No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story and then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. These words written by Bill Hooks just over 30 years ago reflects the tensions between individuals and institutions. Hooks contends that institutions of higher education often consume the narratives and consequently the pain of marginalized groups, sharing that this remains the central message from the academy to those marginalized. In the 2021 op-ed in the New York Times, high school senior Elijah Megasin revealed that educators and peers alike encouraged and expected him to write about pain or trauma in his college essay. Elijah felt constrained in his ability to tell an authentic story that recognized his experiences and personality while simultaneously responding to institutional expectations to discuss struggle. This desire to celebrate his victory and not his victimhood for university consumption exposes the negotiations that black students went applying to colleges and universities face. He writes, I was told you’re smart and you’re from the hood. You’re from the projects. Colleges will love you. Now interesting enough, I received a similar message when I applied to college just over a decade ago. The message from high school counselors was clear. My college essay should emphasize my ability to overcome struggle. My identities were the admissions trifecta, black, living in inner city Detroit and high achieving. They told me that this background coupled with the discussion of trials and trauma I endured will help me get into selective institutions. My tenure in college admissions gave me a taste of ethnography where I both observed and participated in the reading of thousands of college applications and college essays. It was in this role where I was bombarded with the realization that I too have become a cog in this organizational machine that both entices and rewards students from marginalized backgrounds to put their trauma on display to be viewed as worthy as opportunities. Now seven years later as a PhD student, I dedicate my research and my life’s work to complicating and expanding the scholarship on struggle and trauma and the complexities of storytelling. My current research examines how black students reconcile with and navigate through a tangled web of paradoxes, inequality and racial discrimination. I asked under what conditions do black undergraduate students enrolled at predominantly white institutions and historically black colleges and universities fulfill, subvert or reject expectations to narrate trauma or struggle in college admissions essays. Now in my work I conduct interviews with current undergraduate students and I closely read their essays. The first part of my interviews investigates how participants make sense and meaning of their stories and the second part understands their identity narration motivations. Now my findings thus far have been shocking and arguably counterintuitive. Given my experiences in college admissions and college guidance, I expected to find self-promotion coupled with stereotypical narratives of struggle, yet I learned that there’s so much more to these stories. Through my interviews I see reflexivity, critical imaginations, authenticity and beautiful stories of resistance. Consequently it will be oversimplification and reductionist if I only detailed the ways that students spent time buying for admissions without considering how personal statements are often rooted in more than strife. These stories also critique social systems and reflect authentic experiences and notions of self-hood. So what if I told you then that both stories of struggle and hardship could operate as resistance? What is resistance if not living and telling stories that prioritize who we are? Authenticity can both upend fixed expectations and stereotypes and serve as critique of broader stratification and inequality. For an example, students who choose to write about their housing insecurity and the challenges that their single parent face to secure employment or a living wage are not only writing about their reality, sharing what they’ve seen, felt and learned from these experiences, they’re offering counter narratives, exposing, analyzing and challenging the majority of stories of privilege that exposes the inadequacies of housing policies. Now that is resistance. Even students who write about experiences deemed to be primarily individual level implicate structural challenges. For an example, a student discussing their battle with mental health exacerbated by a competitive school culture offers a critique of limited access to adequate mental health discourse and support. But they also provide a larger condemnation of the workaholic culture that reduces individuals to their productivity, no matter the consequence. That is resistance. Now another very important kind of piece or gap in the literature and public discourse are stories of joy. Now therefore, I would like to conclude with sharing how stories of joy also operate as resistance. Now as previously mentioned in my own research, I examine how black undergraduate students attending PWIs and HPCUs make sense other stories and potentially traumatic experiences shared in college essays. Dedicated to challenging my own assumptions about what trauma means or looks like for black students, I find myself continually retooling my own sociological imagination, opening up my mind to hear about their joys and celebrations as much as their challenges and obstacles. I realized I didn’t have to look too far because black students and other students from marginalized backgrounds were also writing about tracing their roots to their mother’s homelands. They talked about winning scholarships to study Chinese and Beijing and journeys to love their natural care so much they started YouTube channels to inspire other students to do the same. This is resistance. And telling our stories in ways that prioritize our joy as much as our sorrows, we reject and subvert the single story that reduces us to our pain and limits the complexities of who we are. Now some of the black undergraduate students in my work outright rejected expectations to depict their stories and journeys as sad. Let’s hear from a few of them. First there’s Larry, a first generation college student from Chicago who rejected advice to write a traditional essay about hardship. He says, it made it difficult because I didn’t really have something I wanted to say at the moment but it opened myself up to think outside the box, thinking about what I figured a college counselor or college admissions officer would probably never really hear. Now I was just thinking about stuff I like to do in my hobbies and that’s when the concept of video games hit me. I’m pretty sure they’re probably never going to see an essay like this. Here Larry shares how he rejected the recommendation to discuss poverty and other hardships, taking a more creative approach to his essay. Then there’s Octavia, an outgoing and gregarious first generation college student from Long Island. I would say, imagine yourself, your brand, what defines your brand? I think a lot of people’s answers would not be some soft story. It would be kind of, I’m a goofball. Let’s talk about my humor. I’m pretty lazy or I’m responsible or I hate school. What is your brand? Just talk about you and how you function as a student based upon what your brand is. Not like how being a student was tainted by some very sad or like crucial story. What’s your brand? What’s you? In her essay, Octavia uses an analogy of a tootsie pop to reflect the many layers of her personality and ideas. She admits that her essay went against the grain by not discussing trauma because she found it over generalizing. Like Larry, Octavia shared that taking a creative approach to her essay would help her stand out in the admissions process. And she countered the idea that admissions officers only wanted to read a sad essay. Even though she felt that students at her school were spoon fed the idea to discuss soft stories. And then finally, their sage, a first generation college student from my hometown of Detroit. I personally like talking about positive things and my opportunities. I really wanted to talk about like how even though I’m a black female, I come from Detroit, I’m still a normal person. I still love to travel and I wanted to do these things. Now, through her essay, Sage attempted to challenge the assumptions people make about those who share her social locations as a black woman from Detroit, et cetera. And she wanted to frame her story and experiences as positive and more lighthearted. So as researchers, scholars and students, we maintain platforms that invite us to tell our students all the tell our stories all the time. Now this research reveals opportunities for post-secondary institutions to honor the vast stories and experiences that black students and students from other historically underrepresented backgrounds bring to college campuses without exploitation, tokenization and perpetuation of racial stereotypes. What I offer for those students who find themselves writing and telling stories is to always prioritize their story of self. The next time you sit down to write an essay for a grant or a scholarship or application, I want you to think twice about what you share, with whom you’re sharing and what you hope to gain. Remember that your stories of struggle and success work together and operate as resistance. You do not have to shrink yourself to gain access to institutional wars and opportunities. And finally, I think Bella, an undergraduate student from Delaware, really says it best. She says, I think it’s sad that black students feel the need to have this kind of story. I think a lot of our white peers feel like black students, especially at top schools, had this kind of story. And I think it’s okay to be a regular person. I don’t need to tell you my whole story. I am here and that’s enough. Thank you.