This article contains references to suicide and sexual assault.
My hands shook with each word — my darkest secrets laid bare for an admissions committee’s scrutiny. My mother’s cancer. My struggle with depression. The childish scrawl of a loved one confiding he wished for death. When college decisions rolled out, I was accepted to universities I had only ever dreamed of. However, the acceptances felt void, as if pity had garnered them. And because of the vulnerability funneled into my essays, I was devastated by the rejections; they were more than a sucker punch. I wondered whether the vulnerability was worth it.
The Common Application (Common App), a streamlined application that can be submitted to over 1,000 colleges worldwide, is a formidable beast to conquer. First, one must scale the GPA rockwall, deftly swinging from an unweighted crevice to a weighted ledge. Without pause, Advanced Placement courses, International Baccalaureate courses, the SAT and ACT lunge, teeth-bared. Then, army-crawling beneath the barb-wired activities section of the Common App and staring at the honors section in abject terror because you have not won any Pulitzer Prizes. The finale: a 500-foot-long tightrope benignly named the personal statement, wielding cruel knives, prepared to shred your chances with a singular ill-placed word. It must be cohesive. It must elicit tears, sobbing and laughter. It must have wit, a light, airy quality and demonstrate the maturity of a young individual full of potential who nonetheless boasts a multitude of accomplishments. It must stand out from the tens of thousands of applications the most competitive schools receive in the most humble, yet earth-shattering, of ways. In short, the Common App personal statement must accomplish the seemingly impossible task of displaying the entirety of one’s unique character, background and potential in under 650 words.
Under the pressure of the personal statement, many students turn to the one thing that seems unique: their emotional response to the most terrible events they have witnessed or experienced in life. In other words, their trauma. Applicants feed off society’s sensationalization of trauma in the same way a producer strives for the next Netflix hit series. In light of the grueling nature of college admissions applications, students' decisions to write about trauma can hardly be deemed unsolicited.
The Common App prompts encourage students to discuss adversities they have faced, with the second prompt for 2023-24 application cycle being “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?” Although college officials are not directly responsible for writing these prompts, universities’ persistent endorsement of the Common App as the primary means to apply confers culpability. As the primary benefactors of the Common App, colleges are obligated to lobby for reforms to current prompts. Further, while colleges may not direct students to write about painful experiences, the fact that sharing trauma tends to yield successes promotes their authorship, leaving students to question if withholding the most vulnerable recesses of their life equates to sacrificing an acceptance. To alleviate the pressure students face to write such essays, it is imperative universities favor transparency in the admissions process. For instance, colleges could release statements clarifying that students are not required to write about traumatic experiences, but rather, it is up to their discretion to do so.
In putting pain to paper, students are forced to relive the experience, curating hardship for a pristine pitch to admissions officers. Resilience is lauded while legitimate scars are left unacknowledged. After submitting my applications, I toiled over the word “depression” and how it might flag my file. If I had not discussed it in a sufficiently palatable way, I feared the stigma of mental illness would ultimately preclude me from admission. Far from therapeutic, these “trauma essays” are responded to with an austere acceptance or rejection several months later.
Further invalidation of students’ trauma arises from the nature of an experience. Perhaps one student’s experience fits squarely into the tragedies that emblazon headline news, from police brutality to school shootings to prejudice-driven discrimination to sexual harassment. Students belonging to marginalized communities may feel disproportionate pressure to write about experiences of racism or xenophobia, ostensible eye-catchers to admissions committees. Stories like the “smelly lunch”— experiencing ostracization as a result of bringing ethnic food for a school lunch that does not fit in with American cuisine — are regarded as cliches. Thus, the pain oft-faced by minority students is not only tokenized but trivialized as unoriginal.
Alternatively, a student who recounts an experience that does not subscribe to these pre-set categories or that is socially-branded as shameful may fear it cannot evoke empathy. This was my experience. No one knew the stifling animosity that could fester behind four walls enclosed by a proverbial white picket fence. All anyone could know was the pretty picture presented to them, and before writing my personal statement, I made no effort to contradict it. Nonetheless, my honesty was plagued by an incessant imposter syndrome. I felt I had no right to claim pain when my hardships seemed minute relative to what others experienced. My strife was a caged zoo animal, and I couldn’t help but wonder if goggling spectators would deem it teenage girl drama. A person’s pain cannot be encapsulated by a singular label, yet this is the challenge that students pressured to write trauma essays face, tying it off with a cheery bow to boot.
Obsession over the trauma essay often galvanizes perverse games of comparison between peers. For instance, a student from my high school with a congenital heart defect excelled both in and outside of the classroom despite missing school often for treatment. Many of his friends joked he had his personal statement written for him. In a battle of who suffered the most, all contenders lose, and pain begets pain in a destructive cycle.
Pain can be an unparalleled instructor — it shapes us in a way to which many other forces in our lives cannot compare. Yet, it cannot, nor should it be, our entire identity. Dear colleges, we students are not our pain. It is time the admissions process reflects this truth. It is time this unspoken pressure to divulge the most agonizing parts of our humanity be dismantled. It is time for us students to own our pain. Whether we keep it tucked safely away in our hearts or share, it should be based on our own desires, not in exchange for a college acceptance.
If you or someone you know experienced sexual assault, you can access Emory’s Title IX resources at 404-727-0541 or https://equityandcompliance.emory.edu/title-ix/index.html and the Office of Respect at https://respect.emory.edu/ or their hotline 24/7 at (404) 727-1514. You can reach the RAINN National Sexual Assault hotline 24/7 at (800) 656-4673 or https://hotline.rainn.org/online. You can reach the Atlanta Grady Rape Crisis Center crisis hotline 24/7 at (404) 616-4861 or gradyrapecrisiscenter@gmh.edu and the Decatur Day League Sexual Assault Care and Prevention crisis hotline 24/7 at (404) 377-1428.
Sophia Hoar (25Ox) is from Newburgh, Ind.
