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benbrine

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Personal Statement

Post by benbrine » Fri May 05, 2017 5:09 pm

I feel like I got a good start, but I'm having a hard time with everything else. Thoughts? Don't hold back.
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Many times in recent years I have asked myself why the sound of sirens impacts me the way it does. I have walked up the street near my home, chatting jovially with my friend, and then we pass a funeral home and time seems to slow for a moment—sobriety reigns in my heart. I move on with life, but I do not forget. I am joyful, but there is a part of me that recognizes certain truths about the world—truths that give me pause to think: What is the end of it all?

When I was 14 years old, I decided to go to law school. It was certainly an uninformed decision, and my primary motivation was my desire to follow in the footsteps of a friend of mine. Nonetheless, I set my heart on becoming a lawyer, and studied hard in school. I had had a speech impediment since I first spoke, and I was consequently a very shy and self-conscious child. I spoke very little, even in my “natural habitat”, my home. Shortly after I decided that I wanted to go to law school, I was sitting at the dinner table one day and some of my (six) siblings strongly suggested that I didn’t talk nearly enough and that I should participate more in their conversations. I decided, then and there, that I would do exactly that; though the perspective I took in order to generate conversation topics was assuredly not one that they had expected. My response to their prompts that day would turn out to be one of the most impactful decisions I would ever make as a young teenager.

It has been said that “your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits”[1]. My response to my brothers and sisters that day was to think of, and talk about, the ways in which they were “doing wrong”. After all, I reasoned to myself, a lawyer has to be good at finding faults in other people, right? I proceeded, gradually more and more as time passed, to practice my critique of my siblings’ lives and actions. They became the subjects of my experiment; the make-believe defendants in my newfound practice. My “authority” was found in the instructions of our parents, and my father was a very opinionated person, so “authority” was abundant. I got good at my trade. I bumbled out my commentary loudly and often.

And they hated it. With good reason.

As I grew older, though, my attention turned to more important things, among them, the study of philosophy. I though it a necessary prerequisite to the study of law, so I dove into my studies with a gusto. I quickly found new authority for my critiques of other people, and discovered that my parents’ rules were arbitrary and unfounded.
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cavalier1138

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Re: Personal Statement

Post by cavalier1138 » Fri May 05, 2017 5:14 pm

My first thought is that you didn't need to make a new account for this. My second thought is that you clearly need to find a hobby.

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