Very true. As a note from my lived experience as a high school teacher, I asked students a few years back, as part of a writing exercise, to respond to the prompts of the common app, found here: https://www.commonapp.org/blog/2019-2020-common-app-essay-prompts
What I received was a boatload of essays (more or less well-written) in which almost all of them referenced some form of trauma, however one defines that. Even in responses to prompts that had nothing to do with adversity, students were eager to talk about how they experienced terrible things in their lives which sent them into mental / depressive spirals. These were things like: breaking a bone (causing them to miss "the big game") or "toxic friends" they needed to dump. I don't think there was anything in there outside of what I would call ordinary experience.
And, as noted in this episode, this is something the admissions types seem to foster intentionally, but it has now become part of the common zeitgeist.
Very true. As a note from my lived experience as a high school teacher, I asked students a few years back, as part of a writing exercise, to respond to the prompts of the common app, found here: https://www.commonapp.org/blog/2019-2020-common-app-essay-prompts
What I received was a boatload of essays (more or less well-written) in which almost all of them referenced some form of trauma, however one defines that. Even in responses to prompts that had nothing to do with adversity, students were eager to talk about how they experienced terrible things in their lives which sent them into mental / depressive spirals. These were things like: breaking a bone (causing them to miss "the big game") or "toxic friends" they needed to dump. I don't think there was anything in there outside of what I would call ordinary experience.
And, as noted in this episode, this is something the admissions types seem to foster intentionally, but it has now become part of the common zeitgeist.