Tear Apart My Personal Statement
Posted: Sun May 03, 2020 12:34 pm
I'm hoping that I can find a few people to look over my personal statement and take it apart so I can improve it. A good part of it is carryover from a statement of purpose that I was writing for potentially attending grad school in Ed Policy. I've decided that I would rather attend law school, but I've had so difficulty "personalizing" my personal statement.
I am a product of rural America. Not the kind of rural that means you reside just outside the confines of a relatively sizeable town, but the kind where the monthly trek to Wal-Mart was meticulously planned and considered a road trip. Sadly, opportunity was not exactly a word that floated around my hometown. Poverty was rampant, tearing away at families and leaving more than one family destitute. Drugs were pervasive throughout the community, and their ill effects were on display daily. Further education was nigh impossible; I am the sole member of my high school graduating class to graduate from college.
Almost ten years after graduating from high school, I returned to my hometown as a teacher, eager to make a difference in students’ lives. I immediately discovered the nefarious forces that shattered students’ dreams when I was a student remained present. If anything, things had turned for the worse. The devastation of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 lingered, leaving many families even worse off than they had been when I was a student. Furthermore, work in the oil fields, where many of my town’s residents worked, had shut down, and a return to work was not in the foreseeable future. However, my role as a teacher afforded me a different perspective than the one I had as a student. For the first time, I truly realized how the poverty and drugs that ran unbridled through my hometown shattered the dreams and hopes of youth. The ills of my hometown had a direct effect on my students’ ability to succeed in school. Most students were not struggling at school because of a lack of desire or intellect; most students were struggling at school because of environmental factors entirely outside their control.
I soon came to realize the student laying their head on the desk was probably not them just being defiant. Instead, there was a decent chance the student’s parents were fighting all night long, and the student could not sleep because they could not block out the screaming coming from the living room. As coach of the school’s basketball team, practice was often cut short, so my players could get home to feed and put their siblings to sleep, due to mom or dad (or both) working a second minimum wage job at night to support the family. Most sadly, I saw the perfidious forces in my hometown consume the dreams of strong and intelligent young men and women. Within six months of teaching, the fact that I always found quaint—me being the only member of my graduating class to obtain a college degree—instead spoke volumes to the obstacles to success that youth from my hometown faced.
One of the most disheartening experiences of my teaching career came in my second year of teaching. I had a student who excelled in school and had plans to attend Oklahoma State University on scholarship to study civil engineering. As graduation drew near, the student’s excitement and hopes for a better future became palatable. However, one morning I arrived at school to find the student despondent. With tears streaming down her face, she explained to me that her mother had passed away the previous night. In one moment, all the students’ dreams for a better future were extinguished. The student had two younger siblings and with their father out of the picture, she would become responsible for taking care of her younger siblings. Her hopes of attending OSU were now nigh impossible.
It was scenes like the one described above that become seared into your consciousness. All the hard work, dedication, and perseverance displayed by a student go up in flames in less than a minute. Half a decade of experience in the classroom has led to me refuting the common refrain from politicians or economists that our education system is broken or failing its students. In my experience, the education system is tasked with fighting what amounts to a losing battle. The greatest educational theories and practices cannot defeat the myriad of environmental factors that strangle the hopes and dreams of students. The primary source of problems in the educational system is not poor teachers, old textbooks, or a lack of technology. The primary source of problems in the educational system are the myriad of social ills which spill over into the classroom. It is almost impossible to educate students whose only meals of the day are the ones they receive at school, or students who leave school at the end of the day and immediately report to work till almost midnight in order to help support their family. Many have called for an educational revolution; no educational revolution will be successful unless we first address the underlying social problems that inhibit youth from pursuing a quality education absent of fear or terror.
To truly help students, we must address the source of the problem. It is the distressed and downtrodden, like the inhabitants of my hometown, that rarely have a voice. My desire to attend OU Law School and earn my Juris Doctor is a byproduct of almost half a decade on the frontlines of rural education. I seek to be that voice within the legal system. The voice that fights for students' right to a quality education, the voice that fights for a student's right to be free of the shackles of poverty and seek out a better future. I have plied my trade in the classroom for half a decade, attempting to change students' lives from inside the system. However, I have concluded that if genuine change is going to happen—a change that makes quality education accessible to the most vulnerable of our society—it will come only when the most vulnerable have a voice that advocates and fights for their right to quality education and a better future.
I am a product of rural America. Not the kind of rural that means you reside just outside the confines of a relatively sizeable town, but the kind where the monthly trek to Wal-Mart was meticulously planned and considered a road trip. Sadly, opportunity was not exactly a word that floated around my hometown. Poverty was rampant, tearing away at families and leaving more than one family destitute. Drugs were pervasive throughout the community, and their ill effects were on display daily. Further education was nigh impossible; I am the sole member of my high school graduating class to graduate from college.
Almost ten years after graduating from high school, I returned to my hometown as a teacher, eager to make a difference in students’ lives. I immediately discovered the nefarious forces that shattered students’ dreams when I was a student remained present. If anything, things had turned for the worse. The devastation of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 lingered, leaving many families even worse off than they had been when I was a student. Furthermore, work in the oil fields, where many of my town’s residents worked, had shut down, and a return to work was not in the foreseeable future. However, my role as a teacher afforded me a different perspective than the one I had as a student. For the first time, I truly realized how the poverty and drugs that ran unbridled through my hometown shattered the dreams and hopes of youth. The ills of my hometown had a direct effect on my students’ ability to succeed in school. Most students were not struggling at school because of a lack of desire or intellect; most students were struggling at school because of environmental factors entirely outside their control.
I soon came to realize the student laying their head on the desk was probably not them just being defiant. Instead, there was a decent chance the student’s parents were fighting all night long, and the student could not sleep because they could not block out the screaming coming from the living room. As coach of the school’s basketball team, practice was often cut short, so my players could get home to feed and put their siblings to sleep, due to mom or dad (or both) working a second minimum wage job at night to support the family. Most sadly, I saw the perfidious forces in my hometown consume the dreams of strong and intelligent young men and women. Within six months of teaching, the fact that I always found quaint—me being the only member of my graduating class to obtain a college degree—instead spoke volumes to the obstacles to success that youth from my hometown faced.
One of the most disheartening experiences of my teaching career came in my second year of teaching. I had a student who excelled in school and had plans to attend Oklahoma State University on scholarship to study civil engineering. As graduation drew near, the student’s excitement and hopes for a better future became palatable. However, one morning I arrived at school to find the student despondent. With tears streaming down her face, she explained to me that her mother had passed away the previous night. In one moment, all the students’ dreams for a better future were extinguished. The student had two younger siblings and with their father out of the picture, she would become responsible for taking care of her younger siblings. Her hopes of attending OSU were now nigh impossible.
It was scenes like the one described above that become seared into your consciousness. All the hard work, dedication, and perseverance displayed by a student go up in flames in less than a minute. Half a decade of experience in the classroom has led to me refuting the common refrain from politicians or economists that our education system is broken or failing its students. In my experience, the education system is tasked with fighting what amounts to a losing battle. The greatest educational theories and practices cannot defeat the myriad of environmental factors that strangle the hopes and dreams of students. The primary source of problems in the educational system is not poor teachers, old textbooks, or a lack of technology. The primary source of problems in the educational system are the myriad of social ills which spill over into the classroom. It is almost impossible to educate students whose only meals of the day are the ones they receive at school, or students who leave school at the end of the day and immediately report to work till almost midnight in order to help support their family. Many have called for an educational revolution; no educational revolution will be successful unless we first address the underlying social problems that inhibit youth from pursuing a quality education absent of fear or terror.
To truly help students, we must address the source of the problem. It is the distressed and downtrodden, like the inhabitants of my hometown, that rarely have a voice. My desire to attend OU Law School and earn my Juris Doctor is a byproduct of almost half a decade on the frontlines of rural education. I seek to be that voice within the legal system. The voice that fights for students' right to a quality education, the voice that fights for a student's right to be free of the shackles of poverty and seek out a better future. I have plied my trade in the classroom for half a decade, attempting to change students' lives from inside the system. However, I have concluded that if genuine change is going to happen—a change that makes quality education accessible to the most vulnerable of our society—it will come only when the most vulnerable have a voice that advocates and fights for their right to quality education and a better future.