Ted Talks, Ivy Leagues, and trauma essays: what we can learn from the Fierceton case

By Opinion Editor Erika Liu

Content warning: abuse

It can get annoying after the 10th “If only I had something traumatic to write about.” Yet, still, I get where it comes from. What people have begun calling the “trauma essay” — or the highly-confessional, at-any-cost style of personal statement (PS) I’ve heard so much about recently — has surged in popularity not least because it’s being treated as an Ivy League tactic. After all, the victim who can articulate the situation of the victim ceases to be a victim. Under mounting pressure, it can be hard to resist the trauma essay’s siren call. 

I was thinking about this again as I read an article from The New Yorker on an ex-University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) student, Mackenzie Fierceton. As a teenager she showed up to her elite private school covered in blood. She claimed abuse from her mother, and was promptly placed in foster care. Fierceton went on to be accepted into UPenn, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, as a first-generation, low-income (FGLI) student. Little did committees know, her mother and father were both university-educated; Fierceton herself, very wealthy.

Fierceton’s case highlighted an issue many recognized with these personal essays: that it’s weird, almost unethical, to turn some deeply personal trauma into something profitable. In 2022, Australian beauty influencer Tina Yong gave a TED Talk about this. “[In college applications], it becomes necessary to sanitize our pain,” Yong said, referring to her own experiences laying bare her own “clichéd” immigrant origins to colleges as a teenager. “[We have to] make it marketable and strategic.” Briefly and cuttingly, Yong makes a good point. It’s no longer enough to just say, “it sucked.” In the context of college admissions, trauma has to be commodified, strained of some morals. It’s a lifetime of experiences reduced to some artificial means to an end. 

There’s another side to this, too. Colleges perpetuate the weird inequities of this system just as much as students do. Once Fierceton lost her status as the perfect victim, she also lost the pity of the elites. UPenn instantly suspended her master’s degree, issued a $4,000 fine, then conducted an investigation into her behavior. Yet, at the end of the day, the abuse was still real. Fierceton was still a foster child; her biological mother, still charged with felony child abuse and misdemeanor assault. While Fierceton’s FGLI status was ambiguous, UPenn continuously doubted and demanded proof of Fierceton’s abuse, despite hospital records, police reports, and her own documented history in foster care attesting otherwise. How is it okay in any circumstance to prod and dissect the circumstances of someone else’s trauma? To blame someone for not having suffered enough?

I think it is far more insidious to declare all marginalized people “grifters.” There is some real value to be had in considering context and environment in admissions. But it’s also impossible to deny the way trauma’s been rendered a currency, especially in the Common App. These PS’s, in such a context, feel less like a sincere attempt at reconciling with one’s own trauma rather than a craven and overtold lie: that the applicant is a generically disadvantaged, suffering student, saved by the benevolence of an Ivy League institution. What I mean to say is: it’s ridiculous to believe that someone can meaningfully package their entire life into just 650 words.