- Posts: 4
- Joined: Aug 29, 2016
- Mon Aug 29, 2016 8:27 am
#28125
The following is a late draft of my law school personal statement. I would appreciate any feedback I can get and I thank you for your time!
My decision to attend law school was both thwarted and sparked by the same man: my father. When I was eleven years old, my history teacher lectured to our class that no one had won the Vietnam War. My father, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had told me otherwise, many times. He’d told me about his heroic endeavors in a distant swampland full of terrifying enemies throwing fire and lighting up the jungles. He’d told me that he and America had been the proud victors of the terrible fight in the hot jungle so that I and all American citizens could be free. My view of my father, and indirectly of my world, pivoted on those stories. Perhaps I felt it was my duty to correct my history teacher, or perhaps more likely I felt a need to fell the danger her words posed to my concept of my father and the world in which I lived. Whatever the reason, I raised my hand and (as I thought) corrected her. She and I went back and forth, arguing the point, fighting two completely different battles in our respective different universes, in front of the rest of the class. She won, of course, as the truth tends to do. My classmates, certainly unaware of precisely what was taking place that day, groaned and shifted as I argued my case. I can still hear their prepubescent voices: “Let it go!” “Oh, my God! Who cares?” “Shut up already!” It was the first of many humiliations that my father inflicted upon me, the harm of which he never intended.
A simple cross-reference delivered what I had been afraid of: my father had lied. Again. And now my whole class knew it. I could not have known it when I was eleven, but my father was mentally ill with an exceptionally severe instance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He had been shot four times with enemy fire in Vietnam, each one represented by a purple heart in our living room. Like most of the other dads I knew, he was loving and funny, always willing to chase and tickle us. He was incredibly smart. But, he could be violent and explosive. He was unpredictable and could blow up at the slightest provocation. As a child, I learned not to upset him and to avoid situations in which others might upset him. His doctors explained that the lying was a compulsory defense mechanism designed to create a world he could accept so that he could survive here. A world in which he had fought for nothing and then returned to be spit upon and assaulted by the very people for whom he had risked his life so many times was not an acceptable world to him. He saw his time in Vietnam as a personal failure and because of that any failure in the rest of his life became “a world that was unacceptable.” Without his defense mechanism—the recreation of reality—he was at risk of suicide or worse. If anyone challenged a lie he spoke aloud, he would gradually advance from simply annoyed to outraged and finally to unreasonably and confusingly explosive. Any poor soul who dared challenge his lies was confused. They saw a man getting frighteningly worked up at so-and-so’s barbecue over some minor point. What they were really looking at was a man fighting for his life.
Years later, as I approached my undergraduate degree, I informed my father that I wanted to go to law school. I wanted to use my intelligence to help others and to contribute to my community by becoming an assistant prosecutor in our town, the seat of our New Jersey county. I was fascinated by the law; someone at some point in the development of the law had considered so many different sides of so many actual and hypothetical situations and then created parameters around what was possible in order to make the world a better place. I identified with that pursuit and I knew it was where my talents would be best put to work. He was horrified and loudly disapproving of this choice.
“Lauren, law school is a scam. They’ll never let you in because you’re white,” he told me, leaning back professorially in his broken recliner.
“That’s ridiculous,” I countered. “What do they care what color my skin happens to be so long as I am good at what I do?”
“Don’t be naïve,” he said, getting agitated. “I thought you were smarter than this. They only let in underrepresented minorities because of the bleeding hearts in Washington.”
I learned years later that my father had attempted admission to law school, but because he was at that time a full-time police officer working overtime and attending night classes for his undergraduate degree, he was unable to pass the LSAT. I know now that his objection to my law career was not a genuine objection but a flare-up of his illness. If I were accepted to law school, it would challenge the lie he had told himself for thirty years—that it was not his own failure that kept him from law school, that it had been because of his race.
Vaguely, I was aware that I was toeing the line. I knew I should tread carefully here, but I wanted this. I was angry that I had been told I couldn’t work hard enough to achieve something based only on my skin. I narrowed my eyes. “Then why is there an overwhelming majority of white lawyers?”
He exploded, causing me to cringe and jump. “Don’t contradict me! I know what I am talking about! You think I got to be this old without learning a thing or two?! Now, stop with the law school.” He grimaced derisively with a dismissive wave of his hand. The conversation was over. I went into book publishing.
I became a literary agent within a year and a half of entering the industry, which is something that normally takes ten years. I traveled the country, teaching authors how to write books, how to get them published and how to market them. I wrote and published an book on how to get noticed in publishing. Though my job had many aspects, it was telling that I most enjoyed contract negotiations and review. I enjoyed manipulating the language so as to protect my clients from potential unforeseen harm. I saw each contract as a puzzle that I needed to solve based on the variables of the author and the particular publishing house, and their respective individual factors. I dove into them as though they were a leisure-time activity. Of course, this would often remind me of my original career goal, and I would sometimes consider returning to school. The thought of breaking the news to my father would always chase the idea from my mind.
I did so well as an agent and I was so visible because of my industry-related writing and public appearances that I was headhunted by a new avant-garde publishing house that hired me as its assistant publisher, second only to the owner of the company.
After a devastating lay-off due to the company’s instability, I immediately secured employment as an adjunct instructor at the community college where I began my education. This allowed me to remain close to home, cutting out my three hours of commute time, and it allowed me to help people within my own community, something my work in book publishing had not provided. I am still employed as an adjunct instructor at the college, and while my work is enjoyable, rewarding and sufficiently challenging, it lacks what I originally wanted from a career and what I still want: the ability to use my intelligence and passion for law to help others and become an integral member of my community.
During my career experiences, I have considered almost every day how my law career was thwarted by my father’s illness and how the resulting confusion and severe financial difficulty prevented me from achieving what I had always wanted to achieve. And then, though I never would have imagined it, the inspiration to return to school and obtain my law degree came from a wildly unlikely source: my father.
Because he thwarted my law career by trying in his own way to survive, it is ironic that he then sparked it by passing away. In February 2016, my father died of cholangiocarcinoma, which is a rare and aggressive bile duct cancer that has become increasingly prevalent in individuals exposed to agent orange in Vietnam. His death devastated me. Despite the negative effects he had had on me as a child and a younger adult, we were very close. As an adult, I understand his affliction and I had learned to simultaneously protect myself from it and to ease it for him in any way I could.
My father had a small circle of influence, so I was surprised that dozens of people I had never known or heard of came to our small church gathering. I stood motionless, amazed as stranger after stranger approached me to explain how my father had deeply touched life after life. One man, who had traveled hundreds of miles to be there, told me how my father had saved his life, dragging the man’s broken, bleeding body through the jungle for two days under intermittent enemy fire and with his own terrible injuries. People he had known fifty years ago had traveled across the country on short notice to honor him. I was astounded. I had never known my father had done so much and been so loved by so many.
In the days and weeks that followed, I worked through my grief. Sitting alone in my father’s old broken recliner from which he had crushed my legal career, it slowly dawned me that those dozens of people had not come to his funeral because they loved my father, the person; they had come because he made a difference. He had fought for his country in Vietnam. He had served as a beacon of heroics for the people he had grown up with in Inwood, many of whom were so poor they couldn’t afford shoes. He had helped inspire cultural acceptance at the Paris Peace Talks. As a police officer, arson investigator, and firefighter, he had been a leader, an integral member of his community and he had saved lives. Even in his retirement, he had learned to speak Arabic so that he could help train the troops at Fort Dix Naval Air Station.
I realized that I had been angry at my father all these years. Sadly, I had been so affected by what he currently was that I had failed to consider what he had been, what he had meant to be. I had been guided by the tragically ill man I knew my father to be. Now that I could see in stark relief what my father truly stood for, what his beliefs were and what a difference he had made to all of those people, it was time to let that guide me. It was time to become what this great man would have inspired in me instead of letting his illness dictate my career and the difference I can make.
**Again, thanks for your help!
My decision to attend law school was both thwarted and sparked by the same man: my father. When I was eleven years old, my history teacher lectured to our class that no one had won the Vietnam War. My father, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had told me otherwise, many times. He’d told me about his heroic endeavors in a distant swampland full of terrifying enemies throwing fire and lighting up the jungles. He’d told me that he and America had been the proud victors of the terrible fight in the hot jungle so that I and all American citizens could be free. My view of my father, and indirectly of my world, pivoted on those stories. Perhaps I felt it was my duty to correct my history teacher, or perhaps more likely I felt a need to fell the danger her words posed to my concept of my father and the world in which I lived. Whatever the reason, I raised my hand and (as I thought) corrected her. She and I went back and forth, arguing the point, fighting two completely different battles in our respective different universes, in front of the rest of the class. She won, of course, as the truth tends to do. My classmates, certainly unaware of precisely what was taking place that day, groaned and shifted as I argued my case. I can still hear their prepubescent voices: “Let it go!” “Oh, my God! Who cares?” “Shut up already!” It was the first of many humiliations that my father inflicted upon me, the harm of which he never intended.
A simple cross-reference delivered what I had been afraid of: my father had lied. Again. And now my whole class knew it. I could not have known it when I was eleven, but my father was mentally ill with an exceptionally severe instance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He had been shot four times with enemy fire in Vietnam, each one represented by a purple heart in our living room. Like most of the other dads I knew, he was loving and funny, always willing to chase and tickle us. He was incredibly smart. But, he could be violent and explosive. He was unpredictable and could blow up at the slightest provocation. As a child, I learned not to upset him and to avoid situations in which others might upset him. His doctors explained that the lying was a compulsory defense mechanism designed to create a world he could accept so that he could survive here. A world in which he had fought for nothing and then returned to be spit upon and assaulted by the very people for whom he had risked his life so many times was not an acceptable world to him. He saw his time in Vietnam as a personal failure and because of that any failure in the rest of his life became “a world that was unacceptable.” Without his defense mechanism—the recreation of reality—he was at risk of suicide or worse. If anyone challenged a lie he spoke aloud, he would gradually advance from simply annoyed to outraged and finally to unreasonably and confusingly explosive. Any poor soul who dared challenge his lies was confused. They saw a man getting frighteningly worked up at so-and-so’s barbecue over some minor point. What they were really looking at was a man fighting for his life.
Years later, as I approached my undergraduate degree, I informed my father that I wanted to go to law school. I wanted to use my intelligence to help others and to contribute to my community by becoming an assistant prosecutor in our town, the seat of our New Jersey county. I was fascinated by the law; someone at some point in the development of the law had considered so many different sides of so many actual and hypothetical situations and then created parameters around what was possible in order to make the world a better place. I identified with that pursuit and I knew it was where my talents would be best put to work. He was horrified and loudly disapproving of this choice.
“Lauren, law school is a scam. They’ll never let you in because you’re white,” he told me, leaning back professorially in his broken recliner.
“That’s ridiculous,” I countered. “What do they care what color my skin happens to be so long as I am good at what I do?”
“Don’t be naïve,” he said, getting agitated. “I thought you were smarter than this. They only let in underrepresented minorities because of the bleeding hearts in Washington.”
I learned years later that my father had attempted admission to law school, but because he was at that time a full-time police officer working overtime and attending night classes for his undergraduate degree, he was unable to pass the LSAT. I know now that his objection to my law career was not a genuine objection but a flare-up of his illness. If I were accepted to law school, it would challenge the lie he had told himself for thirty years—that it was not his own failure that kept him from law school, that it had been because of his race.
Vaguely, I was aware that I was toeing the line. I knew I should tread carefully here, but I wanted this. I was angry that I had been told I couldn’t work hard enough to achieve something based only on my skin. I narrowed my eyes. “Then why is there an overwhelming majority of white lawyers?”
He exploded, causing me to cringe and jump. “Don’t contradict me! I know what I am talking about! You think I got to be this old without learning a thing or two?! Now, stop with the law school.” He grimaced derisively with a dismissive wave of his hand. The conversation was over. I went into book publishing.
I became a literary agent within a year and a half of entering the industry, which is something that normally takes ten years. I traveled the country, teaching authors how to write books, how to get them published and how to market them. I wrote and published an book on how to get noticed in publishing. Though my job had many aspects, it was telling that I most enjoyed contract negotiations and review. I enjoyed manipulating the language so as to protect my clients from potential unforeseen harm. I saw each contract as a puzzle that I needed to solve based on the variables of the author and the particular publishing house, and their respective individual factors. I dove into them as though they were a leisure-time activity. Of course, this would often remind me of my original career goal, and I would sometimes consider returning to school. The thought of breaking the news to my father would always chase the idea from my mind.
I did so well as an agent and I was so visible because of my industry-related writing and public appearances that I was headhunted by a new avant-garde publishing house that hired me as its assistant publisher, second only to the owner of the company.
After a devastating lay-off due to the company’s instability, I immediately secured employment as an adjunct instructor at the community college where I began my education. This allowed me to remain close to home, cutting out my three hours of commute time, and it allowed me to help people within my own community, something my work in book publishing had not provided. I am still employed as an adjunct instructor at the college, and while my work is enjoyable, rewarding and sufficiently challenging, it lacks what I originally wanted from a career and what I still want: the ability to use my intelligence and passion for law to help others and become an integral member of my community.
During my career experiences, I have considered almost every day how my law career was thwarted by my father’s illness and how the resulting confusion and severe financial difficulty prevented me from achieving what I had always wanted to achieve. And then, though I never would have imagined it, the inspiration to return to school and obtain my law degree came from a wildly unlikely source: my father.
Because he thwarted my law career by trying in his own way to survive, it is ironic that he then sparked it by passing away. In February 2016, my father died of cholangiocarcinoma, which is a rare and aggressive bile duct cancer that has become increasingly prevalent in individuals exposed to agent orange in Vietnam. His death devastated me. Despite the negative effects he had had on me as a child and a younger adult, we were very close. As an adult, I understand his affliction and I had learned to simultaneously protect myself from it and to ease it for him in any way I could.
My father had a small circle of influence, so I was surprised that dozens of people I had never known or heard of came to our small church gathering. I stood motionless, amazed as stranger after stranger approached me to explain how my father had deeply touched life after life. One man, who had traveled hundreds of miles to be there, told me how my father had saved his life, dragging the man’s broken, bleeding body through the jungle for two days under intermittent enemy fire and with his own terrible injuries. People he had known fifty years ago had traveled across the country on short notice to honor him. I was astounded. I had never known my father had done so much and been so loved by so many.
In the days and weeks that followed, I worked through my grief. Sitting alone in my father’s old broken recliner from which he had crushed my legal career, it slowly dawned me that those dozens of people had not come to his funeral because they loved my father, the person; they had come because he made a difference. He had fought for his country in Vietnam. He had served as a beacon of heroics for the people he had grown up with in Inwood, many of whom were so poor they couldn’t afford shoes. He had helped inspire cultural acceptance at the Paris Peace Talks. As a police officer, arson investigator, and firefighter, he had been a leader, an integral member of his community and he had saved lives. Even in his retirement, he had learned to speak Arabic so that he could help train the troops at Fort Dix Naval Air Station.
I realized that I had been angry at my father all these years. Sadly, I had been so affected by what he currently was that I had failed to consider what he had been, what he had meant to be. I had been guided by the tragically ill man I knew my father to be. Now that I could see in stark relief what my father truly stood for, what his beliefs were and what a difference he had made to all of those people, it was time to let that guide me. It was time to become what this great man would have inspired in me instead of letting his illness dictate my career and the difference I can make.
**Again, thanks for your help!
