Growing up in the city I was encouraged to embrace the expression of art and I gained exposure to it in a wealth of ways. I enjoyed seeing the love and passion exude from the pores of my relatives, like my grandmother through a paintbrush on a canvas where she created life-like portraits or like my closest uncle making music in the studio from sunrise to sunset later going on to produce chart-topping tracks for music icons like Michael Jackson, Jessie Powell and more. I worked creatively alongside friends who were writers, filmmakers and vocalists, and volunteered as an intern for a fashion styling company in Manhattan. These experiences instilled in me a love for creativity and freedom and it was in this time of my life that I realized my passion for the power of expression. However I couldn’t fight the overwhelming sentiment that I wanted to be an advocate for others seeing how in my city, creation and art are at the core of our peoples’ livelihood, which I always sought to help protect. My passions had been enriched both in college through extracurricular activities, projects I organized, and after through unpaid internships. However not long after graduation, the realities of adulthood hit home. I was hard-pressed to learn that passion, ideas and inspiration alone are not sufficient to achieving success. When my grandfather became ill and passed away I made the decision to get to know my Southern relatives and to lend support and encouragement for our great loss, but it was I who received what I purported to give. My relatives in the South consisting of physicians and businessmen and women, people who worked hard and went from below poverty to success in elite professions hold strong …show more content…
For two years I worked to earn an income before I decided to sacrifice money to realize my long-term goal of attending law school. My relatives pushed me to study full-time for the LSAT exam and encouraged me to thoroughly plan ahead to prepare for my future professional career in law. This new perspective provided me with an increased sense of structure and relentless work ethic to apply to my goals –what I first viewed as contradicting- I later realized complemented the creativity and passion that I already