor and an overturned box-turned-ad hoc table beside it; another opened to reveal trash strewn across the floor and heroin paraphernalia on the table. In both cases, there were young children in the room. Such sights became sadly commonplace as I became more familiar with the area, and inescapable slowly morphed into suffocating.
However, what was perhaps most striking to me was the manner in which my coworkers reacted to this state of affairs, casually accepting each story I would recount to them and every event that we would witness: a gun pulled on a neighboring shop owner in the parking lot, an overdose behind the store, drug deals made in plain sight, etc. My new friends, having grown up just minutes away from where I did, nevertheless did not share my reality, nor indeed anything with me on paper: we differed by education, we differed by class, we differed by race and identity and any other litany of defining characteristics. Yet in spite of our seemingly disparate backgrounds, my co-workers and I quickly became close. My experiences communicating with my family, among whom I am an outsider of sorts as a native English speaker, helped me connect with people who otherwise might have considered me an outsider due to any one of our many divergent traits. I eventually became particularly close to my manager Michael: we would end up spending hours chatting in the store lobby after close, talking about our lives, our upbringings, and practically everything as time went on. He told me with tears in his eyes about his father’s (and his) struggles with alcoholism, about watching his best friend get shot and killed for a Michael Jordan jersey, and about the general lack of hope he had that things would ever truly get much better for him.
The continual juxtaposition of my life, defined by relatively good fortune, with his, defined by a lack thereof, increasingly engendered a feeling of deep self-loathing within me. My experiences with the area only amplified the effect, and soon, for the first time in my life, nagging questions began to spring up in my mind. How did I let myself get to this point? How could I have so callously refused to take advantage of what my friend would have killed to have had but a fraction of? How could I continue to justify my indifference to life and the resulting worthlessness I had thus condemned myself to? For a time, I genuinely hated myself: for the arrogance of having disregarded my opportunities, for the selfishness with which I had approached the world and my role within it, and for the lack of responsibility that was threatening to ensure that I never amounted to anything.
The pain of this series of realizations was debilitating at first, but slowly gave rise to something that I had so desperately lacked all along: a sense of purpose. I came gradually to believe that I owed it not just to myself to make something of my life and my intellect, but more importantly to others who did not have the ability or means to make much of theirs. Though I had been blessed with parents who embedded within me an empathy for the less fortunate, I realize now that it was only effectively an abstract appreciation of poverty and disenfranchisement. It was a detached compassion which demanded little more than my sympathy, yet the multitude of things I had witnessed called for a response as substantive as the hardship that had so moved me. A career in law therefore increasingly beckoned, its immense role in a society organized by rules seeming all the more important in light of my experiences.
Although I had previously toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, I now finally had a reason to undergo the long journey to reach that point, a reason to get out of bed in the morning to go to class, study for my exams, complete my papers, and so on. Eventually, my newfound sense of purpose brought forth a corresponding sense of responsibility, both of which served to guide me as I gradually made my way back to college. Over time, each would grow ever stronger as I progressed from those shaky first days back at community college to now being on the verge of obtaining a bachelor’s degree with honors from a respected university. Looking ahead, I fully expect the pattern to continue as I progress through law school and eventually embark upon my career as an attorney.
