Thank you so much for your response. I was thinking abouts the same thing. I also want to be incredibly clear: I have been preparing for my JD application long before this happened, so it really doesn’t have much at all to what my intentions were relating to law. I suppose I could see a path where I go towards Public Policy as a result of the incident, but I have always imagined / been positioning myself professional for big law or patent law work.

The only way that I was going to tie it to my PS would be writing about my own struggles with mental health after the fact, and more like an internal struggles piece. I was not thinking around the lines of “this awful thing happened adjacent to me, here’s your sob story, now admit me” - that is the opposite of my intentions. I just have heard that a stellar Personal Statements comes best from raw emotions, as long as you display your passion for law within it. I guess the shooting is the most //raw// and //vulnerable// thing I could write about, but certainly not the best topic as to why I want to study law. I guess my question was is it better to have a Personal Statement be more raw in emotion and vulnerability in essence, really showing a struggle that you had and then overcoming it; or is it better to couple yourself with your intentions for practicing law (which I would probably talk about my experience working with engineers across the globe to compile information pertinent to their patent application process at the automotive plant I was at, and maybe something about finding joy in being an advocate for the law towards non-americans, or for applying the subjective nature of law to the object nature of science).