Hi everyone, I’m applying this cycle and would really appreciate feedback on my personal statement. I’m mainly targeting UC Law SF (LEOP), Penn State, McGeorge, and a few similar schools, but I still want this essay to be T14-level polished.

What I’m looking for:

• Honest feedback on clarity, flow, and emotional impact

• Whether the narrative arc works

• Whether anything feels confusing, generic, or too on-the-nose

• Strength of the ending

• Any minor line edits you recommend

I’m open to constructive criticism and want this to be as strong as possible. Thank you so much to anyone willing to read and help!

By the time I was seven, I had already learned that family could be both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Though I was born in New York, I spent my early childhood in a village in Punjab, waking to morning Kirtan drifting from the Gurdwara and the cows calling out before sunrise. The woman who raised me, my father’s cousin sister, braided my hair, walked me to the temple, and cared for me as her own. I never questioned why she looked older than the other mothers at school, or why classmates whispered about my “parents” being different. But some nights, the phone would ring, and a gentle voice from America would ask to speak to me, insisting she was my real mother. I would hide behind the woman I knew as mumma, confused by the idea that another family existed somewhere else. Even before I understood the truth, I sensed I was living between two versions of a story that didn’t yet make sense. 

When I returned to America around the age of nine, I thought I could blend in like everyone else, unaware of how different I would soon feel. I entered school with a Nokia phone while my classmates compared the newest iPhones; I still remember the day mine rang in the middle of class, its sharp ringtone echoing across the room as everyone laughed. I laughed too, pretending I understood the joke, but inside something small and heavy settled in my chest. 

My accent, my clothes, even the lunch I brought from home marked me immediately. I tried to make friends, convinced I wasn’t any different from them, but conversations moved faster than I could follow. At home, the Punjabi- only rule stayed firmly in place partly because my parents wanted to preserve our culture, and partly because they were still learning English themselves so school became the only place I could practice the language I was expected to master. 

I spent years in ELD, pulled out of class for extra support, returning each time with a quiet shame. I often felt suspended between two languages and two identities, unsure where I truly belonged. 

Things didn’t truly come together for me until my senior year of college, when I was working at a law firm and was asked to sit in on virtual asylum hearings. One applicant described how his family was being extorted by local criminals, and when he went to the police for protection, they demanded money he didn’t have. Listening to him, I felt a sharp recognition of what it means to come from a place where the systems meant to protect you often fail you instead. His voice trembled in the same way my mother’s used to when she called from America, asking to speak to the child who didn’t yet understand she belonged to her. 

For the first time, the fractured parts of my upbringing didn’t make me feel divided, they made me useful. I understood the uncertainty in those voices, the cultural and linguistic barriers shaping their stories, and the fear that follows you when safety is never guaranteed. Sitting in those hearings, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years: seen, steady, and certain that I could make a meaningful difference in people's lives. 

​​Those hearings stayed with me long after I logged off, not because they pointed me toward one narrow area of law, but because they revealed how many kinds of struggle share the same root: people trying to survive systems that were never built with them in mind. Whether the stories involved fleeing violence, escaping corruption, or fighting for safety within their own homes, I recognized the same quiet determination I had watched in the people who raised me. 

What I learned from those hearings is that understanding someone’s story is its own form of advocacy. Growing up between families, languages, and countries taught me how to listen closely—how to hear what people mean even when they struggle to say it. Law offers a way to turn that kind of listening into something structured and effective, something that can help people move through systems never designed for them. I know I’ll face challenges I’m not fully prepared for, but I no longer see that as a weakness. The same experiences that once made me feel split are the ones that now ground me. I’m ready for the rigor of legal training because I’ve already learned how to keep showing up, how to learn from uncertainty, and how to make steady progress toward something larger than myself.