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13 Reasons Why It’s OK to Write About Trauma in your College Applications — And How to Do So (a joint post by AdmissionsMom and McNeilAdmissions)

Hi everyone. This post is written by me, AdmissionsMom and McNeilAdmissions , TOGETHER. It’s a subject we both care about. We (your dynamic college-co nsultant duo) took up pens together to write what we believe is the first collaborative advice post in the sub’s history. Yay!  Enjoy and thanks for reading. 

Content warning: discussion of traumatic subjects: suicide, sexual abuse, trauma, self-harm

There is always a debate about what topics should be avoided at all cost on college essays. The short-list always boils down to a familiar crew of traumatic or “difficult” subjects. These include, but are not limited to, essays discussing severe depression, self-harm, eating disorders, experiences with sexual violence, family abuse, and experiences with the loss of a close relative or loved one.

First and foremost, you do NOT have to write about anything that makes you uncomfortable or that you don’t want to share. This isn’t the Overcoming Obstacles Olympics. Don’t feel pressure to tell any story that you don’t want to share. It is your story and if you don’t want to write about it, don’t. Period.

BUT, in our view, ruling out all essays that deal with trauma is wrong for two big reasons.

The first is that there is no actual, empirical evidence that essays that deal with trauma are less successful than those that don’t.  The view that essays dealing with trauma correlate with lower admissions rates is based on counselor speculation and anecdotal evidence from students who applied, weren’t admitted, then tried to find a justification and decided it was their essays.

Both of us reflected on this. Here’s what we had to say.

• AdmissionsMom : I work with lots of students who have suffered from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and addiction. They nearly always have to address their issues because of school disruption, and I have to say that their acceptances have remained right in range with the rest of my students.
• McNeilAdmissions : I counted, and I can provide more than 17 accounts about students of mine who have written about trauma and been admitted to T10 schools. I also asked a colleague of mine who is known as the “queen of Stanford admissions” and she said there was no trend among her students.

The other big reason is that traumas, while complex, can be sources of deep meaning, and therefore are potentially the exact sort of thing you want to consider . Traumatic experiences are often life-shaping, for better or for worse. So are the ways that we respond to and adapt in the face of trauma. The struggle to adapt and move forward after a traumatic experience may be one of the most important and meaningful things you’ve ever done. So a blanket prohibition on traumatic topics is equivalent, for many, to a blanket prohibition on writing an essay that feels personally meaningful and rewarding.

Categorically ruling out trauma stories also conflicts directly with  the core lesson  that most college consultants and counselors (including ours truly) are trying to advocate. That is, write a story that matters to you. This is a piece of corny but non-bullshit advice. As it turns out, it’s a rare moment (in a process that can be somewhat cynical) where meaning and strategy overlap. AOs want to read good essays. Good essays are good when they’re written about things that matter. You can attempt to hack together a good essay on a topic you don’t care about, but good luck.

So there are a few big intersecting threads about why you MIGHT want to write about your experience with trauma. First, there is no empirical evidence to recommend against it. Second, traumatic experiences are huge sources of personal meaning and significance, and it would be sad if you couldn’t use your writing as a tool for processing your experience. Third, meaningful essays = good essays = stronger applications.

So for anyone out there who wants to talk about their experience but who is struggling with how to do it, here are some things we want to say:

• You ARE allowed to talk about trauma in college apps.
• Your story is valid even if you haven’t turned your experience into a non-profit focused on preventing sexual assault, combating abuse, or eating disorders or done anything whatsoever to address the larger systemic issue.  Your  story and experience —  your  personal growth and lessons learned — are intrinsically valuable.

Now, here are some things to keep in mind if you decide to write an essay about a challenging or traumatic subject.

13 Reasons Why It’s OK to Write About Trauma in your College Applications —  And  How to Do So

• Colleges are not looking for perfect people . They are looking for real humans. Real Humans are flawed and have had flawed experiences. Some of our most compelling stories are the ones that open with showing our lives and experiences in less than favorable light. Throw in your lessons learned or what you have done to repair yourself and grow, and you have the makings of a compelling overcoming — or even redemption — story.
• Write with pride : This is your real life. Sometimes you need to be able to explain the circumstances in your life — and colleges want to know about any hardships you’ve had. They want to understand the context of your application, so don’t worry about thinking you’re asking the colleges to feel sorry for you (we hear kids say that all the time). We recognize you for your immense strength and courage, and we encourage you to speak your truth if you want to share your story. Colleges can’t know about your challenges and obstacles unless you tell them. Be proud of yourself for making it through your challenges and moving on to pursue college — that’s an accomplishment on its own!
• Consider the position of the admissions officer :  “We’ve all had painful experiences. Many of these experiences are difficult to talk about, let alone write about. However, sometimes, if there is time, distance, and healing between you and the experience, you can not only revisit the experience but also articulate it as an example of how even the most painful of experiences can be reclaimed, transformed, and accepted for what they are, the building blocks of our unique identities.

If you can do this, go for it. When done well, these types of narratives are the most impactful.  Do remember you are seeking admission into a community for which the admissions officer is the gatekeeper. They need to know that, if admitted, not only will you be okay but your fellow students will be okay as wel l.”  from Chad-Henry Galler-Sojourner ( www.bearingwitnessadmissions.com )

• Remember what’s really important : Sometimes the processing of your trauma can be more important than the college acceptances — and that’s ok. If a college doesn’t accept you because you mention mental health issues, sexual assault, or traumatic life experiences, in my opinion, they don’t deserve to have anyone on their campus, much less survivors. Take your hard-earned lived experiences elsewhere. The stigma of being assaulted, abused, or having mental health issues, is a blight on our society. That said, be aware of any potential legal issues as admissions readers are mandated reporters in some states.
• Consider using the Additional Info Section : If you do decide you want to share your story — or you need to because of needing to explain grades, missed school, or another aspect of your application or transcript, don’t feel compelled to write about your trauma, disability, mental health, or addiction in the main personal essay. Instead, we encourage you to use the Additional Info Essay if you want to share (or if you need to share to explain the context of your application). Your main common app essay should be about something that is important to you and should reveal some aspect of who you are. To us (and many applicants), your trauma, disability, mental issues, or addiction doesn’t define you. It isn’t who you are and it isn’t a part you want to lead with.

Putting some other aspect of who you are first in your main essay and putting trauma, addiction, mental health issues, or disability in the Add’l Info Essay is a way to reinforce that those negative experiences in your life don’t define you, and that your recovery or your learning to accommodate for it has relegated that aspect of their experience to a secondary part of who you are.

• You CAN use your Common App essay if you want:  IF you feel like recovery from the trauma or learning to handle your circumstances  does  define you, then there is no reason you can’t put that aspect of who you are forward in the main personal essay. If the growth that stemmed from the crisis is central to your narrative, then it can be a recovery, or an “overcoming” story. It’s a positive look at your strengths and how you achieved them. If you want to place your recovery story front and center in the primary essay, that’s an appropriate choice.
• Write from a place of healing : Some colleges fear liabilities. So, wherever you decide to put your essay in your application, make sure you are presenting your situation in a way that centers how you have dealt with it and moved forward. That doesn’t mean it’s over and everything is all better for you, but you need to write from a place of healing; in essence, “write from scars, not wounds.” (we can’t take credit for that metaphor, but we love it)
• M ake sure your first draft is a free draft.  With any topic, it can be hard to stare at a blank page and not feel pressure to write perfectly. This can be doubly true when addressing a tough topic. For your first draft, approach it as a free write. No pressure. No perfection. Just thoughts and feelings. Even if you don’t end up using your essay as a personal statement or in the additional info section, it can be useful to sit and write it out.
• Establish an anchor. Anything that makes you feel safe while you’re writing and exploring your thoughts and experiences. Have that nearby. It can be a candle, an image, a pet, a stuffed animal.
• Check-in with how you are feeling.
• Pay attention to your body and what it’s telling you.
• Take breaks
• Go for walk
• Talk to someone who makes you feel safe
• Remember this kind of essay is NOT a reflection of you. It is only  part  of your story. (Ashley Lipscomb & Ethan Sawyer, “Addressing Trauma in the College Essay,” NACAC 2021)
• Who supported you in the aftermath of the experience? What did you appreciate about their support and what did you learn about how you would support others?
• Did your self-perception change after the experience? How has your self-perception evolved or grown since?
• How did you cultivate the strength to move through your experience?
• What about how you dealt with the experience makes you most proud?
• Remember that all writing is a two-way street and should serve you and the reader : All writing leaves an emotional impression or residue with the reader. This is especially true with personal essays. Good writers are able to look at their writing and understand how it can serve themselves (that sweet, sweet catharsis) while still meeting the reader halfway. This can be particularly challenging on the college essay, where your goal is to be both personally honest and to help an AO see why you would be a wonderful addition to their school’s student community. When you’re writing, be cognizant of your reader – tell your story
• Shield your writing itself from excessive negativity : When writing about difficult experiences, it can be easy for the writing itself (your phrasing, your diction) to become saturated with a tone of hardship and sorrow. This kind of writing can be hard to read and can get in the way of the underlying story about growth, maturity, or self-awareness. Push yourself to weed out any excessive “negativity” in your writing – look for more neutral ways of stating the facts of your situation. If you’re comfortable, ask a trusted reader to read your essay and point out the places where language seems too negative. Think of ways to rephrase or rewrite.
•  Think of your application — and therefore your essay — kind of like a job application. Sure, it’s more personal than a job occupation, but it’s not necessary to share every detail. Focus on the relevant information that validates the power of your journey and overcoming your challenges. Focus on the overcoming.

A framework for writing well about trauma and difficulty: “More Phoenix, Fewer Ashes”

Here’s a framework that we think you could apply to any essay topic about a traumatic experience or challenge. This is not a one-size-fits-all framework, but it should help you avoid the biggest pitfalls in writing about challenging topics.

The framework is called “More Phoenix, Fewer Ashes.” The metaphor actually comes from one of our parents who used to be active on A2C back when her kid was applying to college; she took it down in her notes at a Wellesley info session. In short, however, the idea is to pare down the “ashes” (the really hard details about the situation, past or present) to focus on who you’ve become as a result.

• Address your issue or circumstance BRIEFLY and be straightforward. Don’t dwell on it.
• Next, focus on what you did to take care of yourself and how you handled the situation. Describe how you’ve moved forward and what you learned from the experience.
• Then, write about how you will apply those lessons to your future college career and how you plan to help others with your self-knowledge as you continue to help yourself as you learn more and grow.
• Show them that, while you can’t control what happened in the past, you’ve taken steps to gain control over your life and you’re prepared to be the college student you can be.
• Remember to keep the focus on the positives and what you learned from your experiences.
• Make sure your essay is at least 80% phoenix, 20% ashes. Or another way to put this is, tell the gain, not the pain.
• The ending, overall impression should leave a positive feeling.
• Consider adding a “content warning or trigger warning” at the beginning of your essay, especially if it deals with sexual violence or suicide. You can simply say at the top: Content Warning: this essay discusses sexual violence (or discussion of suicide). This way the reader will know if they need to pass your essay along to someone else to read.

Use that checklist/framework to read back through your essay. In particular, do a spot check with the 80/20 phoenix/ashes rule. Make sure to focus on growth!

Good luck and happy writing,

AdmissionsMom and McNeilAdmissions ( www.McNeilAdmissions.com )

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I agree with both of You! When we experience a traumatic event, it can be difficult to share our experiences with others. We may feel like we are the only ones who can understand what we went through. We may feel like we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. But sharing our experiences with others can help us heal and can help prevent further trauma. Although, for me, it’s ok to share. If you can’t, then there’s nothing bad about that. After all, it’s difficult to get back to your dark past.

I love your perspective. Thank you for sharing your thoughts here!

Do you think if you write about a parent who was abusive, they can somehow contact the parent or something? I don’t wanna get in any trouble.

They might have to because of their state laws. I’d research that and talk to your school counselor.

As someone who works closely with high school students, I will definitely be sharing your article with them. It’s a valuable resource that can help them navigate this important aspect of the college application process with confidence and integrity.

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Addressing Trauma in the College Essay

• October 29, 2020
• 2020-2021 , NACAC

Cody Dailey Victor J. Andrew High School

By the time you read this, many students will have (hopefully!) submitted their college applications and essays. However, with regular decision deadlines still around the corner, I felt it’s still relevant to share some takeaways from a presentation I attended at the 2020 NACAC that addressed trauma in the college essay.

This year has been challenging for students in so many ways. With the global pandemic, needed calls for racial justice, and a highly-polarized election cycle, students have seen and experienced increased levels of trauma. In the college admissions process, oftentimes these traumatic experiences can be displayed or brought to light in a student’s writing sample for applications. In the NACAC session titled, ‘Addressing Trauma in the College Essay Writing Process,’ presenters Ashley Lipscomb and Ethan Sawyer touched on many key recommendations for working with students who have experienced trauma as it pertains to the college essay.

Among the key takeaways, there was a reminder that students should not feel required or pressured into always writing about their challenges. While that is a powerful topic to explore, there are many others, including writing about a passion, an identity, a career, an important object or memory, or even a unique skill or ‘superpower.’ Sometimes students feel pigeon-holed into writing about their traumas, but we should remind them that they own the distribution rights to those moments.

If a student is struggling with what to write about, Ethan shared a phenomenal activity that could be done with individuals, small groups or even an entire class: his “Feelings and Needs Exercise.”

He has students start by making five columns:

• Column 1: Students share challenges they’ve experienced
• Column 2: Students write down the effects that occurred due to that challenge
• Column 3: Students write down feelings associated with those effects
• Column 4: Students write down what they needed/feel they needed to cope with the feelings
• Column 5: Students write what they did action-wise to overcome those feelings

Once they have completed this exercise, it should give students a menu of different options of where they want to go in their writing. He encourages students to ‘star’ important topics or themes. This can also be done by pairing students up in a pair-and-share model, but you must be cautious that students within the class trust one another with these sensitive topics.

Finally, simply affirming and thanking the student for sharing their experience goes a long way. In sharing, students are trusting us with a lot of very personal, traumatic information. In return, we must show them the utmost respect and gratitude for not only valuing our input but also trusting us with this information. To some this might be just an essay to check off the list, but for others it can also be a powerful tool of emotional processing, and we are lucky to be a part of that.

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“The essays I ended up submitting were more reflective of my character than my earlier drafts because they were rooted in the joy that defines me as much as anything else,” Lin Lin, a Chalkbeat Student Voices fellow, writes. (Whitney Hayward/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images)

There’s more than one way to write a college essay

I resented the expectation that i lead with my trauma. but trauma is not the only thing that defines me, and it’s not the only reason i deserve to go to college..

“You’re smart, you’re Asian, you’re queer and nonbinary, and you were raised by a single mom. Colleges will love you.” That’s the message I heard from friends even years before applying to college. In high school, advisers chimed in, too; they made it seem like it was a cool thing to be from a marginalized background.

When it came time to do my college applications, I think they assumed that I’d write about the challenges I faced growing up in an immigrant family with limited means, with minority racial, gender, and sexual identities. I knew that I could tell a phenomenal story about all the struggles I had overcome. I was, after all, applying to college through QuestBridge , a national nonprofit that connects low-income youth with colleges and opportunities. My peers initially encouraged me to use the hardships to my advantage. Tell them how you adapted and thrived through it all, even the pandemic , they urged me.

I drafted an essay, then I discarded it and tried again. And again. One was about growing up in a neighborhood that is slowly being gentrified. Another was about living in a world that perceives me as an Asian woman and the violent consequences that come with it. Another still was about coping with my weight. None of them felt right. I knew some of what I went through was tough, and some saw my ability to persevere as remarkable. But is that all I had to offer? Is that all I am worth?

It felt like an exercise in proving my worth to college admissions officers.

And what, exactly, was I trying to prove? That despite the disadvantages I faced, I am still at the same academic level as those who didn’t face such adversity? That I can handle college because I grew up handling so much?

I resented the expectation that I lead with my trauma.

When I focus only on the worst things that ever happened to me and on the challenges and pain that come with my racial, gender, and sexual identity, it feels toxic and takes away from my humanity. Trauma is not the only thing that defines me, and it’s not the only reason I deserve to go to college.

I drafted an essay, then I discarded it and tried again. And again.

Of course, if other applicants want to open up about their hardships, they should tell their stories. I would never want to take this away from them. It’s just that I refuse to believe that it’s the only way to write a college essay.

Conflicted, I reached out to a fellow community organizer Van Sam, of VietLead . They were a great help. While overcoming challenges is character-building, Van reminded me that I have many other things to contribute. They urged me to question what actually makes up my identity.

Here’s what I came up with:

I am funny with a contagious laugh. I am loud. I like talking to people and always want everyone to feel included. I love urban green spaces and spending time outdoors, especially running or hiking. I’m addicted to romantic comedies and Chipotle. I’m someone who is growing constantly.

So what did I end up writing about? My love of nature, how much I adore analyzing the world around me and reveling in that same world. I also wrote about being non-binary through the lens of my liberation. Specifically, I wrote about buying my first chest binder. “When I put it on, it was euphoric,” I wrote. I compared the experience to eating candy without consequences. I compared it to flying.

The essays I submitted were more reflective of my character than my earlier drafts because they were rooted in the joy that defines me as much as anything else.

I felt good about what I had turned in, but as early decision day approached, I was overcome with doubt. I thought of all of the reasons they would reject me. I hadn’t submitted my SAT or ACT scores, which were optional. I worried that my essay wasn’t good enough and that I couldn’t compare to other high-achieving students who did more than I did in high school.

I tried to calm my nerves. I prayed to my ancestors. My hands were stained with the reddish color of the incense I’d been burning. My fingers were the color of sangria. It wouldn’t come off, no matter how much soap I used.

When I finally worked up the nerve to go log on, the “Dear Lin” letter waiting for me began: “Congratulations!” I had been accepted to Dartmouth and, thanks to QuestBridge, I would receive a full scholarship.

In the days since, I’ve spent time scrolling through Dartmouth’s website . I’ve decided I want to double-major in government and sociology. I want to join campus clubs and take part in Greek life. I want to study abroad. I want to learn how to swim and how to ride a bike and how to drive a car. Maybe I’ll get a tattoo of a rabbit and a tiger after saving up money. There’s so much joy ahead. I’m going to lead with that.

Lin Lin is a senior at Central High School in Philadelphia, the president of the citywide student newspaper the Bullhorn News , and a Chalkbeat Student Voices fellow . They will be attending Dartmouth in the fall.

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College Essays and the Trauma Sweetspot

Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. Discuss a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. If all else fails, explore a background, identity, interest, or talent so profound that not doing so would leave our idea of you fundamentally incomplete.

Exactly the sort of small talk you want to make with strangers.

American college essays — frequently structured around prompts like the above — ask us to interrogate who we are, who we want to be, and what the most formative experiences of our then-short lives are. To tell a story, to reveal ourselves and our identity in its entirety to the curious gaze of admissions officers — all in a succinct 650 words.

Last Thursday, The Crimson published “ Rewriting Our Admissions Essays, ” an intimate reflection by six Crimson editors on the personal statements that got them into Harvard. Our takeaway from this exercise is that our current essay-generating ethos — the topics we choose or are made to choose, the style and emphasis we apply — is imperfect at best, when not actively harmful.

The American admissions process rightly grants students broad latitude to write about whatever they choose, with prompts that emphasize personal experience, adversity, discovery, and identity — features often distort student narratives and pressure students to present themselves in light of their most difficult experiences.

When it comes to writing, freedom is good — great even! The personal statement can be a powerful vehicle to convey an aspect of one’s identity, and students who feel inclined to do so should take advantage of the opportunity to write deeply and candidly about their lives; the variety of prompts, including the possibility to craft your own, facilitate that. We have no doubt that some of our peers had already pondered, or even lived in the shadow of, the difficult questions posed by the most recurrent essay prompts; and we know the essay to be a fundamental part of the holistic, inclusive admissions system we so fervently cherish . Writing one’s college essay, while stressful, can ultimately prove cathartic to some and revealing to others, a helpful exercise in introspection amid a much too busy reality.

Yet we would be blind not to notice the deep, dark nooks where the system that demands such introspection tends to lead us.

Both the college essay format — short but riveting, revealing but uplifting, insightful but not so self-centered that it will upset any potential admissions counselor — and the prompts that guide it push students towards an ethic of maximum emotional impact. With falling acceptance rates and a desperate need to stand out from tens of thousands of applicants, students frequently feel the need to supply the sort of attention-grabbing drama that might just push them through.

But joyful, restful days don’t make for great stories; there are few, if any, plot points in a stable, warm relationship with a living, healthy relative. Trauma, on the other hand — homophobic or racist encounters that leave one shaken, alcoholic parents, death, loss and scarring pain — makes for a good story. A Harvard-worthy story, even.

For students who have experienced genuine adversity, this pressure to package adversity into a palatable narrative can be toxic. The essay risks commodifying hardship, rendering genuinely soul-molding experiences like suffering recurrent homelessness or having orphaned grandparents into shiny narrative baubles to melt down into a Harvard degree. It can make applicants, accepted or not, feel like their admissions outcomes are tied to their most vulnerable experiences. The worst thing that ever happened to you was simply not enough, or alternatively, it was more than enough, and now you get to struggle with traumatized-imposter syndrome.

Moreover, students often feel compelled to end their essays about deep trauma with a statement of victory — a proclamation that they have overcome their problems and are “fit for admission.” Very few have figured life out by age 18. Trauma often sticks with people far longer, and this implicit obligation may make students feel like they “failed” if the pain of their trauma resurfaces during college. Not every bruise heals and not all damage can be undone — but no one wants to read a sob story without a redemption arc.

A similar dynamic is at play in terms of the intensity of the chosen experience: Students feeling for ridges of scars to tear up into prose must be careful to avoid cuts too deep or too shallow. Their trauma mustn’t appear too severe: No college, certainly not Harvard, wants to admit people who could trigger legal liabilities after a bad mental health episode . That is the essay’s twisted pain paradox — students’ trauma must be compelling but not too serious, shocking but not off-putting. Colleges seek the chic not-like-other-students sort of hurt; they want the fun, quirky pain that leaves the main character with a new refreshing perspective at the end of a lackluster indie film. Genuine wounds — the sort that don’t heal overnight or ever, the kind that don’t lead to an uplifting conclusion that ties in beautifully with your interest in Anthropology — are but lawsuits in the waiting .

For students who have not experienced such trauma, the personal essay can trap accuracy in a tug of war with appealing falsities. The desire to appear as a heroic problem-solver can incentivize students to exaggerate or misrepresent details to compete with the compelling stories of others.

We emphatically reject these unspoken premises. Students from marginalized communities don’t owe college admissions offices an inspirational story of nicely packaged drama. They should not bear a disproportionate burden in proving their worthiness.

Why, then, do these pressures exist? How can we account for the multitude of challenging experiences people have without reductionist commodification? How do you value the sharing of deeply personal struggles without incentivizing every acceptance-hungry applicant to offer an adjective-ridden, six-paragraph attempt at psychoanalyzing their terrible childhood?

We don’t have a quick fix, but we must seek a system that preserves openness and mitigates perverse pressures. Other admissions systems around the world, such as the United Kingdom’s UCAS personal statement, tend to emphasize intellectual interest in tandem with personal experience. The Rhodes Scholarship, citing an excessive focus on the “heroic self” in the essays it receives, recently overhauled its prompts to focus more broadly on the themes “self/others/world.” We should pay attention to the nature of the essays that these prompts inspire and see, in time, if their models are worth replicating.

In the meantime, students should understand that neither their hurt nor their college essay defines them — and there are many ways to stand out to admissions officers. If it feels right to write about deeply difficult experiences, do so with the knowledge that they have far more to contribute to a college campus than adversity and hardship.

The issue is not what people can or should write about in their personal statements. Rather, it’s how what admissions officers expect of their applicants distorts the essays they receive, and how the structure of American college admissions can push toward garment-rending oversharing. We must strive for an admissions culture in which students feel truly free to express their identity — to tell a story they want to share, not one their admissions officers want them to. A system where students can feel comfortable that any specific essay topic — devastating or cheerful — will not place them slightly ahead or behind in the mad, mad race toward that cherished acceptance letter.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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Writing About Trauma in College Essays

• Sasha Chada
• May 29, 2023

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A recent TEDx talk by Tina Young entitled: The Rise of the “Trauma Essay” in College Applications caught my attention, as many of the points she raises are ones we have discussed with our students, especially those in our Laurel Scholars program, which seeks to help the otherwise underprivileged in their college applications. 

She raises some important points, but we want to discuss the phenomenon of trauma essays in a slightly different light, and explore why colleges want to hear about your struggles. We’ll seek to contextualize this need in the application process, and explore how you can share it with colleges without making it the core of your identity or application process. 

Why Colleges Care About Trauma

The truth underlying the TEDx talk is simple: trauma essays often work, and are successful in helping students get into college. This leads to many students, both those who have experienced trauma and those who haven’t, feeling like they need to discuss challenges they’ve faced and overcome in their essays to have a shot at getting into college. This is not the case. 

Essays about overcoming challenges often work because they function well as college essays. A good college essay tells admissions officers who the applicant is, what their values are, and tells an interesting narrative to convey this information. Stories about overcoming challenges are often narratively compelling (just look at most popular TV shows and movies, and see how many challenges those characters face). While this is far from the only way to write a strong college essay, it is easy to see why some students feel compelled to write one.

That said, colleges do care about struggles you may have faced which have impacted your educational progress. This is because all students are analyzed in context, and their achievements are measured against the opportunities they were presented with. To show how this works, let’s compare two fictional students. 

Students A and B have the same grades and test scores, though student A has taken far more advanced courses in math and science. Student A has also interned at several labs, and has their name on a number of research papers. Student B has some extracurriculars, but for the most part has not done much outside of school beyond some part-time employment. 

Here is where context matters. Student A attends a top private school, one with extensive support for extracurriculars and advanced academic opportunities, including support for independent research and help finding internships. Student B, on the other hand, attended a poorly funded public school, one without the budget for arts, much less advanced options. They had to help take care of siblings after school, and worked part time to help their parents pay bills.

In light of this context, which student’s academic achievement means more? Does this explain the extracurricular gap?

While students should not feel forced to devote their essays to discussing past hardships, nor are those the only topics they can write about in essays. That said, admissions officers only know what you tell them, and this kind of context about challenges you have faced can and does substantially impact your chances of acceptance.

How to Write About Trauma

So what to do, if you have context you want to provide, but are hesitant (understandably so) to delve into past bad experiences in so personal a way as the best essays require?

In these cases, we recommend using the Common App’s additional information section, which exists for this purpose explicitly. The additional information section is not an essay, but is instead a place to factually describe any circumstances or challenges you have faced, personally or educationally. You may or may not have overcome these challenges; that is not at issue. Rather, colleges want to understand who you are, and the situation you’ve come from.

Generally, the additional info section is used to discuss the following: 

• Additional activities or extracurriculars that did not fit elsewhere
• Medical issues which have impacted your education
• Extenuating or remarkable circumstances
• Learning differences which have impacted your education

Note that you do not have to include an additional information section if you do not wish to, and you do not have to divulge personal information outside your comfort zone. The goal is to provide information to allow admissions officers to evaluate your accomplishments in the light of what you have done.

Here are some examples of extenuating or remarkable circumstances which students can describe in this section. This is not an exhaustive list, but serves to show the kinds of situations students have discussed before: 

• How a parent’s death, illness, or injury impacted them, and what additional responsibilities they had to take on within their household because of it.
• What responsibilities you had within your household normally, above and beyond normal chores, including things like caring for siblings or taking care of major household responsibilities, such as meal preparation.
• If you were unable to participate in extracurriculars due to familial or other responsibilities, or monetary constraints. 
• If language barriers or cultural clash were a barrier to your education, due to your immigration status.
• If your education suffered disruptions due to circumstances outside of your control.

Again, this section is not an essay, but instead a place to simply and factually explain your circumstances, and how they affected you. There does not need to be an excess of detail, or descriptions of how you overcame an issue if you did not. That said, if you have worked to address or overcome a challenge, you may include that as well.

The Trouble With Trauma Essays

In the TEDx talk, the presenter rightly points out that requiring students to discuss and unpack their trauma in college essays can be harmful. It produces false expectations for what their essays should be, and places an undue burden on students to discuss topics they may not be comfortable with. She also rightly points out that not all challenges are overcome, and not all of them can be neatly tied up with a bow and presented in the form of an essay for admissions officers.

These are legitimate concerns, but we do believe there is also a need for students to share some of their struggles with admissions officers. While we do strive to give students equal opportunities to succeed, the truth is that not all schools have the same level of funding and resources, and not all of them are able to offer the same opportunities to their students.

On top of this, each student has their own unique struggles, some far more than others. The circumstances of your life do not need to define you, but they can shape the opportunities you are provided. The relative weight of an accomplishment must be judged based on the resources of the student doing it.

Admissions officers are only humans, but there is a push to make college admissions more fair. Part of the difficulty in this is trying to judge the relative accomplishments of students. The more information they have about you, and what you’ve gone through, the better they will be able to evaluate your accomplishments, and evaluate you in the proper context. 

Final Thoughts

There is sadly no easy way to resolve the problem of trauma essays in college admissions. While students should not feel the need to recount every challenge they have faced, there is a legitimate need to provide context for your accomplishments to admissions officers, especially if your life circumstances have impacted your academic or extracurricular involvement. Even if they haven’t, your achievements are made more impressive by what you have dealt with in accomplishing them.

While college applications are difficult for students regardless of background, we do know that some students have better access to resources than others, or have unique concerns that impact their applications. If you want to discuss your own concerns with us, schedule a free consultation today. If you aren’t sure about that, consider checking out our pro bono offering: Laurel Scholars . In either case, we look forward to hearing from you, and helping you with your collegiate dreams.

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College Essays and Trauma: Students Are Being Pushed to Write About Their Worst Experiences

By Claire Hodgdon

Last spring, I interviewed for a job providing essay support with a company that works with high schoolers on their college applications. Services like this are expensive: According to a 2019 article in US News , comprehensive college consulting packages can range from $850 to $10,000. Because of the price point, these services are often reserved for students from economically privileged backgrounds. “These students are really at a disadvantage these days,” my interviewer confided. “What would you tell students who haven’t experienced trauma when working on their essays?”

I was immediately struck by the linking of privilege with disadvantage. I was uncomfortable with the one-for-one association of income bracket and adversity as if having money protected high schoolers from anything bad ever happening to them and that coming from a lower-income family automatically meant students were traumatized. Most of all, I was shocked by the emphasis being placed on trauma in college application counseling.

Trauma should not be a deciding factor in college admissions. Students should not need traumatic experiences in their past in order to be competitive applicants, nor should they feel forced to disclose anything that they may have gone through. Pain should not be the avenue through which students must represent themselves. And students who do not feel they have experienced much adversity or hardship should be grateful, not bitter, and write about any of the other things that make them who they are. But as the volume of applications that students send out continues to rise , applicants are desperate to stand out.

What do colleges actually hope to learn about a student through their essay? According to the CollegeBoard , they want “a unique perspective, strong writing, and an authentic voice.” Harvard Business Review says the Common App essay is “your chance to show schools who you are, what makes you tick, and why you stand out from the crowd.”

At its best, the college application is an opportunity for a student to go from being a set of data points to a human being. The essay can demonstrate a student’s writing ability, style, and flair. It can prompt a teenager to reflect on their values, on the moments and experiences in their lives that have shaped them, and on their understanding of their own selves. I am, primarily, a personal essayist. I believe deeply in the power of an essay to function as art and to reflect something much bigger than ourselves. I could even be convinced that a 650-word limit might be a productive constraint in essay writing. The personal essay could be good for students if students actually felt any topic was available to them, if they felt they really could write about their passion for pickleball or fan fiction instead of thinking that milking adversity could equal bonus points in their application file.

At its worst, college essays force high school students to search through their personal experiences for a trauma they think they can sell. Meanwhile, as former foster youth Emi Nietfeld wrote in Teen Vogue , young people who have faced immense adversity struggle to capture their experiences neatly in a few hundred words. When students compare themselves to their classmates, especially when applying for the kinds of colleges and universities that take a limited number of students from a specific high school, they are practicing ranking themselves against their peers in a form of trauma Olympics. They are not learning to be empathetic to the people around them or to recognize that they can never know the entirety of what people are carrying with them.

The Supreme Court's decision to overturn race-based affirmative action puts an even harsher burden on applicants' essays. Colleges can’t consider the systems of inequity that may affect students of color, but individual students can include their experience as a marginalized person in the essay . Many college admissions boards are still mostly white , and students of color may have to find ways to communicate their identity while also answering the essay prompts. This narrows what applicants think is worth writing about or what makes them worth receiving the education they dream of.

This summer I worked with a group of 16- to 18-year-olds in a creative writing class. For many of them, it was their first experience in a class like this. One afternoon, a student started writing about something they hadn’t thought about in years and ended up in tears over their laptop. We built a space where these students felt safe and supported to explore their trauma in writing and it often came out in incredibly moving 10- or 15-page essays. The projects were open-ended, so the story they needed to tell dictated how long the piece would be. Our students didn’t need to pretend their experiences had a neat conclusion. They could be honest. They could reflect and process, and then they could share a piece of writing with a community that cared about them.

The college essay allows for none of this when students feel required to write about adversity. Some students have already asked for a kinder application process , citing the damage the process as a whole does to their mental health. If students have trauma they need to work through, and if writing can help them do so, they should have space to safely, deeply, and thoroughly write about what they need to say without turning it into a self-sales pitch. The college essay should be a space for exploration and reflection where students can present what they care about and what makes them who they are.

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How to Write About Trauma

By Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

• Aug. 13, 2016

One summer afternoon, when I was 4 or 5 years old, I was raped by a next-door neighbor. If the act itself was gruesome, the aftermath was surprisingly uneventful, beginning with the fact that my mother, despite knowing what had transpired, did nothing. As for me, I did what everyone tries to do under similar circumstances: move on and be normal. With the exception of the occasional nightmare that visited me in the years that followed, I was convinced that there had been no lasting damage. How miraculous it was that I had emerged unscathed.

This could very well have been the end of the story if not for my freshman year in college, when I found myself being pursued, some might say stalked, by a male professor who had somehow determined, at least in his own mind, that I was gay. He had also determined, or so he said, that I was a good writer, or a great writer, hyperbole I happily accepted without question since I was in need of any and all approbation.

He gave me books, he gave me money, he gave me dinner. He also gave me letters, multipaged and pornographic, describing in no uncertain terms what we would do once I got over my sexual inhibitions. Sometimes I would hear him driving past my apartment building in his silver sports car with its distinctive downshift. Sometimes I imagined I heard him driving past. Sometimes I would wake up to find that a letter had been placed in my mailbox at some point during the night.

I was not gay and I told him so. He would not accept no for an answer. The no was even more evidence that I was gay. Back and forth we went like this. Since there had never been any precedent in my household for alerting the authorities to misdeeds, it never occurred to me that I could have walked over to the campus student services office and reported his behavior. In my confused and desperate state, I even wasted a significant amount of time entertaining with some seriousness the possibility that I might indeed be gay. This went on for the duration of my college career, which for the record was never completed.

What I could not understand, because I was in a sustained repudiation of my past, was that much of what was happening between me and the professor had originated some 15 years earlier on that fateful summer afternoon. In fact, what was playing out was my fundamental need to be menaced by a predator, and then, in the final moment, to elude that predator’s trap. This was the very thing I had not been able to do as a child, but it was neither cathartic nor therapeutic.

Well, strangely enough, 25 years later, degreeless and still bearing the distress from my college years, I am now a professor who teaches aspiring writers. Sometimes I will ask my nonfiction students to write a personal essay about a trauma they have experienced. This has always struck me as a foolproof writing exercise, with its built-in drama and its intrinsic demand for self-expression. Since “trauma” can, of course, be applied to a wide range of incidents, both big and small, the students are welcome to choose whatever event they want, but it’s my hope that they’ll have the space, freedom and confidence to write the thing they have been so far unable or unwilling to express.

Occasionally, there are students who will suggest that they are too young to have experienced any trauma, which is either wondrous good fortune or extreme denial. Everyone else, though, manages to come up with something: weekends with alcoholic aunts, visits to Mom in the psych ward and, yes, sexual assault by boyfriends, classmates, relatives, employers. As of yet, no male student has written about being sexually abused, possibly because the sample size of male students in my classes is too small, or if my history is any indication, the shame is too great.

Recently, I suggested to my class that sometimes trauma alone does not a story make. Sometimes the surface content, no matter how well it’s written, is not compelling enough and needs to connect to something more, something deeper. Or to put it another way: Not every troubling or difficult thing you have experienced will be interesting to someone who doesn’t know you. I was not doing a very good job making myself clear, partly because I hadn’t fully thought it through beforehand, and partly because I was diplomatically trying to avoid implying that a certain student’s story had been boring. I flailed around for a while, before resorting to myself as an example, more specifically my thumb, which I had dislocated a few days earlier while playing basketball. Now it was in a splint for four weeks.

WHAT piece, I asked my class, could I write about my dislocated thumb? Sure, it had been traumatic, the shocking sound of the pop when the ball had hit it, the horrifying disfigurement of the thumb suddenly lodged halfway inside my hand, and then the slogging through Manhattan streets, going from urgent care clinic to urgent care clinic, until I found one that had an X-ray technician working the holiday weekend. But what was significant about this experience? How could I make it emblematic of something larger than just a dislocated thumb, and turn it into a story that someone would want to read?

I wasn’t asking the class pedantically. I was asking genuinely. And one young woman, sitting directly across the table from me, offered, “What about the vulnerability of your body?”

And sure enough, there it was: the dislocated thumb as a metaphor for the damaged, vulnerable body that I had had as a young boy. The point being that everything can connect, everything can be emblematic, everything is lying in wait to be uncovered. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look. At the basketball court, despite my own pain and discomfort, I had reflexively shielded my thumb from the other players, not wanting them to see the injury lest the horror of their reaction increase my own. This was followed by the kindness of a fellow player, who had come all the way in from Brooklyn for his one weekly game of basketball, but who sacrificed it to accompany me as I looked for medical aid.

When eventually I was seen by a doctor, she patiently explained what she was going to do, caring doctor that she was. “This will hurt,” she told me. I didn’t care about hurt. I cared about having my body restored at whatever cost. And remarkably and quite easily the doctor did just that: She shot me five times with Novocain and then grabbed my thumb and yanked it back into place. With the exception of the yellow iodine covering my hand, and the slight swelling of the thumb, no one would ever have suspected that a moment earlier something about me had been damaged.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the short-story collection “Brief Encounters With the Enemy” and the memoir “When Skateboards Will Be Free.”

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Dumping Your Heart Out: “Trauma Dumping” in College Application Essays

Exploring the advantages and pitfalls of writing the common application personal statement about traumatic experiences., reading time: 8 minute s, by  ayesha talukder , sophie zhou, issue 1 , volume 114.

Summer: a time of abundant sunshine, ice cream, and … college applications. Rising seniors pass the days constructing school lists, applying to scholarships, and studying to take the SAT one last time. However, there’s one part of the college application process that’s particularly stressful: essays. The number of essays a student will write will vary based on which schools one is applying to, but it’s common to write up to 20 essays . Arguably the best-known essay that students write is the personal statement, which is submitted through the Common Application portal. This portal is used by over 900 colleges and universities and has seven prompts that students can choose from, each of them meant to bring out a side of the applicant not showcased in other parts of their application.

One approach to writing the Common App essay has been dubbed “trauma dumping,” where students center their essay on personal traumatic events. This term has since evolved to include essays focused on any intense hardships that the student experienced (whether they resulted in psychological trauma or not), otherwise known as “sob stories.” For the purposes of this article, “trauma” will be used to refer to any hardship that had a long-lasting impact on the student. This essay-writing approach has been popularized by viral social media stories, where trauma essays are portrayed as the “make-or-break” factor in college applications; a well-known example is Abigail Mack, who went viral on TikTok after sharing her “ letter-S” essay about the loss of a parent. Mack was accepted to Harvard University.

Some students feel pressure to use trauma in their essays to make them stand out. Maggie Huang (‘23) is currently majoring in pharmacy at St. John’s University. “I think a lot of people treat [the college essay] as a major important thing in their life, like they have to sell themselves really badly and be like ‘I went through so much, I deserve to be here.’ [...] You're only 17, 18, so there’s not that much else you can talk about unless you did something really, really revolutionary,” Huang said. The pressure to stand out can be especially intense at a school like Stuyvesant, where there are countless high achievers and accomplished students. “When you hear about all the things your friends [...] are doing, [your own accomplishments] don’t seem impressive enough. I [felt] really very painfully average when compared to the rest of Stuy,” Huang added. 

By the time college application season arrives, essays are often viewed as the only thing on a student’s application that they still have control over. “Your grades are already your grades, your SATs are already your SATs, you’ve joined whatever clubs and pubs you’re going to join, so [the essay] feels like the last chance, the last thing that’s still up for grabs,” Assistant Principal of English Eric Grossman said. Because of this, students often feel pressured to make up for the weaker points in their application by crafting a powerful essay.

Thus, trauma often becomes tempting as a way to stand out. “A lot of Stuy kids are immigrants, first generation, etc… or have had something bad happen (I mean, COVID was literally handed on a silver platter to us). Maybe it’s just me, but it feels easier to just write about that because it’s so much easier to make yourself seem inspirational and deserving of being in a school for having made it through that kind of experience,” Huang said. 

English teacher Mark Henderson agreed that including trauma in an essay is often presented as a means of earning a spot at a prestigious institution. “The whole college application process is really unfair to students and that aspect of it feels really gross to me. Students feel as though they are being asked to share things that are really hard to share with strangers in order to like, you know, win something—basically to win an acceptance to a college and all of that,” Henderson said.

However, others, such as Bill Ni (‘19), a graduate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and current software engineer at Amazon, believe that there isn’t any pressure to include trauma in college essays. “I don’t think there’s any pressure to use trauma … [However,] I still feel that it’s presented as an option, but it’s not something you have to, like, 100 percent use.” 

Ultimately, though, deciding whether to write a “trauma essay” should come down to the student’s own level of comfort with revealing a vulnerable experience in their life. This can be more difficult than students may initially assume. “If you’re writing about something traumatic in your past, exploring that topic in a piece can be traumatic in itself because you may, depending on what it is, be reliving it,” Ni said.

Ingenious Prep Associate Director of Counselor Enrollment and Communications Zak Harris agrees that it is crucial for students to think carefully about whether they are fully prepared to share their trauma. “If you’re going to go down this path, you have to be 110 percent behind yourself to some degree,” Harris said. Thus, it may be easier for students who have already worked through their trauma to mention it in their essays: “With students who are doing clubs and organizations, volunteering, [or] working for a nonprofit that connects to some of the issues that they’ve had, I think that’s where it’s a little bit different, because their day-to-day experience is sort of using that trauma [...] So that might be a little bit better than someone who is, I think, still navigating and figuring it out,” Harris added. 

Students should be aware that “trauma essays” can be controversial and aren’t well received by everyone. Some people caution against them because “trauma essays” can become too focused on the traumatic event itself and not on the student’s cultivated strengths. At Stuyvesant, senior English teachers dedicate an entire unit to helping students with their college application essays, often providing individualized feedback. “[My English teacher] said actively to avoid trauma dumping, because it’s so overdone and it doesn’t tell the college anything about you specifically,” Huang said. After hearing this advice, Huang switched gears with her essay. “Originally, it was about like a family situation and then it pivoted to my acceptance of my identity of being Asian-American in America, which is still kind of not completely trauma-free, but at least it wasn’t as bad as before,” Huang said.

Additionally, there is also the risk of admissions officers having biases against certain traumas, especially those relating to mental illness. “There are many colleges that have lawsuits going on against them right now connected to mental health issues and their slow reactivity to things that current students have been going through,” Harris noted. “Sometimes what happens in admissions is that if there's any risk, then I think there's going to be a pocket of people that will say, ‘Well, don't do it, because it's risky.’” However, this is slowly changing as mental health issues become more openly discussed and the stigma around them decreases. “I think we are in a generation and a time where mental health struggles and issues are widely talked about in a way that 10, 15, 20 years ago, they were not talked about as much, which I think actually is helping admissions officers become more comfortable or even more open to reading about these things in essays,” Harris added.

One way students can communicate relevant traumas to admissions officers outside of their essays is to ask their recommenders to include that information in their letters. “It's quite often, I find, when I'm writing recommendations, that [the letters] could be a really useful place for somebody else to sort of explain and put [traumatic events] into context, in the context of recommending them,” Henderson suggested.

If a student does decide that they want to write about trauma in their essay, they should be cautious of how they frame it. Students should make it clear that their goal is not to seek sympathy from the admissions officer, but to demonstrate how they’ve grown from their trauma. “The admissions officer [shouldn’t be] just focusing on what happened, but taking that into consideration [...] what's happening next, or what's happening now. How are they using this, you know, to better themselves or better other people?” Harris explained. 

English teacher Katherine Fletcher shared an example of when incorporating trauma in an essay can work to a student’s advantage. “I read a very effective college essay last year about this student’s struggle to overcome her challenge with obsessive compulsive disorder [...] and how she wants to sort of live a functional life in spite of those challenges.” By concentrating on growth rather than struggles, the student was able to impress Fletcher and leave a lasting impact.

However, students should consider avoiding including traumas in their essays because traumatic moments don’t always demonstrate the best aspects of one’s personality. “If I was applying to college or any other part of my life, I would not want to feel obligated to be judged on my worst moments,” Henderson said. “I would want to be judged on the moments I'm proudest of.” 

Grossman similarly believes that less intense topics can be just as powerful (if not more) than ones that address trauma. “One college essay I read that I really, really liked was my son’s. He wrote about [...] European castles and kind of like fantasized about what his life would be like if he could buy this one,” Grossman said. “I think the essay didn’t try to bare his soul [...] I don’t think that for the most part a college essay is for baring your soul. There isn’t enough room anyways—nobody’s soul is 600 words.” 

At the end of the day, there is no one person to listen to when it comes to essay topics but yourself. After all, the criteria used by admissions officers to judge essays isn’t clear-cut, and depends heavily on the individual admissions officer who reads the essay. “None of us have ever let anyone into college. So none of us will truly know that secret, like ‘Here’s the one essay that will get you in,’” Henderson said.

Ultimately, it’s important for students to remember to stay kind to themselves throughout the grueling process of writing their college application essays, whether or not they choose to write about their trauma. The approach to writing about trauma often recommended in college applications—that is, demonstrating one’s growth from it—might not always align with the healthiest approach for the student’s healing process, and that’s okay. After all, the personal statement is essentially supposed to hold a mirror to the applicant’s truest self, so whatever the student decides to put on the page should unequivocally be their choice and reflect the parts of themselves that they are most comfortable sharing. Whether that includes trauma or not, the admissions officer should come away from the essay feeling as if they have seen the applicant in the clearest and most authentic way possible.

How to Write About Trauma in my College Essay?

So, I want to talk about my childhood experience in a somewhat bad household, but how should I talk about it without making it seem like a sob story but not being so vague that the college AOs are confused?

Specifically, my dad was an alcoholic and I want to mention how I was able to “win” through that situation by making toys and stuff out of his beer boxes and later connecting that to my passion of creating illustrations and telling stories, but idk how i’m supposed to write about him without making it too focused on him…

Should I even mention him?

I think you have a great topic in your hands (I’m sorry that you had to grow up in that situation but it makes a memorable essay topic). Especially with the great nuances of you creating toys and “stuff” with beer boxes, you could craft a powerful essay with a bit of effort. Obviously you don’t want to make this about your dad because then it turns into a bit of a sob story unless you write it well in my opinion, but if I were you I would mention your dad somewhere in the beginningish of your essay because your dad being the reason you had a somewhat bad household adds to the idea of overcoming adversity seeing as to how dads are supposed to have a positive impact on their child’s life. (I’m not saying your dad didn’t but it doesn’t look that way based on your description)

I think you can do this essay. Focus on your creativity and your unique hobbies. I like the toy part and your hobby of illustrations and telling stories. I think it could work. More readable than a covid essay in my opinion.

It certainly meets the criteria that if someone would pick up this essay (without your name on it) they would most certainly know you authored it.

And can you then look forward, and connect your creativity/hobbies/storytelling to your future plans?

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