1) Above all else, my family matters the most to me. I consider my family my relatives as well as my closest circle of friends who I love similarly. My family is of the utmost importance because they are my most valued support system and keep me grounded. Through the relationships I have built with my family over time, I can trust them to be completely honest with me. I can also share personal matters with them knowing I have their unconditional love and that their feedback comes from the right place. The loss of my father, two years ago, cemented the importance of family. When I turned to family for emotional support, someone was always available. As time passed, the grief never diminished, but I kept persevering and growing around my grief. I saw how family was the most consistent network in my life and the people I could count on when I felt helpless. My family always cared to check in without needing to be prompted. I was able to depend on these relationships heavily because I had nurtured them. My actions have demonstrated that I can be relied upon to reciprocate care and attention. Being a part of a family entails work, sacrifice, and the inevitable disagreements. Yet, by working through hardships, I find my family growing stronger. Having strong family roots allows me to maintain the mental and emotional health to keep pursuing my goals. Moreover, the most important aspect of my professional life is public service. From a young age, my parents instilled in me the value of helping those in need. I feel a moral responsibility to use my academic and professional opportunities toward the pursuit of social justice for marginalized communities. After college, I was a public school teacher in an underserved neighborhood in New Orleans for two years. I saw first-hand the hardships of public service as well as how I was able to impact the lives of others. Though it was easy to be discouraged in the initial stages of teaching, I grew to understand the mindset necessary to do public sector work. In public service, I believe to seek change on individual levels. The woes of public interest are vast and overwhelming. However, through attention to detail and finding the value in small-scale victories, individual wins for my clientele will scaffold larger gains in social justice. I plan to commit to this in law school by taking a public service pledge. As a public interest attorney, I will focus on making the most of each unique situation. I find my purpose in working with communities in need of legal help, and I will strive to bring more attention to the need for equity in the justice system. 2) Throughout the law school application process, I learned about the value of preparation and routines while making major life decisions. Before beginning my law school applications, I understood that it was paramount to have a well-organized plan and schedule to complete the applications. I made myself three general checkpoints that would allow me to focus and take the necessary time to finish with fidelity. First, I built my LSAC profile, created an Excel spreadsheet to track my application statuses for each school I would apply to, and reached out to my mentors for letters of recommendation. Next, I committed to taking the LSAT twice to reach my highest score possible. Lastly, I wrote my personal statement and supplemental essays. From these checkpoints, I gained additional insight into the personal strategies that work best for me when generating a variety of my products for others to assess. I prefer to compartmentalize tasks and fully complete them by a personal deadline to prevent myself from over-dwelling. Alleviating this mental drain, allowed me to better manage my day-to-day tasks as a teacher while simultaneously pursuing law school admission. Once all my applications were complete and officially out of my control, I learned the necessity of patience and routines as I waited to hear back. I gained insight into immersing myself in other tasks or hobbies to remain productive and channel my nervous energy elsewhere. I invested myself in coaching the boy's fifth and sixth-grade basketball team, exercising, and reading fiction novels. I recognized how my routines allowed me to gain a sense of control that balanced the unknown status of my applications. My routines became meditative and integrated patience into my daily life. I now instill these practices in my life regardless of my workload to foster a diligent mindset while completing tasks. Lastly, I gained insight into making important life decisions. Law school is the biggest socio-emotional, financial, and professional commitment I have made in my life. As I received interview requests, admissions, and scholarships, I weighed what my best options were. I focused on the academic and networking opportunities, employment outcomes, and the financial burden after graduation. After careful consideration, I can confidently say that I want to have a career in law. While I believe that I am ready and will be successful in law school, I also recognize that there is so much I do not know and will need to learn. One of the insights I learned about making such an important decision is that it is also a leap of faith. No matter how calculated I believe my decisions are, I also have a degree of blind trust. I am confident that in the future I will look back on the hardships and jubilations of my legal career and be happy with my decision.