I don’t want to sell my trauma to admissions

College applications now feature more questions about overcoming adversity, encouraging students to write about adversity to showcase their grit.

One 2021-22 Common App essay prompt asks applicants to “recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure.” There is the common belief that admission officers love to read about adversity. However, there is a catch: Some hardships are more welcome than others. Or as I like to put it, some trauma sells better than others. 

As then high school senior Elijah Megginson wrote in a piece published in the New York Times: “I was told, ‘You’re smart and you’re from the hood, you’re from the projects, colleges will love you.’” In the article, Megginson wrote that he, and other Black African American students who wanted to apply to a predominantly white institution, felt like they were put in a box that is the cliché story of a Black kid in America. 

Aya M. Waller-Bey, a doctoral sociology candidate at the University of Michigan, found in her research that Black college students are aware of an expectation to write about trauma in college essays and find this expectation to be a racialized one. These stereotypes result in the phenomenon of marginalized students writing about their pain and white students discussing their passion. 

From a marginalized community myself, I also experienced the need to write a good sob story in my college application. However, not having the “typical” immigrant family experience — if such a thing even exists — I did not have any struggles that fit into any boxes. Something about searching for hardships to write about simply felt wrong to me because I never perceived myself as a victim. I felt like I was put at a disadvantage against my peers who had more or “better” adversity stories. I constantly thought: How can I oversell myself?

My experience reflects a widespread phenomenon rarely talked about: marginalized students attempting to become the poster child of trauma and pain. This phenomenon is equally problematic for both sides. For underserved students who feel expected to put dollar signs behind their trauma, they are pressured to reduce their identity to often negative stereotypes and reinforce narratives about them as victims. Those who get in by selling their trauma may also feel as though their college acceptance was undeserved and their trauma essay can become an internalized mindset they carry into their college experience.

For students who have undergone hardships in life that do not neatly fit neatly into any boxes or categories, they may find it more difficult to have their experiences understood or empathized with. The story of Mackenzie Fierceton provides one example.

Fierceton, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship in 2020, withdrew her Rhodes candidacy after Penn’s deputy provost Beth Winkelstein received tips that called into question the integrity of Fierceton’s scholarship application. In a letter to the Rhodes Trust, Winkelstein said Fierceton failed to “acknowledge her upper middle-class upbringing” and provided an inaccurate account of her abuse in her application. 

In an interview with Rachel Aviv, a writer at The New Yorker, Anne Norton, one of Fierceton’s friends, said, “I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough. She was a foster child, but not for long enough. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. She was abused, but there is not enough blood.” 

Who are we to judge if someone’s life is tragic “enough?” Who are we to validate someone’s victimhood? Do colleges really care about their students or do they simply want a sob story? Trauma, hardships and privilege are not tools we can use to measure a person’s worth. 

According to a 2018 Hechinger Report on race and college admissions, “Enrollment in the 468 best-funded and most selective four-year institutions is 75 percent white.” Research has repeatedly shown that white students, as a whole, have a higher chance of attending college due to their socioeconomic status. With this, students of marginalized backgrounds must do more than their white counterparts to stand a chance, even if it means trauma-baiting.

Although the college admission system is not going to change anytime soon, we can change how we view ourselves and others by not letting racial stereotypes factor in our judgment of others and practice a true embrace of diversity through appreciating the heterogeneity of individual experiences. Our struggles do not define us and we cannot let institutions, such as colleges, make us believe otherwise.