how to write a sob story college essay

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May 3, 2023

On Avoiding Sob Stories in College Essays

Originally Published on September 29, 2017:

Many students and parents have the mistaken impression that sharing sob stories in college admissions essays will pull on the heartstrings of admissions officers at highly selective colleges and inspire them to want to offer the student admission.

Maybe it’s a story about a grandparent’s death. Or perhaps it’s a story about enduring a childhood illness like leukemia. Now, we don’t mean to sound coldhearted. That’s terrible to go through — no child (or adult) should have to experience cancer. It’s just that writing about a childhood illness will not serve a student’s case for admission. Nor will writing about a grandparent’s death since this experience is universal.

Instead, writing such sob stories will more likely lead an admissions officer to think just what you may fear they will think — that you’re sharing this woe-is-me story to sway them to offer you admission. Students made this mistake in 2003. They continue to make this mistake in 2023.

Sob Stories in College Essays

Sob stories are cliché in college admissions essays.

While regrettable, it’s also important to know that many children suffer from illnesses, including cancer. So you can imagine that many students write about their bouts with these illnesses in their college admissions essays, most notably their Common Application Personal Statements.

When the name of the game in the highly selective college admissions process is differentiation, to stand out and avoid cliché, writing about a topic that so many other applicants are tackling is counterintuitive.

In our experience at Ivy Coach over the last 30 years, the six most cliché topics for Personal Statements are as follows: sports, music, foreign travel, community service, dead or living grandparents, and childhood illnesses. No essay executed on these topics will wow an admissions officer, and the latter three topics, in particular, lend themselves to sob stories.

Notable Exceptions to Tackling a Sob Story in College Essays

But for every rule, there is an exception. It’s just that virtually every parent and student seems to think they’re the exception rather than the rule. In all likelihood,  they’re not . Remember, admissions officers don’t want to read about students as children. They don’t want to read about playing tag in the elementary school playground. Instead, they want to read about who students are and how they think  now  — as young adults. 

So in Ivy Coach’s 30 years of helping students earn admission to our nation’s most prestigious institutions, the only occasions in which we’ve allowed them to tackle a sad story is when they can relate that story to their interests as young adults.

For example, we had a student interested in political science whose father was tragically killed in the 9/11 terror attacks. This student wrote about how our nation should confront terrorism. She didn’t write her whole Personal Statement about their late dad. Instead, she shared this story as a way into her interest in political science so the reader could understand her unique perspective. She showed rather than told of their passion for improving America’s counterterrorism policies. In so doing, she proved she was the exception rather than the rule.

Ivy Coach’s Assistance with College Essays

If you’re interested in wowing admissions officers with your essays, know that helping students present their most powerful case for admission in the many college essays they submit is  a big part  of what we do at Ivy Coach. So fill out our free consultation form , and we’ll contact you to outline our college counseling services .

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Guest Essay

When I Applied to College, I Didn’t Want to ‘Sell My Pain’

By Elijah Megginson

Mr. Megginson is a high school senior in Brooklyn.

In school, most kids are told that they have the potential to do great things in life. They’re told the sky’s the limit. As I started to be recognized as a promising student, around eighth grade, I was told, “You’re smart and you’re from the hood, you’re from the projects, colleges will love you.”

When I heard this, I was confused. I always looked at being from the hood as a bad thing. It was something I was quite ashamed of when I was younger. So for my teachers and advisers to make it seem like it was a cool thing made me feel good inside, until I fully realized what they were talking about.

In my life, I’ve had a lot of unfortunate experiences. So when it came time for me to write my personal statement for college applications, I knew that I could sell a story about all the struggles I had overcome. Each draft I wrote had a different topic. The first was about growing up without my dad being involved, the second was about the many times my life was violently threatened, the third was about coping with anxiety and PTSD, and the rest followed the same theme.

Every time I wrote, and then discarded and then redrafted, I didn’t feel good. It felt as if I were trying to gain pity. I knew what I went through was tough and to overcome those challenges was remarkable, but was that all I had to offer?

Conflicted, I asked around to see what others had written. I spoke to my old middle school algebra teacher, Nathaniel Sinckler. When he was applying to Morehouse, he remembered, he “felt pressured to write about something I could oversell.” He knew enough to write about hardships he had faced, he said, but although “I didn’t have enough, I didn’t go without.”

This made him feel that he was at a disadvantage because he was competing with kids on the same academic level who had faced even more adversity. So the question on his mind, for a long time, was “How can I oversell myself?” He explained that this was an experience not talked about enough: students of color trying to become poster children for trauma and pain. The focus becomes no longer who you are as a person but rather “are my challenges enough,” as Mr. Sinckler said, “and will this give me value?”

Mr. Sinckler asked me, “Who are you?” He urged me to question what actually makes up my identity, because while struggles are important, they’re not my only contribution. He felt that students of color glorifying their hardships is selling trauma with scholarship “dollar signs behind it.”

I also spoke to a friend about her application to N.Y.U. She wrote about experiencing homelessness at one point in her life. I asked how she felt as she wrote about that, and she said that it was “difficult to write, rather forced — and I had an interesting experience rereading it when I graduated, because I had sort of programmed myself to think of myself as less-than, as inferior.” Her application described her poverty, her living briefly in a shelter, as well as her dad not being present in her life. I asked why she wrote about her hardships, and she said, “Because I had to get into school and advisers emphasized, like, sell your pain.”

“It was a flex,” she said, to go to a prestigious school like N.Y.U. “But I didn’t feel like I should have been there.” She had the grades, she had the credentials, but she lacked self-esteem, partly because she forced herself to write about moments in her life she wasn’t proud of. So for the longest time she felt her N.Y.U. acceptance was undeserved. She would stay under the radar in classes, instead of making her presence known. Her essay had become an internalized mind-set.

I spoke to one of my younger brother’s teachers, Aaron Jones, who also attended Morehouse, and he said, “Teachers promoted it” — the personal statement about hardships. But he wanted to show the admissions officers what he was capable of and decided that if he wrote about his neighborhood in Annapolis, Md., “it would put me in a box.”

This box was the clichéd story of a Black kid in America. Mr. Jones said that if he had wanted to go to a P.W.I. — a predominantly white institution — then a sob story would have been more important, but since he wanted to go to a historically Black institution, he could showcase his abilities. He emphasized that students of color have more to offer than the cliché. He said, “The sob story can be truth, but it’s not all said all.” He argued that college is the gateway to experiencing a fresh start and that bringing old baggage with you only limits your growth. He ended up writing about a teacher who had mentored him since the fifth grade.

Mr. Sinckler, my friend who went to N.Y.U., Mr. Jones and I had gone to different high schools, and we had all been given the same message. But it wasn’t just the advisers; I was hearing it from family and neighbors. Everyone around me seemed to know this was what colleges were looking for, to the point where it didn’t even have to be spoken. I felt like the college system was forcing us to embody something that was less than what we are. Were colleges just looking for a check on a checklist? Were they looking for a slap on the back for saving us from our circumstances?

As I kept rewriting my personal statement, it kept sounding clichéd. It was my authentic experience, but I felt that trauma overwhelmed my drafts. I didn’t want to be a victim anymore. I didn’t want to promote that narrative. I wanted college to be a new beginning for me. At the time, my mom, a part-time health aide, was taking care of a patient who used a wheelchair. My mom was sometimes unable to pick him up at the bus stop, as she was just getting off her second job, so I took on that responsibility.

I would wait for her patient at the bus stop; I would make sure he ate, and I would play music for him until my mom got home. I also wrote about my relationship with my middle school janitor. I used both of these stories to show the importance of diversity and the value of respecting everyone regardless of physical ability, status or class. After writing this, there weren’t any feelings of regret. I felt free.

Trauma is one of life’s teachers. We are molded by it, and some will choose to write about it urgently, passionately. Yet I would encourage those who feel like their stories were written in tragedy to rethink that, as I did. When you open your mind to all the other things you can offer in life, it becomes liberating. Let’s show college admissions officers what they’re missing out on, not what they already know.

Elijah Megginson is a graduating senior at Uncommon Charter High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who is still choosing between several colleges for the fall.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

Making an Art of the Sob Story

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Interested in reading some good sob stories? Try sitting in the chair of an admissions officer on any of the University of California campuses.

There’s the essay written by an aspiring UC Berkeley student whose family home and possessions were turned to ashes by a wildfire--everything except her dad’s Berkeley class ring. Or the one from a UCLA hopeful whose grades dipped while she worried about her girlfriend’s drug problem.

And then there are the deaths of beloved grandfathers.

Hundreds of them.

“If you believe these essays, California is the most unhealthy state in the union,” said Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA’s director of undergraduate admissions. “There are more sick parents. There are more dying grandparents. There are more burned down houses and natural disasters than anywhere else in the world. That is what we hear about over and over again.”

But if UC officials are tired of these stories, they only have themselves to blame. They asked for them.

No longer able to consider race or gender in picking the freshman class, the officials are trying another approach to maintain diversity in their student body: “We are really looking for kids who have achieved something in the face of obstacles,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl. “We just can’t take race into account as one of the obstacles.”

So as admissions officers tackle reading the 85,000 personal essays that poured in before the university system’s Nov. 30 application deadline, a common theme emerges among the applicants competing for limited seats: how they have faced adversity.

“The word is out on the streets,” said one college advisor, “that you have a better chance of getting into UCLA if your essay reads like a soap opera.”

To be sure, many of these “personal statements,” as UC officials call them, are sobering and true tales from teenagers coping with the gritty reality of the urban jungle.

Take Lupe Gonzalez of Los Angeles. She wrote about being punched and kicked by three “gangsta girls” when she was a high school freshman. Besides leaving her face “swollen, red and blue,” the beating forced her to transfer to another school--and set her on track for college.

Attending the university, she wrote, will help her shatter her family’s expectations that she is destined to “end up pregnant like my sister.”

Yet it’s not just inner-city youths writing about life’s challenges. At one civics class for high school seniors, the question of how many were applying to the University of California arose. A dozen hands shot up. How many wrote their essays about overcoming challenges? Nine hands.

And this was Beverly Hills High.

One student wrote about the loss of her mentor, a former teacher who had died. Another wrote about a friend who was killed in a car accident. A third wrote about how she was preoccupied helping a girlfriend who dipped too deeply into drugs. “My grades weren’t very good in the ninth grade,” she said, “so I thought I should try to explain it.”

About 40% of Beverly Hills High students are of Persian descent, and counseling director Vivian Saatjian-Green finds herself discouraging some from writing about “being refugees from Iran after the fall of the shah.

“We say, ‘Let’s move on, it’s been 20 years now. You weren’t even born when this happened.’ ”

Such gamesmanship, of course, has always been around for those brainy teenagers aspiring to the nation’s elite colleges.

Morton Owen Schapiro recalls the tragedy-laced essays he used to read at Williams College. “Ninety percent of them were about my grandfather died or my best friend killed himself or died in a car accident,” said Schapiro, now USC’s dean of letters, arts and sciences. “They were sad stories, but the same stories over and over.”

Yet gaining admission to one the nation’s elite universities is more competitive than ever and students know they need an edge.

UC Berkeley freshmen have an average SAT score of 1,307 (out of 1,600) and a mean grade-point average of 4.15--which is possible because UC grants five points on a four-point scale for an A in an Advanced Placement or honors course. The average SAT score of UCLA freshmen is 1,275, and the mean grade-point average is 4.13. Grades and test scores inch up every year.

So when Peter Butcher of Santa Barbara began the lonely task of filling out a UC application, it was quite natural for him to wish that his 3.9 grade-point average and 1,360 SAT score were just a tad better.

And it was during this rite of passage--a time marked by high anxiety and pitifully low self-esteem--that he had to tackle the most excruciating part: the essay.

Perhaps no other piece of writing carries such weight in determining one’s destiny. Living in a material world, teenagers are suddenly supposed to turn introspective and spill their guts on paper in a way that will sum up their accomplishments, demonstrate their maturity and perhaps even show a flair for writing--all in a couple of pages.

Peter wrote drafts and then tore them up. He hired a private education consultant, and they pored over drafts together. He finally settled on a topic that seemed to fit: his history of “dysgraphia,” a learning disorder.

That seemed more comfortable than the alternatives. For many years, UC applicants have picked from three topics: A) “Describe the qualities and accomplishments you would bring to the undergraduate student body”; B) “Describe one of your intellectual achievements”; and C) “Describe any unusual circumstances or challenges you have faced and discuss the ways you have responded.”

To Peter, answering the first two felt like bragging.

“It was easier to talk about the challenges you face than talking about how great you are,” he said. “It’s a matter of sounding egotistical. I’m not a person who does that.”

When Life Needs to Imitate Art

Tugging on the heart strings of college admissions officers comes naturally for many students.

They know these stories sell. After all, they are bombarded with them at the movies, on television and sports pages: The hero or heroine must surmount daunting hurdles--or suffer through a life-shattering event--before emerging as the champion or the queen of the ball.

In an example of art imitating life imitating art, the hip television writers on the hit show “Felicity” explored the trend of fudged tragedies. Felicity, the show’s namesake character who developed a crush on a boy and followed him to a New York university, secretly reads his application essay while working part-time for the university. He had written a three-hankie tale about his older brother, who died of brain cancer. The problem was, as she later discovers, he never had a brother.

Good fiction is not the only inspiration available for students who pine for a powerful tale to spice up their young and often uneventful lives. They can now purchase such “hardship” essays over the Internet.

Furthermore, a cottage industry of private educational consultants knows what subjects to plumb.

No obvious family tragedy or personal challenge? Not to worry. They urge the teenagers to dig deep into themselves and come up with a highly personal, awkward or downright embarrassing moment--the real-life stuff sure to catch the bleary eye of an admissions officer plowing through hundreds of personal essays.

One of these essays, cultivated by West Los Angeles educational consultant Vicky De Felice, ended up enshrined in a how-to book, “The Best College Admission Essays.” Its focus: a teenager’s nightly ritual of slathering himself with ointment to rid himself of “the dreaded zit.”

Besides catapulting the reader into the world of teenage angst, the essay had a message: “As you get older and take on a new face, you see that those things weren’t really life and death matters.”

Ada Horwich, a licensed clinical social worker in Beverly Hills, helps teenagers write their essays--a process she compares to psychotherapy: “They’re discovering who they are and trying to put it on paper.”

The predominant themes, she said, are often the same: overcoming obstacles.

As a counselor at North Hollywood High, Susan Bonoff said there is a simple reason that life’s challenges pop up as a common topic. Many of today’s students, she said, “carry a lot more baggage than students did when I was going to high school.”

She disagrees that students wear hardships on their shirt sleeves. In fact, she finds herself nudging low-income students to write about things that amplify their accomplishments: the student who retreats nightly to the garage to study because the family apartment is too chaotic; the student whose mother disappears for months at a time, leaving him in charge of his little brother.

“Some of these kids don’t even see it as a problem. They see it as reality,” Bonoff said.

In contrast, middle-class students struggle with the essay, she said. “They haven’t had any obstacles in their lives and feel that they are behind the 8 ball because they don’t have any reason why they haven’t done better.”

Sunita Puri, who attended Palos Verdes Peninsula High before being accepted to Yale, has little patience for classmates complaining about life’s hard knocks when they grew up in what she calls “one of the most sheltered areas in Southern California.”

“I read six essays about parents with cancer and I know that one of the students made it up,” she said. “People are ruthless. They’ll do anything to get into a big-name school.”

Complementing Grade Information

The idea of having aspiring students write about the challenges they had faced emerged as a way to help spot exceptional students whose promise isn’t fully reflected in grades and test scores. It has taken on a much larger role as the university has phased out affirmative action, the tool long used to boost the number of black and Latino students.

In place of racial preferences, the university now gives added weight to students who excel despite a disability, low family income, parents with no college education or an array of difficult personal or family situations.

That’s where the essays come in. UC admissions officers, as a rule, do not consider letters of recommendation, and applicants are not granted interviews. So the essays become the vehicle, as UC Undergraduate Admissions Director Carla Ferri says, “to tease out as much as possible the context of the student’s achievement, everything that cannot be explained by checking a box” on the eight-page application.

How these special circumstances are weighted has been left up to each campus, and neither UCLA nor Berkeley has rendered those additional criteria into a point system that can clearly be factored into the formula weighing grades and SAT scores.

Instead, the two campuses admit roughly half of their freshmen on the basis of superior grades and test scores alone, and then allow admissions officers some latitude--without strict formulas--to pick the second batch by considering applicants’ academic standing in the context of life challenges, personal achievement or intellectual development.

Outside of the admissions offices, when people argue about the role of application essays, they often focus on how the university has attempted to substitute socioeconomic barriers for affirmative action.

For example, let’s say that a Latino student writes that his teachers had low expectations for him as a student and so they pointed him toward auto shop, instead of college preparatory courses. If the student’s race leads to a disadvantage, can that be considered?

University attorneys have mulled over that question and decided that a disadvantage of that sort can be considered, said Gary Morrison, UC deputy general counsel. Acknowledging that someone has suffered a disadvantage because of racism or sexism is not the same as giving preference to race or gender, he said.

But critics like UC Regent Ward Connerly think that approach is just a “back door” way to give applicants preferences for race. He said the expanded criteria lend themselves to abuse and suggested that the matter will end up the subject of a lawsuit.

“There is no way to verify that someone was race-tracked,” he said. “We are opening the door to a lot of sob stories about hardship: ‘Now give me the preference because of racial discrimination.’ ”

But while Connerly and others focus on the possibility that personal statements might be used to reintroduce affirmative action, what has struck admissions officers is that not just the poor or ethnic minorities, but the sons and daughters of the privileged, are writing about challenges they have faced in their young lives.

“One story that a student wrote was how disadvantaged he was because his mother loved his sister better and he felt unloved all of his life,” said Siporin, UCLA’s admission director. “There is a significant difference between whiny crybabies who are writing to make you feel sorry for them, and those who are coping with horrendous life situations.”

Bob Laird, who retired last month as UC Berkeley’s admissions director, said he grew weary of too many students “straining to find hardships to write about.”

“It’s not unusual to run into a student from an upper middle-income family who says, ‘We don’t have a chance because we don’t have a hardship.’ But they’ve got it backward. What gets lost in translation is that we are interested in students of high achievement, period.”

Laird, Siporin and other UC admissions directors stress that point over and over at workshops they hold for high school guidance counselors every September.

“Do not manufacture hardships,” Siporin said, urging counselors to spread the message in their schools. “Students don’t have to survive a tremendous ordeal to get admitted.”

But then admissions directors read sample essays to the counselors. One heart-wrenching tale explored a Laotian refugee’s anger, resentment and finally acceptance over being abandoned by her wayward mother. Another came from a Latino student who painfully detailed his teenage years in an abusive home fueled by alcohol and drugs. Finally out on his own, he wants to become a UCLA-trained psychologist so he can help others become “survivors.”

The powerful words humbled the audience, turning the boisterous room into a place of hush-quiet reverence.

Reflecting on the mixed message, Laird said, “We get caught in our own little web.”

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I am More than My Sob Story

Students should not be pressured to exploit their pain in college applications..

Rania Jones Visuals: Olivia Park 10.05.23: Unearthed , Forum

I am haunted by a lineage of four words: You are your trauma. 

My mom died a week into my senior year of high school. As I approached and navigated the chaos of the college admissions process, my whole world was fractured. Between drafts and drafts of varying personal statements, everyone around me seemed to know that the gaping grief-sized hole in my life was what colleges were looking for. I was expected to capitalize on this. 

The concept of students centering their college essays on their personal trauma has been dubbed “trauma dumping.” Viral social media stories have popularized this essay-writing approach, where trauma essays are portrayed as the “make-or-break” factor in college applications. 

When students compare themselves to the other applicants, they rank themselves against their peers in a form of trauma Olympics. Turning one’s pain into a self-sales pitch should never be the way to win over an admissions officer. The personal essay could be meaningful for students if they actually felt that any topic was available to them—as I reflect on my own college application process, however, I’m left wondering, is capitalizing on and benefiting from personal trauma unethical? Or is it a “glass-half-full” way of looking at things?

Founder and CEO of the Krupnick Approach and current college consultant Dr. Joseph Krupnick ’00 said, “The fundamental goal for getting into top schools is to differentiate yourself, to distinguish yourself, and to create your own hook … People who have traumatic experiences or who have an uncharacteristic life, or other experiences, that are also unusual, feel pressure to write about those things, because they are very personal and unusual.”

The majority of college applications consist of test scores, GPAs, and class rankings—all factors that shrink our beings into data points. It’s no surprise that essays are often viewed as the only thing on a student’s application over which they feel they have control. 

According to the College Board , colleges want “a unique perspective, strong writing, and an authentic voice,” from students in their application essay. 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.” 

The college application process is “intrinsically an intrusive process,” according to Krupnick. “And it’s intrinsically a process in which you’re telling people things that they have no right to know about. It’s kind of how the system seems to work now,” he explained.

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. Yet, when students feel required to write about their adversity to stand out, the college essay allows for minimal amounts of meaningful self-reflection. This phenomenon narrows what applicants think is worth writing about, and more problematically, what makes them worth receiving the education they dream of. 

When a Harvard junior who wished to remain anonymous was asked if they felt a pressure to write about their eating disorder, they said, “I felt like I was able to write about it, from not a place of it being a sad story, but of actually about something pretty incredible that I was able to overcome.” They continued to explain that our society normalizes trauma in a problematic way, detailing that “people to try to compete with others” about their trauma.

Similarly, Abigail Mack ’25 went viral on TikTok after posting about her “Letter-S” essay about the loss of a parent. Stories like Mack’s contribute to the belief that in order to be a competitive college applicant, not only must students have endured trauma—they also must put it on display to be analyzed by admissions officers.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn race-based affirmative action puts an even harsher burden on applicants’ essays. Colleges no longer can consider the systems of inequity that may affect students of color, but individuals can include their experience as a marginalized person in the essay. Hopefully, future students undergoing college admissions will not feel as though they are at a disadvantage because they are competing with kids on the same academic level who have faced more adversity than them. No one should feel forced to disclose anything that they may have gone through. 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.

Exploiting painful and traumatic moments in your life to “sell yourself” to a college will never work in your favor. An anonymous Harvard student shared a similar sentiment—“I think that like one of the things that my college counselor was like really trying to drive home was like ‘you can’t write a sob story, because they’re just going to read it and feel bad for you. Like there has to be, like a so-what, like what did it do to you, like why?’ ” she said. 

Never in the process of writing my college essays did I ask myself if writing about my mother’s death would give me admission clout. I knew what I went through was terrible and to overcome those challenges was remarkable, but a little bit of me will always wonder if Harvard thought my trauma was all I had to offer. Is who I am outside of my trauma still enough for Harvard, or were they just looking for a slap on the back for saving me from my circumstances?

Trauma-induced people should lean on the conflicts of their life only in authentic ways. I wrote about the most intimate moments of my life only because I know that I am not defined by my grief. Instead, it has helped shape who I am. I would encourage those who feel like their stories were written in tragedy to rethink writing about their trauma. You don’t want to become an applicant that colleges pity, nor will people value more if they can only sympathize with you. The admissions officer will not be just focusing on what happened, but will take into consideration what’s happening next, or what’s happening now. 

* Quotes have been adjusted to account for filler words and grammatical correctness. Rania Jones ’27 ( [email protected] ) has shamelessly published her traumatic college essays for public reading.

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How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay

By: gen and kelly tanabe, avoid the sob story..

Tear-jerking stories may be popular subjects for television specials and song lyrics, but they rarely, if ever, win scholarships. A common theme students write about is why they need the scholarship money to continue their education. While this is a perfectly legitimate topic, it is often answered with an essay filled with family tragedies and hardships—a sob story. Again, there is nothing wrong with writing about this topic, but don't expect to win if the intent of your essay is to evoke pity. If your main point (remember our test) is this: "I deserve money because of the suffering I've been through," you have a problem. Scholarship committees are not as interested in problems as they are in solutions. What have you accomplished despite these hardships? How have you succeeded despite the challenges you've faced? This is more significant and memorable than merely cataloging your misfortunes. Unfortunately, the sob story is one of the more common types of essays that are written by students, and it is hard to stand out when you are telling the same story that literally hundreds of others are also writing. Remember that every applicant has faced difficulties. What's different and individual to you is how you've overcome those obstacles.

Show positive energy.

Mom has probably said: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." Everyone likes an uplifting story. Especially since you have your entire future ahead of you, scholarship judges want to feel your enthusiasm and zest for life. In fact, one reason some people love to volunteer to be scholarship judges is to meet positive and enthusiastic young men and women who do not have the cynicism or closed minds of many adults. Try to stay away from essays that are overly pessimistic, antagonistic or critical. This doesn't mean that you have to put a happy spin on every word or that you can't write about a serious problem. But it does mean that you should not concentrate only on the negative. If you are writing about a problem, try to present some solutions. Your optimism is what makes organizations excited about giving you money to pursue your passion for changing the world. Don't shy away from this fact.

Find people to read your essays.

There is an old writer's saying: "Behind every good writer is an even better editor." If you want to create a money-winning essay, you need the help of others. You don't need a professional editor or even someone who is good at writing. You just need people who can read your work and provide useful and constructive feedback. Roommates, friends, family members, teachers, professors or advisors all make great editors. When others read your essay, they will find errors that you missed and they may give suggestions for making the essay clearer to someone who is not familiar with the topic. You will find that some editors catch grammar and spelling mistakes but will not comment on the overall quality of the essay. Others will miss the technical mistakes but give you great advice on making the substance of your essay better. It's essential to find both types of editors. As you find others to help improve your essay, be careful that they do not alter your work so much that your voice is lost. Editing is essential, but your writing should always be your own.

Final Thoughts ...

Writing scholarship essays may not be your ideal way to spend a Friday night or Sunday afternoon. But remember that these essays can win you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for college. Try to keep this in mind when you feel burned out. If you really get down on writing, take a break. Go outside. Watch some meaningless television. Then when you are refreshed, get back to your essay. Every successful scholarship applicant we've met—and we will include ourselves here—has at some point got tired or disgusted and contemplated quitting. But each persevered and didn't give up. They pushed ahead and finished their essays. Had they given up, they would never have won scholarship money and that all important college diploma would have been a far more expensive (and for some impossible) accomplishment.

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Gen and Kelly Tanabe Founders of SuperCollege and authors of 13 books on college planning.

By: Gen & Kelly Tanabe More than anything else the essay and interview determine whether you will win a scholarship. Ace both with this new book. Includes 30 winning essays, 12 essays that bombed, and 20 sample interview questions and answers.

By: Gen & Kelly Tanabe The goal of The Ultimate Scholarship Book is simple: To help you find free money. Inside you'll find the most up-to-date and comprehensive listing of more than 1.5 million awards. An easy-to-use index makes finding the right scholarships ridiculously quick. And it wouldn't be the Ultimate book without a section of little known insider tips and strategies that show you how to actually win the scholarships you find!

Thursday, April 25, 2024

Opinion Columns

Admissions essays should ask for applicants’ values, not their sob stories.

Personal statements in college applications are seen as a space for personal expression. More often than not, however, they urge students to slap together sob stories – something those with access can better do. There’s a better alternative, though: diversity statements. (Axel Lopez/Assistant Photo editor)

By Sandra Wenceslao

April 5, 2019 12:42 a.m..

Milking one’s trauma isn’t the only road to university admission.

And yet, it’s exactly what college applications look for.

The University of California’s admission process, like that of other universities, aims to be holistic by requesting a history of applicants’ classes as well as their talents and achievements. The University’s undergraduate personal statements ask applicants to describe how their experiences have shaped their interests in their potential fields of study, asking them to draw heavily on personal experiences and relationships.

These statements are substandard for a variety for reasons. For starters, they encourage applicants to curate sob stories to tug at admission officers’ hearts. More troublingly, though, is that they do little to ensure applicants are truly cognizant of the importance of diversity and inclusion.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative: diversity statements.

Graduate applicants and faculty candidates nationwide are often asked to submit diversity statements, which require them to describe their past and possible future contributions to an environment of equity, diversity and inclusion. These statements allow applicants to showcase their commitment to contribute to the intended institutions and highlight what they could bring during their time there.

Diversity statements, while also rooted in applicants’ experiences, ask what their values are, ultimately seeking to understand how they came to be. That kind of questioning at the outset can compel future Bruins to walk on campus ready to think about issues like diversity and socioeconomic disparity. That kind of mindset can predispose students to bridge campus divides through discussion about these difficult topics.

Like graduate school applications, the UC’s undergraduate applications should include diversity statements to encourage potential students to think critically about core values of diversity. Personal statements have the potential of exploring applicants’ pasts, but don’t touch on anything substantial. They don’t ask about applicants’ potential contributions to UCLA or what their presence will bring to the table. They also don’t give students space to critically consider their role within the university.

Additionally, working on a personal statement can be mentally exhausting, which can be limiting for some.

Mia Glionna, a second-year American literature and culture and African American studies student, remembers being stressed out about her personal statement, despite having gone through a college prep program.

“I felt like I had to write a sob story to get in,” Glionna said. “(A diversity statement) doesn’t rely on the assumption of your family or like your personal life. I feel that takes off a lot of pressure to write about your personal traumas.”

Diversity statements don’t rely on personal traumas or hardships, and they can explore applicants’ experiences more deeply – and equitably – than personal statements.

“A lot of admissions processes can be excluding and marginalizing even if they’re not intending to be,” said Andrea Gambino, a graduate student in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

Gambino, who was a high school teacher for four years, said diversity statements are more personal than personal statements.

“How do you deconstruct diversity and inclusion and who you are from your personal statement? That is who you are,” she said.

A diversity statement has the opportunity to truly review an applicant holistically because students aren’t simply retelling their past narratives – they’re critically analyzing their own values and how they came to be.

Getting students to start thinking about diversity before even being admitted can help them know their identities matter and that they’re playing a role in fostering diversity on campus.

On top of that, the UC would be better able to ensure applicants follow through on what they’ve written if it uses diversity statements, said Elizabeth Fasthorse, a GSEIS student.

“You follow up with (those) questions,” Fasthorse said. “A lot of the schools here have additional (communication): They’ll have a question or you have interviews and telephone calls where you can ask the individual where you can check up.”

Diversity statements are also less invasive, as well as a lot more accurate. Students can write about what they hope to contribute without having to paint out their entire lives on a piece of paper.

Selena Cartznes, a GSEIS student, said diversity statements are easier to write in high school because they don’t hone in on past experiences.

“You’re really just talking about yourself. That’s the cool thing about it,” Cartznes said. “Yes, you talk about your life, but you don’t talk about what happened to you. You’re focusing on what happened and how are you going to move forward.”

And while diversity statements deconstruct applicants’ core values, using them wouldn’t necessarily be ideological filtering. The prompt would still require applicants to draw from their personal experiences, but in addition would ask them how they hope to contribute to the UC environment. That kind of introspection would only help students start to think about UCLA’s – and the University’s – core commitments and help make the campus more inclusive.

University admissions have a long way to go before they can truly claim equity, diversity and inclusion. A big piece of that puzzle: making sure admissions essays are more than just trauma porn on paper.

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The Catalyst

Seniors feel pressured to write sob stories for their college essays

Ava Marinos , Opinion Editor | October 21, 2022

The Catalyst / Raymond AMitchell / Flickr Creative Commons

Students write several rough drafts of their college admissions essays before submitting their final draft.

A senior’s fall semester comes with a lot of pressure, but the most time-consuming task for the class is writing their college application essays. Finding a topic is arguably the most challenging part of writing a compelling essay. Admissions officers want to be pulled into a college applicant’s essay right away.

Randi Heathman, The Equestrian College Advisor, even stated, “weak essays get skimmed. If a student’s essay isn’t great OR good, the admission officer will probably just skim past the essay and move right on to your transcript…”

So, what makes an essay worthwhile?

The personal statement, an applicant’s main essay via CommonApp, comes with several open-ended questions. They range from questioning one’s personal tribulations to asking applicants to submit an essay of their choosing. With such creative freedom, it can be difficult to know what to write about, especially with the hopes of truly being considered as a candidate for admission.

When so many of the CommonApp personal statement questions revolve around personal struggles,  students may want to find the most moving and dramatic hardship to write about. The loss of a family member, a mental health crisis, a financial burden; these are just some examples of events that students may reflect on. Does this suddenly turn the college application process into a competition for the most compelling sob story?

“I felt inclined to write my personal statement on adversity considering that I’ve been dealing with ADHD my entire life,” said senior Kayla Hollister. “I had to explain my grades and the implications of the medication I have to take since I wanted admissions officers to understand my struggles with the disorder both inside and outside of school.”

While there are several students who have actually experienced hardships throughout their life worthy of writing about, many have not experienced significant adversity. As a result, they try to pull at anything remotely difficult, even when it does not actually constitute a well-thought-out essay topic.

There have even been times when applicants go as far as lying about their life experiences, just to create a moving essay and gain sympathy points.

In an article on “fact-checking” in the college admissions process written by the New York Times, Sally Goebel, an admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania tells the story of one admitted student who wrote about his mother’s death for his personal statement. Seems like the moving essay gave him bonus points, but it actually ended up becoming his demise. Before classes started, an employee of the school called his home and a woman answered the phone. The woman ended up being his mother, who was very much alive. His admission was revoked thereafter.

Sometimes, it is hard to tell at first glance if a student is being truthful in their application. Advisers just have to emphasize the importance of truthfulness as much as they can, and hope that their students are acting with honesty and dignity.

“It’s also difficult for me to know if a student is telling the truth or not,” said Wendy Connolly, a teacher for the summer college essay intensive at NDB. “I don’t know if one’s essay has been embellished. When I read them, I’m reading as if this is legit.”

While there may not be any verification of the truth within applicants’ essays, college applications should remain truthful, as these lies can haunt them in the near future. It is understandable how one may feel inclined to produce something dramatic in order to stand out amongst thousands of other applicants, but stretching the truth should not be the solution.

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Sob stories? Trauma dumps? Black kids worry about writing college essays after affirmative action ban

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions.

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CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education , it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Wondering if schools ‘expect a sob story’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. … I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

A ruling prompts pivots on essay topics

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

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“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process. They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Spelling out the impact of race

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black.

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University , and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Will schools lose racial diversity?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair. She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

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Do colleges like "sob stories"?

I don’t think “sob story” would be a great term for this, but I’m wondering if talking about how my dad has multiple sclerosis and alcoholism in my family as reasons for me wanting to go into neuroscience and psychology would be appropriate. I’m obviously not looking to “exploit” my family but I don’t know if colleges would see it in that light.

Yea that sounds like it could be a great essay! Just don’t focus on how your dad powered through or whatever. When talking with someone who happened to be my SAT proctor who also happened to be a UC admission officer, she was telling me how she read these incredible essays about how some kid’s parents work so hard everyday and have lived through X, Y, and Z difficult situations. After finishing reading those essays, she wanted to admit their parents and not the kid themself!

So, my point is: focus on how seeing his strife motivates you and how you took actions etc. How did you turn his disease into opportunity or action? Not, how hard was your dad’s life or how brave is he for powering through.

It would be fine to use as a topic but 1) be sure to keep the focus on you, rather than on your dad 2) don’t turn it into a “sob story” but rather focus on the positives – certainly note his illness but it would be better to focus on what you learned from your dad, how your family drives you etc. (as opposed to a “poor me” type of sob story).

A personal statement can tell stories like that, but it will be a failure if it turns out to be about that or about your dad. It has to be about who you are –it’s a personal statement, after all. @happy1 is also correct that if its abiding message is negative it’s unlikely to be successful–you’ll have to pull some positive out of it for it to work at all.

Make sure if you do choose that idea it ends on a positive note. Would not be a good idea to have an entire essay complaining about your circumstances AKA a sob story. Maybe talk about your resilience and how you overcame that obstacle in your life.

Don’t forget to brainstorm other ideas, too! Don’t be restricted to that idea. As cliche as it sounds, make sure you are yourself on your essay. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not, but also try to sound likable and honest. Make sure you are proud of your essay in the end.

Colleges don’t admit you out of pity. They admit you for qualities that YOU showed in difficult circumstances : resilience, courage, drive, ability to feel and empathize, kindness. If you can manage to speak about your dad in ways that speak about you, yes, it’s good for colleged to know that about you.

I think a two-pronged strategy would be good: write about the difficulties and how you responded (the historical part) … followed by what you want to do in neuroscience/psychology (the future).

I’m going to be the dissenter and say no, I don’t think it would be a good essay. Or rather, I think it would be really, really difficult to do it well. These essays often end up being more about the parent than the student themselves, and they have the double whammy of sounding negative.

And unless you’ve already done a lot of pre-work to study psychology and/or neuroscience - or you spent/spend a lot of time as the caretaker of your father - there’s not a whole lot that you can say about yourself in this story.

And if you use it as a positive, there’s the danger of it sounding like an unnecessary prop or framing for a story that could’ve been better without it.

I suppose it could be done, but it would have to be really well-written to avoid the trap. If you have some time, you may want to try several drafts to see how it feels and f you can craft the tone you want, and show it to some outside readers to see if you’re striking the note you want to.

@juillet Completely, completely agree ^

What if the OP’s family history is just mentioned and VERY briefly described as a jumping off point …and the rest of the essay (at least 75%, if not more) describe the general fascination with neuroscience and psychology that ensued and continue today…the questions that had their beginnings in his/her childhood that OP now want to explore for the benefit of others (or whatever he/she wants to do with them. )

@inthegarden This is more of the path I was thinking. I wanted to mention it as more of a starting point then further dive into that being the reason I wanted to go into the field and to not see people suffer like he has. I’m planning to mention the experiences I’ve had because he has MS and describe how him having it has changed me growing up and changed my perspective of others.

Definitely never, ever a “sob story.” A college essay should be a “feel good story.”

You want the reader to say “wow, I want to meet that kid!” not “oh, poor kid, he’s had such a hard life…”

Note that “wow, I want to meet that kid” means showing that you have intelligence, personality, positive character traits, etc. It’s not incompatible with having had to overcome a difficulty, but a sob story is never a requirement. In fact, it can be a hurdle to overcome where the sob story makes it harder to show what colleges are really looking for.

If your dad’s conditions have caused you to have lower grades, it should be mentioned briefly in the counselor’s letter (preferred) or in the additional information section (if your counselor doesn’t write letters or doesn’t personalize them much). They do not have to be part of an entire essay.

It could work for Common App prompt #4 . Focus on MS as the problem you’d like to solve/engage. Leave the alcoholism out. The problem is definitely of “personal importance” to you. It might be more powerful if you discuss your father, briefly, at the end of the essay. That way, the reader will be focused on you, and the ending will have more poignancy. You can explain the significance of MS to you, initially, without mentioning your father. Talk about MS objectively, but keep your interest and passion apparent. Connect the disease with your goals in neuroscience. (Talk about psychology, too, if you like, but I gathered from your info that the psych was more directed toward alcoholism.) Steps that could be taken to identify a solution: a few points re latest research into combating MS. In the penultimate paragraph, discuss your father and how MS has affected you, surprising the reader with the precise (emotional) significance of MS in your life. Edit that paragraph for simplicity and emotional impact. Keep it about you.

Write it early and often to see if you have anything worth keeping because, like @juillet suggested, this could be a hot sobbing mess if you get overly focused on your father, or too emotional in the bulk of the essay.

Try it with your father at the end. If that isn’t working, go with the starting point idea in posts #9-10 . Don’t be too attached to it. Move on if necessary.

Edit: I just realized it’s unclear if you’re applying to undergraduate or graduate programs. I assumed graduate given the sub forum, so the following advice is specific to graduate applications, not undergraduate.

I agree with Juliet, don’t write a sob story as your personal statement. For neuroscience programs the focus of your personal statement should be more on your prior research experience, and less on your personal history. In fact, most schools don’t call it a personal essay, they call it a Statement of Purpose/Research and explicitly ask for info on your research history, inspiration for graduate research, reasons for interest in their program specifically, and research goals. You can include a few sentences at the beginning about your dad’s MS in order to explain your research interest in neuroscience specifically, but it should be no more than that. The point of the statement is to showcase your scientific research preparation for graduate school. You need to show them that this is a well thought out, rational decision on your part and you have the experience necessary to succeed in graduate studies. This isn’t about being a well-rounded applicant, it’s about being a well prepared applicant for research studies.

@Dunboyne , graduate admissions doesn’t use Common App or have essay prompts.

@variola , the OP is a high school student (stated in his/her other threads.)

@variola Yes I am a high school student. I swear I put it in a different category but that is my bad.

I saw a good essay along these lines recently that talked about all the things that intrigued them about their area of medical study, then very near the end briefly revealed the family connection. So it wasn’t the focus, but more of an additional point of data. I found it more compelling than the other essays I’ve seen that use this approach.

You shouldn’t write about this. I just finished the whole college admissions process and my english told me that you should never write about the 4 D’s (death, disease, disability, divorce). If you write about this it could stray away from you.

I think it can be done, but it has to be crafted very carefully. My D15 wrote about a difficult situation that was “central to who she was” or whatever that Common App prompt is along those lines. It made me super-nervous, and I had no input on it. But it really was about her, and it was in her voice, and it was real. I had a third-party read it (I can give you a referral to that person) who blessed it. D was accepted to 2 top 20 schools, waitlisted one, denied one.

ETA: I imagine her teacher recs backed up the theme, which was about empathy.

Try to remember, the more competitive the college, the more they want to see the attributes that matter to them. The personal statement is neither a bio nor meant to explain why you want X major. Remember, they’e looking at you as a possible member of their community. Imo, fine to refer briefly to the experience with Dad’s challenges, but then show how that translated outside your family: your actions and understanding.

“Show, not just tell.”

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How to write a poem: 11 prompts to get you into Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets Department'

Will Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album “The Tortured Poets Department” usher in a new era of poetry appreciation ?

Delaney Atkins, a part-time instructor at Austin Peay State University who teaches a class exploring Swift’s music's connection to Romanticism , hopes this album will help people realize the power of poetry as “one of the purest forms of human expression.”

“Poetry is not a scary thing,” she says. “If it’s something that (Swift) reads and leans into, I’m hopeful that other people will take it as an opportunity to do the same and not be afraid of feeling like they aren’t smart enough or it’s not accessible enough.”

How to write a poem

Ever heard the saying “the best writers are readers”? The first step to writing a poem is figuring out what you like about poetry.

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Is it imagery? Format? Rhyme? Start by sampling a few poets. Maya Angelou, William Wordsworth, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath and Amanda Gorman are among the greats. Look to your favorite songwriters and ask yourself, "What do I admire about their craft?" Atkins also recommends looking for a poem about a subject you're passionate about.

“I promise you, there’s a poem for everyone,” she says.

Next, decide what you want to write about. Simple as it sounds, this can often be the hardest step for writers. What do you want to say?

Finally, decide how you’re going to write it.

Atkins recommends starting with metaphors and similes , which Swift often employs. Some metaphors are more obvious, like in “Red,” when she sings “Losing him was blue, like I’d never known/Missing him was dark gray, all alone.” She uses a simile when she says “Loving him was like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street.”

If you’re writing about a relationship, ask yourself what it felt like. “This relationship feels like … a burning bridge,” is Atkins's example. You can stick to a single line or make it an extended metaphor with an entire poem about that bridge.

Use imagery, or visually descriptive language, to help tell the story. Look around the room and describe the setting using lofty prose or personify the objects around you. Or create a character and tell their story – think of Swift’s love triangle in the “Betty,” “Cardigan” and “August” trilogy or “No Body, No Crime,” in which she slips into the skin of a vengeance-seeking best friend.

Do poems have to rhyme?

While many of Swift's songs rhyme, it’s not required in poetry.

“There are no rules and that’s a good thing, it’s a freeing thing,” Atkins says. “Take that and run with it – be as creative as possible.”

Review: Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is hauntingly brilliant

Taylor Swift has always been a member of 'The Tortured Poets Department'

In Atkins’ class, Swift's 10 previous albums are on the syllabus. Some connections to poetry are more overt, like Swift’s reference to English poet William Wordsworth in “The Lakes.”

But Atkins also teaches the motifs and literary devices that Swift uses throughout her discography, like the repetition of rain . In “Fearless” Swift alludes to naively running and dancing in the rain. Later in “Clean” from “1989,” rain is a baptismal metaphor for washing away the addiction of a past relationship. On “Peace,” off of “Folklore,” Swift sings about rain as a manifestation of her anxieties. 

She uses the extended metaphor of death and dying in several songs. Atkins points to “dying in secret” in 2009’s “Cold As You” as representative of shame (“And I know you wouldn’t have told nobody if I died, died for you”). In 2020’s “peace” death is a symbol of unconditional love (“All these people think love’s for show/But I would die for you in secret”). She also repeatedly references her death throughout “My Tears Ricochet” – “And if I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake?”

Poem ideas inspired by Taylor Swift

Want to become a “Tortured Poet” yourself? Here are some prompts to kickstart your poetry era.

• Use a five-dollar word: Who else could fit “clandestine” and “mercurial” in a song? Use an unexpected word from Swift's work, like “elegies,” “unmoored,” “calamitous,” “ingenue” or “gauche” as a jumping-off point.
• Write a poem based on one of the “eras” : Tell a girl-next-door love story based on “Taylor Swift,” a bitter heartbreak for “Red” or the tale of your slandered character for “Reputation.”
• Write about your “invisible strings”: The “invisible string theory” hypothesizes that there’s some larger force at work laying the groundwork to lead us to our destinies. In “invisible string,” Swift writes about the path that led her to a romantic partner. Write about your own.
• Paint the image of a season: It's tempting to break out your flannels and drive to go leaf-peeping after listening to "All Too Well." In literature, fall often represents change. Pick a season and describe it using imagery – how does that season represent what your poem is about?
• Use rain as a metaphor: Take inspiration from Swift's many uses of rain, which sometimes symbolizes losing yourself in a passionate moment but other times indicates a cleansing or sadness.
• Take a spin on a classic: Swift invokes classic literature in “Love Story” when she sings “You were Romeo I was a scarlet letter.” How can you put a modern take on classic tropes ?
• Retell history: This is precisely what Swift does in “The Last Great American Dynasty” when she tells the story of Rebekah Harkness , a socialite who lived in the Rhode Island house Swift bought in 2013. Who can you use as a muse?
• Play with color: A whole essay could be written about Swift's use of the color “blue.” Try out a common color symbol (like blue for sadness, red for passion, green for envy) or flip it on its head entirely and have it represent a new emotion.
• Use the year you were born: Swift's “1989” symbolizes her artistic rebirth . Title your poem the year you were born. How can you emerge as a poet reborn? 
• Random lyric generator: Still stumped? Use this random lyric generator and use that phrase as the theme or first line of your poem. Just make sure to credit Swift if you post it anywhere online.
• Write about “The Tortured Poets Department”: What would it look like if it was a real place? Assume the role of Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department and craft your world of punished poets. 

Tortured poets: Is Taylor Swift related to Emily Dickinson?

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