Personal Statement

When life throws you lemons, you make lemonade.

By: Mother Goose, President

After many batches on lemonade, the sweet and the sour, I look forward to the opportunity for another chapter of leadership and success in my life. How can I help my peers become the best they can be for each other and for our community? Every day is an opportunity for another success… let’s review some history so we can look forward to the future…

It’s amazing how quickly your lemonade can change from sweet to sour; a snap of a finger, a blink of an eye. I came back to the office to meet our Computer technician for some updates to our e-mail server. I sit down at the senior partner’s computer to close his open programs and shut down his system and I find a rather large, juicy, lemon: A message from the other partner asking for a meeting to discuss their “issues with Erika”, including a resume for another possible legal assistant. How, exactly, do you get lemonade out of being fired? I’ve never been fired before.

So I start mixing my rotten lemons and soon, they start getting a bit sweeter. Maybe I should quit… Quit my first big girl job? That is certainly sweeter than getting fired from my first big girl job. So here we are, forty-eight hours later and I’m unemployed. Bitter sweet lemons at this point but we have some promising fruit on the tree. Opportunities are always just around the corner.

Now on Monday of last week, if anyone has asked if I would move back up to Alaska, I would have told them to put less vodka in their lemonade because that’s the craziest idea I’ve heard in years. I still remember the day I left for college. The rest of my life was at my finger tips and nothing was going to stop me. Four short years of undergraduate education were the best four years of my life to date. I could do whatever I wanted and no one was there to stop me. A double major in Criminal Justice and Political Science was everything I wanted. Those complete pieces are two nice, ripe, and delicious lemons for my beverage pleasure. But they started getting sour a lot more quickly than anticipated.

Life is funny sometimes. I’ve spent my entire life knowing exactly what I wanted to do and how I was going to make it happen. Undergraduate education was only the beginning of my educational career. Step 1 on the road to Law school and being a lawyer. Now there’s a whole new tree of lemons to think about: Being a lawyer. How exactly does one go about “being a lawyer”? You become this beacon of prestige. The perception often held is that the simple title caries a certain respect that anyone will recognize. You immediately achieve the power to change lives with each simple decision that you make – taking a certain case or arguing a certain motion. You hold the power to decide the fate of a child, the sentence of a felon, or truly shape the life of a juvenile.

Now there’s the lemon tree of the future. When a small green one falls from the top and starts hitting every branch on the way down, how can you help to build the net that catches that lemon and helps it turn royal yellow before it falls to the ground? Here’s one solution that I’ve found:

Your green lemon falls from the top and is charged with a crime. A minor crime and his first offense but it’s the beginning of his fall to the hard ground of the rest of his life. Quick, get the net: Anchorage Youth Court. AYC, a small, unassuming office in downtown Anchorage where juvenile cases are handled by other youth in those same teenage years, barely clinging to their tree branch as they strive to mature and turn a nice bright yellow. This is where my story begins – the story of a green lemon clinging to the tree and searching for an escape. My rotten lemons was the beginning of a bitter divorce of my parents – two people who should never have been together in the first place, let alone reproduced. But they did and we became the victims of violence. That rotten lemon tree was uprooted and burned a few years ago so it’s better to move on to the tree that saved this particular lemon from the fire.

Twelve years old. 2002. It seems like a century ago. The day things changed. This story begins one unassuming afternoon in a nonfrequented mall in Anchorage, AK. We pass a table advertising Anchorage Youth Court. I’ve never heard of this organization, but on the recommendation of my mom, I sign up to take the class. My first case is presented before Chief Judge Bill Edwards and I was all alone, representing a client who had shoplifted from a local grocery store. I can’t tell you what caught the attention of Mr. Edwards that day, but he wrote a letter saying I should be promoted that very day. The beginning.

My work in Anchorage Youth Court quickly became everything I ever wanted to do in my life. My sweet lemonade. Representing juvenile offenders who had made a mistake in their life, to help them discover a better path. The reward was only to know that I was a positive influence in the life of another troubled teen. Five short years later, I was President and Co-Chair of the Board of Directors. I was leading an entire organization of three hundred members, each with their own dream to positively influence the community in each small life we contacted. As quickly as my career started, it ended. I was now too old for the program and it was time for college at Washington State University.

It was almost serendipitous when Dr. Mitch Pickerill presented Mock Trial to my Poli Sci class. Another chapter of life began that day but this time, it was a step towards the career path I wanted.