Personal Statement topic about family issues/death of family member? Forum

(Personal Statement Examples, Advice, Critique, . . . )
Post Reply
Pickles312

New
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:31 pm

Personal Statement topic about family issues/death of family member?

Post by Pickles312 » Tue Sep 01, 2020 7:55 pm

I've been trying for weeks to think of a good topic for a personal statement, and I've been at a loss. Frankly, there's just not much that's unique about me, and I haven't done anything remarkable. I'm a straight, white guy from a middle class northeastern suburb - so I'm pretty much the most generic applicant around. I don't have any diagnosed mental illnesses or disabilities either (I have terrible eyesight and had a lazy eye as a kid, but there's not much to say there).

Basically, there are only two things that have happened in my life that have affected me in any way that might be different than the average applicant - and they still aren't much. In any case, I figured I'd go over them and see what you guys think.

1.) I had a hostile family situation growing up. My mother was abusive to me and my sister - mostly emotionally/verbally, but also sometimes physically. It wasn't to the extent I've heard from others, so I don't want to make it seem that bad, but it wasn't great. When I was 9, my parents had a somewhat unorthodox divorce. Basically, my dad asked me if I wanted to go to a "sleepover" at my grandmother's summer house (not as luxurious as it sounds - it was two rooms and no one had lived there for many years). I said yes, we left for what I assumed was one night, and I stayed there alone with my dad for two years while custody was fought over. My sister stayed behind (I later found out she declined to leave).

For part or all of that period we had no heat, no air conditioning, no washing machines, no internet, etc. My dad often slept on the couch so I could have the bed. We weren't living in poverty, and I certainly don't want to pretend I was suffering or anything. Rather, it was a time where I changed dramatically in my personality and perceptions of the world. I learned to become independent in ways I hadn't. My mother is the kind of person who will try to control you and do everything for you so she can say you owe her for it later. Living with my dad allowed me to be my own person and not deal with that, while also having a role model who was changing with me. We learned to cook together because he didn't know how. I helped him fix up and update the house so my grandmother could sell it when we moved out. I learned how to look out for myself and appreciate the basics I had taken for granted a lot more. I also learned that there were ways to live without screaming, cursing and fighting - I had acted out a lot at home as a kid, mirroring what I saw.

At the same time, there was a lot of uncertainty because I had very little idea what was going on behind the scenes, or when I'd see the rest of my family again. I have no idea when my parents actually legally divorced because I wasn't privy to it. The summer before 7th grade my parents both got partial custody of us, and I began a half/half schedule that became the new normal in my life.

Tl;dr: My dad and I left my house when I was 9 and lived alone together for a couple of years after having been in a somewhat abusive situation with my mom growing up. I learned a lot and really became my own person during that time.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm hesitant to go this route. Certainly having a bad home life or having your parents get divorced is not a unique or special experience, so I'm afraid it would seem like I'm being dramatic. In fact, reading my paragraphs above back, I already feel that way. Plus, this all happened when I was 9-10 years old. I've read in other places that your PS should be about something more recent and relevant to who you are now. While I've kept the lessons and experiences of that time with me, I'm certainly not the person I was on either side of that period anymore. And finally, it doesn't have anything to do with law or why I want to pursue it.

2.) The second thing happened when I was 17 and just entered college. I went through the opening week like everyone else: meeting people, joining clubs, getting acclimated. Then, the first Friday I was in school, I got a call from my dad that my grandmother had had a stroke. I was close to my grandmother growing up, although we weren't inseparable or anything. She would visit my dad and I a bunch when we were alone after my parent's divorce, and we grew a bond. Later, as I got older, we saw each other less frequently. She lived in the city, which was a bit of a drive, and she was getting less mobile to visit us. Still, we remained close. She was my confirmation sponsor and probably the only extended family member I have who I stayed in contact with as a teenager.

During that initial call, my dad told me she had been hospitalized and was alright, and I was able to talk to her quickly (which would end up being our final goodbyes). However, she soon began to deteriorate until she passed away two weeks later. All the while, I was kind of locked in my own head. She was all I could think about during that September. But at the same time, I had literally just started college. I was falling behind socially and struggling to keep my head in my academics. Yet I couldn't actually see her in her final days, because I was stranded 4 hours away from her at college. It also meant I couldn't be their for my dad as he saw his mother slip away before him. I felt horrible.

After she passed, my dad was finally able to pick me up at school, and I went home for the funeral. It was the first funeral I had ever been to that I could remember, and it took a lot out of me. Then, when I went home that night, I found out that one of my best friends from high school had been in a terrible car accident and was in a coma. The next few weeks were spent once again taking phone calls from a hospital and scrambling to find a way to visit him. Ultimately he ended up recovering, but his accident definitely was a shock during a grieving process I already wasn't prepared for, and it exacerbated the problems I was having adjusting to school.

I guess the result part of this story is that my grandmother's death made me reflect on who I wanted to be, as corny as that sounded. My grandmother thought the world of me and gave me way too much credit for a lot of things. She thought I was brilliant, even more so than normal grandparents who brag about their grand-kids. She was an immigrant who built everything she had from pretty much nothing, and my grandfather had grown up in even worse conditions as an orphan with no education at all. Seeing her grandchild taking AP classes and get into honor societies was something she could barely comprehend. I always felt a little guilty that she thought so highly of me, almost naively, while in reality I spent plenty of time in high school procrastinating and playing video games. Sometimes, I was doing that when I could have been visiting her.

Ultimately, I decided that instead of feeling guilty, I should become the person she thought I was. I should make the most of all the privileges and opportunities I have that my grandparents didn't. That feeling of wanting to live up to her image of me allowed me to end that first semester strong, and stay dedicated throughout college.

Tl;dr: My grandmother had a stroke and died right after I moved into college. Having to adjust to college and stay caught up academically and socially was a major challenge, compounded by my best friend getting in a life threatening accident the day of her funeral. I made it through and decided to become the person she had thought I was going forward.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm hesitant to do this one too. Again, what is unique about this? Almost everyone has had a loss in their family by the time they enter law school. I don't want to just write a sob story about how hard it was to deal with something that everyone has to deal with at some point. Like the prior topic, it hasn't nothing to do with me going to law school, and the part about it making me a better student is very corny. A part of me also feels like its unethical or just immoral in some ways. I feel like I'd be using my grandmother's memory as a tool for my own goals, and that seems wrong to do to her on some level. Similarly, mentioning my friend's accident in the same story definitely feels like I'd be using him to create a sob story.


So, do you guys think there's any potential in either of these topics? Are either of them even suitable for a personal statement? Or should I go back to the drawing board? Maybe I could write about starting a badminton club in high school, since that's my greatest non-academic accomplishment.

acr

Silver
Posts: 803
Joined: Tue Jan 07, 2014 11:14 pm

Re: Personal Statement topic about family issues/death of family member?

Post by acr » Wed Sep 02, 2020 5:20 pm

Let go of this idea that you need to write about something "unique." A unique premise alone isn't what makes a personal statement good. You need something that contains insight into you (whether unique or not), and you need to connect that insight to your desire to practice law/attend law school. How you connect the dots, and the writing skills you exhibit in doing so, is far more important than simply having a unique topic.

A personal statement is actually a useful admissions requirement because applicants should have a compelling reason for why they want to attend law school. What's yours? How did you come to apply to law school? Figure it out, and weave your PS around that.

nixy

Gold
Posts: 4446
Joined: Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:58 am

Re: Personal Statement topic about family issues/death of family member?

Post by nixy » Wed Sep 02, 2020 7:22 pm

I don't think you *have* to make the PS about why you want to attend law school, unless a school has a specific prompt that requires it. It's one way to go, but it runs the risk of exposing a certain kind of naivete or misapprehension about what law school and the legal profession are like, and lends itself to a kind of instrumentalist narrative, or simple rehashing of the resume. (If your response is that those reveal the person doesn't have great reasons for going to law school, that may be true, but the OP's goal right now is to get in.)

Pickles312

New
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:31 pm

Re: Personal Statement topic about family issues/death of family member?

Post by Pickles312 » Thu Sep 03, 2020 1:11 pm

I think in that case I'm going to have an even harder time because I really don't have a very compelling story about why I want to practice law. I've been interested in it since I was a kid, and the more courses I took in college related to it, the more I figured I wanted to go into it. That's basically the entire story, and I really don't know how to make it compelling. It seems pretty typical, and there was no major turning point in it. And as Nixy noted, I'm also not super knowledgeable on the intricacies of the legal profession, so I don't want to say something presumptuous by going too deep into it.

Do you guys think my two topics in the original post are too emotional and irrelevant to work then?

User avatar
polareagle

Bronze
Posts: 336
Joined: Mon Jun 21, 2010 2:04 pm

Re: Personal Statement topic about family issues/death of family member?

Post by polareagle » Thu Sep 03, 2020 2:02 pm

I don't have any experience reviewing personal statements (and very little, now outdated experience writing one of them), so I don't want to offer my opinion. I will offer these takes from two people far more qualified than me to talk about essays:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120324005 ... rt-ii.aspx

https://experience.law.umich.edu/person ... not-to-do/

If you poke around those two blogs, you might find info that's even more relevant.

Pickles312

New
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:31 pm

Re: Personal Statement topic about family issues/death of family member?

Post by Pickles312 » Thu Sep 03, 2020 3:28 pm

polareagle wrote:
Thu Sep 03, 2020 2:02 pm
I don't have any experience reviewing personal statements (and very little, now outdated experience writing one of them), so I don't want to offer my opinion. I will offer these takes from two people far more qualified than me to talk about essays:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120324005 ... rt-ii.aspx

https://experience.law.umich.edu/person ... not-to-do/

If you poke around those two blogs, you might find info that's even more relevant.
Thank you for the resources!

Want to continue reading?

Register now to search topics and post comments!

Absolutely FREE!


Post Reply

Return to “Law School Personal Statements”