please critique personal statement- don't hold back!

[RainOnNeptune]

Here is my rough draft. I have yet to figure out how to end it and I am concerned that the first paragraph may come across as a pity party. However, it's nothing more than really happened- well it's considerably less than what really happened ;) Please let me know what you think and how to make it better!

 

As the child of an abusive alcoholic, my early life was difficult. My family moved around a lot, and some of my earliest memories of home are of a tent on the Rogue River in Oregon, where my father had a claim to pan for gold. We lived sometimes in cheap motels, slept in the car, spent one long winter when I was about five snowed in in a log cabin on top of a mountain. By the time I was 14 I had crossed the United States four times, and gone up and down the east and west costs so many times I lost count. I started grade school a year late, and it was unusual for me to spend more than a year in any school. When I was fifteen I left my parents and crossed the country again, this time alone, and went to stay with an aunt. This didn’t last, and I spent the next few years sleeping on floors and couches. When I was eighteen my parents died in a car accident, and I found myself somehow more adrift than ever. The point is, school was never a priority while I was growing up. For the first twenty-three years of my life I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I was too busy thinking about where I was going to get my next meal to put much effort into figuring it out.

My first experience in healthcare was working as a housekeeper in a nursing home. I took the job only because it was within walking distance of my apartment, but soon I found in myself the strong desire to be of use to the residents. I fetched and carried, put socks on skinny feet, cared for them as best I could, but my role in the organization was very limiting. I wasn’t there to help anyone, just to mop and wipe. I wanted to do more, so I got my GED, and began classes to become a certified medical assistant. I found that I loved school, and was very successful as a student. I enjoyed my work as a medical assistant as well, but I was still not satisfied with my level of involvement in patient care. With the support of my husband I decided to go to college, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

It wasn’t until recently that I considered becoming a PA. For person who never thought she would go to college, a master’s degree can seem miles out of reach. However, as I was doing research and considering what I could do with my degree, I kept coming back to PA school as the thing that by far I most wanted to do. Being a PA is the right fit for me because it will allow me to work closely with patients and use my brain to help them, while spending time in a challenging and interesting environment. Even better, I will continue to receive instruction during interactions with my supervising physician. Now that I have begun to be educated I never want to stop. I am the right fit to be a PA because I am a careful, hard-working person with a passion for medicine and an ability to think quickly and clearly on my feet. The difficulties in my background have also served to instill compassion in me that I feel would be useful when practicing in an underprivileged rural area, which is my long term plan.