You Shouldn’t Write about Trauma in Your College Essay

If you’ve landed here, you’ve probably heard that you should “sell your trauma” in your college essay. In other words, you should tell a sob story and capitalize on the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, because that will get you into the college of your dreams.

We totally disagree with this, and in today’s blog, we’ll explain why — but there’s a catch. There have been a multitude of articles (in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Harvard Crimson, and elsewhere) claiming that the whole college admissions system is to blame for pushing students into writing about trauma in a college essay. They say that students are encouraged to write over-the-top essays because it’s the only way they’ll get the attention of admissions officers. Respectfully, we disagree with this as well. If you pay close attention to the actual prompts, you’ll see that nobody is urging anyone to “sell their trauma.”

So, without further ado, here’s why you don’t need trauma to write a college essay — and why you should probably stay away from the whole idea of trauma altogether if you want to make your application shine.

“Trauma dumping” is of no interest to admissions officers

The people claiming you should write about your trauma — as well as the people who say you shouldn’t — seem to believe that writing about an over-the-top event will improve your chances of being accepted to a top college. The only difference is that while the former group think this is a good thing, the latter group think it’s a bad thing.

But both these perspectives dramatically underestimate the intelligence of admissions officers. Do you really think the person reading your essay will assume you deserve to be admitted simply because you encountered extreme adversity? Of course not! The mere fact of experiencing trauma doesn’t qualify you for anything. College admissions officers aren’t assessing college essays based on “who’s experienced more than who.” They’re assessing them based on who has interpreted their experience in the most compelling way. And one thing is for sure: if they read an essay packed with over-the-top details of so-called trauma, they’re probably just going to roll their eyes and groan. 

If you focus on trauma in a college essay, you will end with a cliché

Let’s say you decide to write about an over-the-top experience. You describe how your early childhood was miserable because you were subjected to untold horrors, and you experienced things no human should ever experience. How will you interpret this experience later in your essay? What will you say you’ve learned?

You’ll inevitably say something like this: “I had a really hard time, but I got through it, and it made me more resilient than I would have been otherwise. I learned that bad things happen in life, but if you push through them, you’ll become a stronger person.”

In other words, you’ll say what everyone else writing about trauma says, and you’ll end your college essay with a cliché. And as we’ve written numerous times before, clichés are the enemy of the college essay.

The prompt doesn’t ask about trauma

This is probably the biggest reason why you don’t need to write about trauma in your college essay. If you read the Common App prompts, you’ll see the word isn’t mentioned once! The prompt that has come in for so much criticism is prompt #2, which reads: “The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”

Note that the words the framers use are “obstacle,” “challenge,” “setback,” and “failure.” These are all completely legitimate things to discuss in a college essay. They’re not over-the-top at all. Perhaps you encountered a minor setback that didn’t seem important at the time, but you learned some interesting lesson from it; if you take this story in an unexpected direction, it’s going to get the attention of admissions officers.


We read hundreds of essays every year, and we’ve noticed that sometimes the best college essays focus on seemingly minor events in this way. That’s not to say you can’t write about a major event, of course. The point is that you should pick the event that allows you to tell your best story. It can be about anything. It just probably shouldn’t be about trauma.