Show Notes
Welcome to the final episode to our special three-part series on mental health disclosures in college applications. In Episode 3, Ethan’s guest is Emi Nietfeld, author of Acceptance (Penguin Press ’22), a critically-acclaimed memoir of her high school journey through foster care, homelessness, and the troubled teen industry to attend college at Harvard. In this frank conversation, Emi opens up about, among other things:
How the notion of disclosing (or not disclosing) may actually be somewhat problematic
The difference between writing about challenges in general… and writing about them for the purposes of the college application
The role she believes high school counselors can play in supporting students with mental health challenges during the college application process
Takeaways for college admissions officers evaluating applications that include mental health disclosures
And more
A former software engineer, Emi Nietfeld is a full-time writer on mental health, inequality, and higher education. She’s passionate about mental health, helping young people navigate their careers, and the connection between engineering and creativity. Her essays have appeared in New York Magazine. The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other publications.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Play-by-Play
2:14 – Emi shares her background and story
3:50 – What advice would Emi give to students about whether or not to disclose?
9:20 – Emi’s story, as told in her book, Acceptance?
11:55 – What was the college application process like for Emi?
14:24 – How did Emi’s college essay change from the first to final draft?
19:49 – Where else in the application are there opportunities to disclose?
23:38 – What did the rest of Emi’s application look like?
30:00 – How has writing helped Emi process her experiences?
33:17 – How can high school counselors help their students navigate this process?
36:11 – What advice would Emi give to college admission readers?
42:29 – How has Emi’s life been different since writing Acceptance?
46:40 – What are Emi’s hopes for the future of mental health disclosures in college applications?
Resources
Emi’s book, Acceptance
Blog post linked to this episode: Should I Discuss Mental Health in My Personal Statement or College Application? (And If So, How)?
Part 1 of this series – Episode 512: The Counselor Perspective
Part 2 of this series – Episode 513: The Admission Officer Perspective
How to Use the Common App Additional Information Section: Guide + Examples
Episode 406: Why You Don’t Have to Write about Trauma in Your College Essay to Stand Out—and What You Can Do Instead
Show transcript
Emi Neitfeld 0:00
Bemy, what do you hope folks will take away from our conversation? I hope that students will come away with the understanding that there's a big difference between being comfortable with reaching out for mental health help, with sharing your story and owning your story and what you decide to disclose in your college applications. When I was applying, there was so much emphasis on this idea of college admissions essays being a reflection of who you are as a person and showing the committee like your true self. I really don't like that rhetoric. I think it put on way too much pressure, and it also made it really hard for me to be strategic about what to include in the applications.
Ethan Sawyer 0:56
Hi friends and welcome back to our series exploring mental health and the college application process. If you haven't checked out the first two episodes yet, I recommend them on today's episode, my guest is Emmy neatfeld, author of acceptance, a critically acclaimed memoir of her high school journey through foster care, homelessness and the troubled teen industry, to attend college at Harvard. In this frank conversation, Emmy opens up about, among other things, how the notion of disclosing or not disclosing mental health challenges in the college application process may actually be somewhat problematic. We talk about the difference between writing about challenges in general and writing about them specifically for the college application. We discuss the role that she believes high school counselors can play in supporting students with mental health challenges during the college application process, and there are even some takeaways for college admission officers who evaluate applications that include mental health disclosures. A former software engineer Emmys, a full time writer on mental health inequality in higher education for New York Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. I hope you enjoy our conversation
before we start talking about college stuff. I'd love to just have you share with folks a little of your background and your story. My
Emi Neitfeld 2:19
name is Emmy. I am a author. I was a software engineer for a number of years after college, I applied to college back in 2009 to 2010 which feels like a million years ago. I ended up getting into Harvard, which we will probably talk about a little bit in this episode, but since then, I have written a lot about my journey through the mental health system. As a teenager, I was in foster care for a while, and experienced homelessness in high school, and these were all things that I had to write about when I was writing my college essays, and I really, really struggled to do so, and especially struggled with how much I needed to disclose and how much I should disclose about mental health challenges, including eating disorder, self harm, hospitalizations, PTSD and so as as an adult, I really made it my mission to talk more about those topics, help students who are in difficult situations try to navigate disclosure in applications, and also educate counselors admissions officers who might not understand what is going on for a student, and especially how trauma and other life factors can lead somebody to being in a really dark place who might really excel and thrive on a college campus. You
Ethan Sawyer 3:50
wrote this New York Times op ed. It's called, I edited mental illness out of my college applications. I'm not alone, and you raised this question. You said, quote, should applicants play it safe and conceal their emotional troubles, even when it means leaving low grades and gaps and transcripts unexplained, or should they tell the truth and risk getting flagged as a liability? So I want to ask you, what what advice would you give to students? What should they do? I
Emi Neitfeld 4:14
should make the caveat that I am not your college counselor. I'm not an admissions officer. I've just been through this myself, and have talked to a lot of students who have and admissions officers and college counselors when it comes to the nitty gritty of mental health, like diagnoses, hospitalizations, stuff like that, it seems like It's generally good to err on the side of caution and not be super explicit about it, and really think about how things are framed. I think that the question of whether or not to disclose is in some ways a false dichotomy. There are a lot of ways. To disclose, and a lot of different things that you can disclose, and often those gaps in a transcript or things that might show up in other places on the application, often there's a way to to explain them and to get rid of any potential confusion without getting into a lot of details about what is really like, personal, private medical information, I think that this is also a can be a challenging question, because a lot of times students want To disclose, right? I think in many ways, I really wanted to, because it was really fundamental to my identity. I had spent all this time in and out of hospitals. I had read the DSM like, I really, you know, I had thought a lot about mental health and mental illness, and it was really hard to imagine describing my life without describing all these drugs that I had taken, and at the same time, I don't think that that was necessary, and that wasn't the lens through which the college admissions officers wanted to get to know me. You know, even if it was the way that I was thinking about myself as a teenager, that was not the way that they were thinking about me. And so really, like, you know, college applications are so short that a disclosure, especially in detail, it can take away from, you know, writing about your passion for like, I don't writing about your passion for photography, which is, which is something that you really do want to give space to. So I think
Ethan Sawyer 6:50
you're making such an important point. And a question that I'll sometimes ask students to this end is when you're thinking about, Do I disclose, or do I not disclose? I think students are also, to your point, in the kind of binary, because they're thinking, here's this huge thing. Do I write about the huge thing or not about the huge thing? It's like x or not X and Y. Hope that students can do is brainstorm a wide range of possibilities. So they have photography and their love of koala bears and this purple and, you know, all these other things. Yeah, so that it's it breaks it out of that, should I or should I not? And that, to me, seems like an important, important process to go through. And yeah, separate from that, I think students, the question that I'll often ask them is, what is the best way, or what is a really good way to show the skills, qualities, values and interests that you're going to bring to a college campus? And if they're thinking through that lens, and this is I'm also speaking to counselors here, if they're speaking through that lens of like, thinking through, okay, which topic is going to help me do that? Yeah? Then that might be a slightly different orientation, as they're thinking about, yeah, disclosure, yeah. I love that.
Emi Neitfeld 7:56
And also, as a professional writer, in some ways, college applications prepared me very well to be writing op eds and essays, because in every single piece that you write, there's the question of, like, a frame of reference. And in some pieces, you know, I drop in there, like, Oh, I was in foster care, right? And in some pieces, I go into the whole story, like that's the point. And in other things, you're just gonna leave like a detail or two, and then in other essays, it's totally a distraction, and you're not gonna bring it up. And I think that's it's a pretty advanced writing skill to really master, and to be able to have the emotional like strength to to be able to, like, leave out something that's really hard, but I do think it's that's super valuable in a college essay where you might need to say, like, hey, my brother was sent to jail and my grades dipped, but you might decide to leave out that you were hospitalized in the aftermath of that. Yeah, and I think there should be, I just think that, like, if students decide not to disclose, there should be absolutely zero guilt in doing so, because it really is your private information, and you cannot control how an admissions officer is going to respond.
Ethan Sawyer 9:20
So for those who don't know, and you wrote an amazing book. It's called acceptance. I've read it. It's incredible. It's powerful. It's strong. Some of the content in it, you know, for some folks, is, is, you know, well, you know, I can let you speak to it more, but I'd love to let you share just a little bit with folks about, like, what's in the book, and give them some context to you mentioned some of these things that you went through, but leading up to that college application process where you get folks to whatever extent you're able, you know, a sort of summary of, like, here was sort of my experience leading up to being 16 and 17, just by way of context. Yeah.
Emi Neitfeld 9:56
So both of my parents struggled with mental health problems and. And when I was 11 years old, they divorced, and it really exacerbated things for both of them. My mom dealt with compulsive shopping and hoarding, something I write about a lot in acceptance, but she couldn't really tell that she had a problem, and so instead, I was taken to the doctor, diagnosed and medicated, and I ended up taking a dozen psychiatric drugs in a little under two years, starting with ADHD medication and then going all the way to antipsychotics. And so my book acceptance really opens when I was 14, what would be my freshman year of high school, and my life just felt totally hopeless when a doctor suggested that maybe I could get into college early. And I had always been a huge bookworm, and so to me, this idea was absolutely thrilling, but there were so many roadblocks in my way, especially as somebody who spent my freshman year institutionalized in a locked residential treatment center, I had been hospitalized, I think five times before that, on psych wards and one eating disorder unit, and I would be hospitalized again my sophomore year. But you know, and I had a very tumultuous high school experience, where I attended five or six different high schools. I spent my sophomore year in foster care, and then as a junior in high school, I got a scholarship to art sporting School, which was an incredible experience. It was very fun to write about, but during breaks, I still didn't have a place to stay, and so I found myself sleeping in my car, couch surfing, writing my college essays from a shelter, and then really having a crisis, being like, okay, how am I going to explain all of this?
Ethan Sawyer 11:55
And what, what advice were you getting from your premier college counselor? And what was that relationship? What was that connection
Emi Neitfeld 12:00
like? Yeah. So even though I was attending a private school my junior and senior year, my college counselor was very overworked. She had 250 graduating seniors, and I didn't know this, but she was also looking for a new job and interviewing on the side, and so I had gone to her hoping for guidance, and she really was like, you know, I do not have time to talk to any juniors like we can talk about this when you're a senior. And that was hard for me, because I didn't even know where I was going to be staying over the summer. And so I ended up getting help from a private college counselor, who I write about in the book. I was able to get pro bono assistance from her. And you know, she's very talented at what she does. And at the same time, I don't think she had ever had a client who had a history exactly like mine before. And so our first her advice for me was, really, you have to make things extremely clear. For colleges, whatever you're going to tell them, it has to be comprehensible. And that, in and of itself, was really hard as a 16 year old, because I was in the middle of it, right? And I did not have adults in my life who were explaining like, you have trouble coping with your emotions because you have been neglected and experienced like this abuse. So I didn't have anybody to spell it out for me. So just trying to make things comprehensible was a huge challenge. It was a very complicated story, like even the book acceptance is 383, pages long. And so how am I going to describe this in, like a one page letter of extenuating circumstances? But then the other question that we really faced was, okay, how much are we going to disclose? And in the first round for early decision. It was really my counselor advised me that honesty is the best policy. We're just going to lay it all out there, and hopefully, if they see that you had these mental health problems basically your freshman year, that will tell schools how bad your living situation was. So that was our first that was our first attempt. And
Ethan Sawyer 14:25
my sense is, but this is from previous conversations with you that it was pretty explicit, like you said, you know that it was pretty much just laying it all out, laying the facts like, say more about that, because I said that there was, like there was a redraft. But tell us about the first draft before you tell us about
Emi Neitfeld 14:41
Yes, so the first in the first draft, there was a timeline, and it included, like, I was hospitalized. I was in this, like, locked residential treatment center. It included some diagnoses, like I had depression and post traumatic stress disorder, right? Which? Which are pretty i. I would say, pretty understandable diagnoses, but it was, yeah, it was, it was a lot, and I definitely felt uncomfortable sharing it, although I you know, almost everything about the process was making me feel uncomfortable. So that was very explicit. And then I applied early action to Yale with that, and then I was rejected. And luckily, I had some adults in my life who could do some reconnaissance, and my school's guidance counselor called Yale. She at least she told me she called Yale, and they were basically like, you know, we don't get a sense that me has overcome. And then my private college counselor talked to people and was like, Hey, this is TMI. You know, colleges are going through a mental health crisis. They have a lot of people on campus who have psychiatric needs that they cannot support. And like this looks like a giant liability. Yeah,
Ethan Sawyer 16:06
one of the things that I can imagine a student listening or a parent listening, who's been so students been through a lot of stuff, or a parent's witness their kid going through a lot of stuff. For those of you who are listening, we're not saying here at first blush, like, therefore, don't disclose anything, you know. But there comes it seems like a more complex question of like, what were, what were some of the, what are some of the questions that you would want students to be thinking about as they're thinking about whether or not to disclose, and even, like, how to disclose? Absolutely
Emi Neitfeld 16:36
so at that point, after that rejection, it was clear that I needed to do something differently. And the first thing that I figured out, that I would recommend any student figure out right away is, what do I need to disclose? And so in my case, I had gone to a bunch of different high schools, and spent my freshman year, like, locked up. And so I had received credits on my transcript from this, like classroom in an institution, and so I had been sure that I would have to disclose that right, that there just wouldn't be a choice. It would just be so confusing. They had to know where it was coming from. And then I went and I got my transcript, the transcripts that they were sending to colleges. And what I found was that actually, basically, my my previous high school had lumped all of my past credits together, and so it didn't say what school that it was from. It didn't say anything about it. It just was, like, a bunch of random credits. And this was so important for me to know, because it really changed the game of, like, what did I have to disclose? Right? Yeah, what I'm hearing
Ethan Sawyer 18:00
you say is that it seemed to tell a different story, like there was there was one story that you had told, and then if you were to just look at the transcript, it was telling a slightly
Emi Neitfeld 18:07
different story. Yeah, exactly. And, and I think that it can be really easy for people to give blanket advice like, Oh, don't disclose, or do disclose, but a lot of people don't realize that there's often, like, things on your transcripts that you really want to explain. And so I was really lucky in this case, that I didn't have, you know, I didn't have any huge fluctuations in grades, like, you know, my transcripts, basically, I would have to explain where I had gone to school before, but I wouldn't, I didn't need to get into the weeds, and I think that that's just really important to know, because I wrote a piece for The New York Times about how other students have dealt with mental health in their college applications. And very often, a mental health crisis comes with like, a steep decline in grades, right? Or classes getting dropped out of stuff being done in the like, in the middle of the semester. And I think it's really important to just take inventory of like, what are the basic facts here that need some context, and then kind of thinking through, okay, well, what? What are the options for that context. And so in my case, I was able to basically simplify it and say, you know, I started high school in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and then my sophomore year, I went to foster care, and I changed schools. And then last year, I got the scholarship, so I changed schools again, and that was just a much simpler picture that did not include institutionalization.
Ethan Sawyer 19:49
Yeah, and, like, just so that students who are maybe going through this process for the first time, or parents who are going through this, I want to give folks context for what these different opportunities are for disclosing so i. And I also want to hear how it went in your particular case. So there's the personal statement, which is what many folks call the college essay, which is this 650, word, one page essay. And then you've got your activities list, which talks about, you know, the brag sheet, all the stuff you've done. And then we've got this additional information section, which is often that place where the extenuating circumstances will go. In some cases, there's like an additional letter that might come from the counselor or a teacher or another supportive adult in a student's life. But I'd love to hear from your perspective and your experience what ended up in each of those pieces, with the caveat to students that it's not like we're saying, therefore, do all these things and you'll get into Harvard. We're just saying that. In Emmy's case, this was what the next draft looked like. So how did you what went into your personal statement, and then where did the other pieces? Like, what went into those other pieces, including activities, lists and like, how did that whole thing
Emi Neitfeld 20:52
look my personal statement, I tried writing a lot of things about what was currently going on in my life, like about experiencing homelessness or my hopes for the future. And all of those essays were just so sad, and none of them were working, and they felt super exploitative while I was writing them. And I was very lucky, because I had taken a creative writing class the spring before, and I ended up sending my college counselor, one of the pieces I had written which was totally different. It was about something from my childhood, and one of my parents is trans, and I had written an essay about how that affected me and how it shaped my own kind of evolution and growth as a girl. And so we decided pretty early before all this, that that was going to be my personal statement, and it, you know, it told you a little bit about my parents, but it was not going to give you context about my current life. And then this, when I had the bullet point in depth, checklist of or in depth, like timeline of hospitalization and stuff like that. That was all in this letter of extenuating circumstances area, and I knew that that was going to be where I did, like the heavy duty explanation, my secondary essay that, you know, I wrote basically two main essays. One was the personal statement, which every school got, and then I had a secondary essay that was about studying photography in foster care. And that essay I cut down into various lengths for basically any school that required, like, an essay about an activity that I had done, or like any other prompts, basically, yeah, and I think that that one gave schools a little bit of like context into what was it like to be in foster care, like, here are some of the challenges of foster care, but it was framed around this passion that I had, that I really loved, and that made me feel more confident in sending that out. And then I think that the kind of the final piece where some of this information was coming from is that the common app had a section about explaining school changes, and so that was where I was able to say, you know, I started school in Minneapolis, and then I was in foster care, and now I'm at boarding school.
Ethan Sawyer 23:19
And I think, but I don't know. I think that you probably had strong extracurricular activities and grades. I'm just curious about the rest of your applications. Because I think I'm curious because, yeah, because I think, and I don't think this is not a podcast on how, quote, unquote, how to get into Harvard or how to get into selected schools, but just to kind of fill out the picture for folks like, what did the rest of your application look
Emi Neitfeld 23:38
like? Absolutely, I'm glad you're asking that. I actually, when I wrote acceptance, I wanted to include my full application as, like, an appendix in the back of the book. And I was like, Yeah, I would pay money to, like, read somebody else's college application. So I think the one other piece that I had that I haven't talked about is the brag sheet, and I think it probably looked a little different for me than it did for a lot of kids who had been in the same high school for four years. But I included a lot of things around writing and visual art, in part because those were things that I had continuity in. And so I was able to say, hey, like, I've done National Novel Writing Month, like every year for these four years, right? And the first year I did it in a hospital bed, which I wasn't going to say in the application, right? But I was glad that I could point to that. And then my application really was like framed around this talent for writing, this passion for writing and so stuff like the intramural soccer team that I joined in high school specifically to put in my college application like we did not mention that, you know, we cut that, but I really, I feel like I dug really deep to figure out, okay, what of all these moving pieces? What. Has been the same over the last four years. And, like, I love French, and even when I was on my own, I tried to read books in French if I could, and then getting the French, my French teacher to be one of the recommenders, because she could speak to that, to that passion and and be able for her to say, you know, like, oh, Emmy is actually Trey bien en Fauci, even if her transcript shows her, like, doing half a year, a quarter of a year, it being all broken up. What I'm hearing you
Ethan Sawyer 25:33
say, and I want to so i want to say back to you, make sure I'm getting it right. Is that the new draft of the eight year application ended up sharing some of the challenges and some of the difficulties, but not sharing all the details. And you haven't quite said this, but I think what I'm getting is that you mentioned that the first draft was more about the challenges, and the new draft included, maybe the exterior letter included more of the sort of, did you include any of the what you've done and sort of what you've learned from the experience, or was it just sort of like a shorter version of some of the challenges. The new
Emi Neitfeld 26:03
version focused a lot more on, quote, unquote, overcoming a term I don't like but was what they wanted to see. And will you say,
Ethan Sawyer 26:11
Can I actually pause you say, why you don't love that term? Well,
Emi Neitfeld 26:15
I feel like it's pretty unrealistic to tell a 17 year old that they need to prove that they've overcome these awful circumstances when they are still in the middle of it, and it's like, Oh, tell us how you've grown from being homeless while you're sleeping in your car, right? And that's just a pretty cruel standard. And at the same time, I realized that colleges are not charities. They are not looking for like the saddest story. But I did try to show like, okay, here is how far I've come, and this is why this makes me a valuable contribution to your campus, right? In a way that was less like, Okay, you should feel bad for me, right? Which I think they should have, and this should give me some points for getting good grades in the middle of that. But here's what I'm going to do for you. And I think it's also worth noting that in my first draft, I was an open book when I applied to Yale, and after I was rejected from Yale, my counselor advised me, you know, we need to tone it down. But I took a look at my transcript, and I thought really hard about the feedback I had gotten, and I decided that I wanted to completely remove any mention of mental illness from my application, and that basically, I was not going to disclose anything around diagnoses, around treatment, and I would just erase it from this application.
Ethan Sawyer 27:48
And in retrospect, how do you feel about that choice? I felt great about it
Emi Neitfeld 27:54
at the time, I was plagued with nightmares. I was convinced that I had lied, that I had cheated, that I was being extremely dishonest by not disclosing this stuff. And I think a big part of that is that I had had so many adults really make it seem like my diagnoses were who I was right, or that they were character defects like I had been told explicitly that I was locked up because I was bad, that I was in foster care because I was messed up, you know, that I was just a failure, and that I couldn't, like, hack living at home, and that if I was just stronger, I wouldn't be dealing with this stuff. And so I had all those messages going on in my head which made it really hard to think about diagnoses as something like medical or objective or that wasn't like core to my identity. It made it hard to leave it out of the application. But I think it also ended up being really liberating for me to think about, okay, how do I tell this story and reframe it a little bit, you know, and take back this narrative and take back the idea that, like, I do not think that having a diagnosis makes someone a bad person, that it makes you weak, that it anything like that, right? But I had really been living in this medicalized space where everything that I was going through was a disorder that, like, I was experiencing, and it ended up becoming an exercise in, like, Okay, I had these bad things happen to me, and I'm going to tell them that these things happened. And of course, I have faced consequences, and I have struggled to cope with those things, but I don't have to disclose all of that. I can really decide how I'm going to frame it, and that is my choice that I get to make with my private information. Question,
Ethan Sawyer 30:00
and yet, I hear you saying that you were also doing a lot of writing at the time, and so it's like, it's also not like you weren't writing about these things still. So, and I'm guessing this is a bit of a leading question, so maybe I'll ask in this way, is, Will you talk a little bit about what role writing has played in your in your processing of everything you've been through
Emi Neitfeld 30:23
in high school. To me, especially writing was so important to me as an identity and just to get through the the day and these challenges. So I had a personal writing practice that was deeply confessional, that where I just put it all on the page, and I wrote about my like, Adderall problem, I wrote about eating disorders, I wrote about everything. And luckily, I had some friends who I really trusted, who I could share drafts with, and I also had some creative outlets, like submitting to teen literary magazines. There's one called polyphony that it made me feel so special to be accepted and to be published. So I had those different avenues, but when the college applications came up, at first, I thought, Okay, this is my big chance to finally have my work matter, to have like an audience for it. And I, at first, I thought about my application as like a creative writing project, and I let myself really, like explore the dark stuff, really go there, and I'm glad that I gave myself that freedom and took a lot of risks early on in the drafting process, or even in the process of what I sent to my counselor. If I hadn't done that, I don't think I ever would have occurred to me to write a personal statement about my parents transition, even though I think it was a really I'm really proud of that piece of writing, and I think it was a really different perspective. But I think I also ended up realizing that the audience for a literary magazine is very different than an admissions committee that is trying to fill out their class. But I'm really glad that I had the people and the spaces in my life to have an outlet, to be having those tough conversations and to be processing everything that was coming up, even just while writing the applications. What
Ethan Sawyer 32:35
you're saying to me, it's like, I'm doing resonance wiggle fingers, because it's so I think it's so important. And I just want to say, like, I think I skipped over the start, but I'm like, so grateful for your vulnerability and your bravery back then, but also now, like coming and talking about these things. So thank you. And I think what you're saying is so important about and I really want students to get this there's, I think there is a difference between writing about it, which I think can be such a valuable experience, and then, as you were saying that second part of going, you know, based on what colleges are looking for, they're shaping a class. And I'm saying just what you were saying, like, how is that piece different? And that's where I think a different perspective, talk to your college counselor can be really helpful. It sounds like,
Emi Neitfeld 33:15
yeah, absolutely.
Ethan Sawyer 33:18
So as you think back and you're you're thinking about speaking of your counselor. What advice would you give to counselors as they're advising students going through this process? What was helpful for you? What was less helpful? Yeah, speak to counselors for a minute. Yeah.
Emi Neitfeld 33:33
I think it's so important to acknowledge the students full experience as we were talking about writing versus writing for the college essay. As a writer, even as a 31 year old, I can't edit a piece unless I've had someone read it and tell me, you know, I accept you for who you are. You are good enough as you are, and I hope that counselors with a million things that are on your plates, that when students come in with those messy, messy drafts that are really like vulnerable and raw, that you're able to give students that acceptance of like, I see this. This is powerful. I hear you, and begin the conversation with that. And then going on to what? What do we want to tell colleges, right? Colleges who don't know you, and this is the first thing that they see about you. I also think it's really important to to understand what students can and cannot leave out, like we talked about with the with transcripts, right with grades. How do we do that? And I also, I would have loved if my counselor could have taken a little bit more of an active role in explaining my family circumstances. Mm. Uh in in their counselor letter, and so it it was really hard for me to accurately describe what was happening at home without sounding really negative, because it was a negative situation, and I ended up getting a letter from a mentor. She was like my county assigned mentor, who had all these degrees, and she was able to write a very frank letter that did a lot to just put my situation in context and explain. And I think in an ideal world, if I hadn't had her, or even if I had my counselor might have been able to say, to lay out, here's some of the obstacles that Emmy faced, kind of freeing me of that burden to do so. And I think that would have had to be a conversation between her and me. I would not have felt comfortable if she disclosed things that I didn't want known, but I just imagined that that would have been such a weight off of me to not have to be the person to say, like, Hey, I was kicked out of my foster home. You know?
Ethan Sawyer 36:11
Yeah, one of the things I imagine counselors listening are like, what does that look like? So rest assured that in the show notes, we'll we'll share some examples of counselor letters and additional information sections, so that listeners that you can see, you know, what does this actually look like? Practically speaking, when it comes to disclosures, it's not going to be Emmy's application, it'll be another sample application. So you can kind of see, practically speaking, what this looks like. I'd love Emmy if you'd be willing to speak to college admission readers for a minute, and what would you like them to hear
Emi Neitfeld 36:44
when I reported on this for the New York Times, one of the things that really shocked me was that all of the students that I interviewed, they the range of their crises was not that Great. You know, some people ended up in the hospital. Other people didn't, but they're like people, people struggled, right? And we know lots and lots of young people are struggling, but what was so dramatically different was the amount of support that a person had around their academics with that crisis, and also just around how they were going to explain it. And so when I was talking to private school guidance counselors, they were basically like, you know, we can make it look like the kid had motto if they were impatient for depression, you know, we'll just pretend it was mono and versus if you are in a foster home and you have, like, even a small crisis, you might be forced to transfer schools, to drop out of classes, it could just upend your whole entire life. And so I think it's really important to sound the alarm of how different the very same crisis can look because I think it's really scary when you see that a student has been hospitalized, right? Or you see these kind of like, that evidence of a breakdown. And I just want people to have the context, you know, for like, what, who is protecting this child, right? And like, what kind of grace do they need? So I think that it can be really easy to say, like, okay, don't disclose. But when I was talking to students for the New York Times, there were cases where it seemed like it might have been beneficial for people to disclose, right? And either they chose not to, or they did. And one of the things that so impressed me with these students was the way that they modulated what information they gave and even the language that they used.
Ethan Sawyer 38:56
And so examples, I'm curious,
Emi Neitfeld 38:59
yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was one student who who had attempted suicide and then was hospitalized for it, and she described it in her application, as she said, You know, I was hospitalized during a mental health crisis, and then I quickly recovered. Blah, blah, blah, but she felt she felt she had to disclose that it was a mental health crisis because it had shown up on her transcript. She had gotten worse grades. She's like, if I had mono, you know, I would have still been able to do my schoolwork, right? But she was just very like, both matter of fact about it, but also just kind of deliberately vague, like it was a mental health crisis, and she got into every school where she applied, and there was another student. Their name is Jamie, and I featured them in the story in more detail, and their mom had died two weeks before applications were due. Yeah, and they believe that they. Would not have gotten into Stanford if it hadn't been for their essay that was about this topic. And I mean, I read the essay, it was so incredibly powerful, and Jamie mentioned their struggles with guilt and with depression, but omitted a inpatient hospitalization, and that seemed like, you know, all of these choices seem like a really good balance to strike. And while I talked to some other students where, you know, they had a situation that made a big impact on their transcript, and often not disclosing anything can lead to just a big, confusing gap.
Ethan Sawyer 40:44
I want to make sure that students listening don't take any of these one things that we're saying and go, Well, if you had a hard thing and disclose it. And I know I said that earlier, but I want to make sure students hear it, in case they just logged in for this little part that I imagine that Janie also had, you know, an incredible application. And it wasn't just the story that quote, unquote, got them in, because I imagine that some students go, Well, this is my one chance. And if I this is my golden ticket. And if I, you know, have this thing that gave me entrance. But in each of these cases, I imagine, and in your case, there were other things that helped fill out the applications. In other words, there were other things that qualified you into getting into a selective school, and that story was one part of your overall application story in the broader sense, yeah,
Emi Neitfeld 41:30
absolutely. And I think it's also it's frustrating, because we in American redemption narratives, something bad happens to us, and then as a reward, something good happens, right? So we have a crappy adolescence, and then we get into Harvard, or our mom dies, and then we get to Stanford. But I think in all of these cases where there is a disclosure, and that does become a part of the application, it really does seem to be as much about the telling, or more about the telling, than about what actually happened. And I think that was super frustrating to me when I was actually applying, because it was like, Why do I have to, like, spin this tail? But, you know, there it's not, it's not a competition of like, who had it the hardest they really do want to see like, okay, what can you take from this experience and move like, how can you move forward with it? Yeah,
Ethan Sawyer 42:28
that's something that, yeah, I'd love to, again, reassure folks. We'll, we'll explore in the show notes with a practical guide of like, here specifically is how you can write about your experiences, and, yeah, how to write about what you've done and what you've learned from the experience? Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit about what, how has your life been different since writing acceptance? Because when I was reading the book, I imagined that this was kind of like rewriting your personal statement, but just much longer, like, I imagine that this is this epic, you know, sort of like personal statement, because it's definitely a personal statement. You know, writing a memoir, I'm curious, you know, in the years since it came out, like, what's what's changed for you?
Emi Neitfeld 43:11
Oh, writing acceptance really changed my life so fundamentally, and I had a lot of shame around my adolescence, around omitting things in my college applications. And there had been a certain narrative that my mom told me, that these adults in charge, told me. And I think any process of writing is a process of rewriting and reinventing the narrative. And so I really had, I did so much work to track down the people I interacted with in high school. I found hundreds of pages of medical records and social worker nodes and read. I read every single email I sent in high school, more than 10,000 of them. I do not recommend that to anyone that is bad for your mental health, plus, we're talking about mental health, but it it helps me to to come up with a new story, right, and to have a story that really was on my own terms and reconcile the what you have to do, the kind of self marketing that it often takes to successfully apply to college, especially when you're in a difficult situation and you're trying to explain a story of Whoa. And so I, I honestly feel, it feels wonderful to be more open and honest with people and to realize that, you know, while I really the costs were so high of disclosure in high school that as an adult, I'm kind of free to talk about what I want to talk about, you know. And. Made me feel much more confident with this, with this belief that you know your medical information is really your private business, and that as a teenager, I did not owe that to anyone, and as an adult, I also don't owe that to anyone, and that is super it's super freeing and super liberating. Yeah,
Ethan Sawyer 45:21
one of the themes that we've been talking about, and I just want to, like, underscore this, for counselors who are listening, is about affirming students as they're going through all of this. And you know, I'm hearing the double meaning, and at least the double meaning in the title of the book acceptance, that it sounds like it's something that you know that at least two ways you were looking for as a young person, and just the importance of giving kids that that yes, that's seeing them as humans, as whole humans, and giving them that affirmation. And then we can kind of move on to the practical technical aspects, which I imagine can be really of the application process, which I imagine can be really hard and complicated when we're time strapped?
Emi Neitfeld 46:01
Yeah, absolutely, we're time strapped. And I think there's also a huge generational divide where, you know, I'm like a zillennial, I'm a younger millennial, but there's so much more acceptance now and discussion and communication of mental health issues, which I think is so positive and amazing, and also not everyone who's reading the applications is coming from that generation, right? And so it's a very that process too, is so much translation between different generations worth of experience,
Ethan Sawyer 46:40
yeah. So as we wrap here, I'd love to hear what is your hope, either for admission officers, for the ways that they're thinking about this process, thinking about students writing about mental health, or even from parents and students as they're navigating, considering disclosing mental health issues in the college essay or application.
Emi Neitfeld 47:05
I saw a statistic recently that said that the majority of high school seniors, the majority who are applying to college, had at least one diagnosable mental health condition. So mental health is not a niche topic. It is not a niche crisis. And I really hope that talking about this and talking about my own experience will help college admissions officers and other decision makers have greater empathy for students and have a more accurate context in which to be assessing people who are coming from different backgrounds, right, particularly people who do not have the type of counseling that I had or that people deserve. And I also, I also hope that the college application process. Maybe this is totally optimistic, but I really hope that the college admissions process for some students really can help them think about different aspects of their experience and life in a way that is not as medicalized as I was thinking about mine, right where it's like we we do have struggles, and I think those struggles are human and normal, and that there's more than one way to talk about mental health or to think about mental health. And really, inadvertently, for me, doing these edits and thinking through different lenses about my experience, it did kind of open up this, this door to start thinking about my reaction to trauma differently, and to start actually making a lot of progress in taking better care of myself, in coping better, and in finding seeking the help that I needed. So maybe that's Pollyannaish to think that it could do that for other students, but I really hope so. It's like a different it's a shift in perspective, and sometimes that's what you need.
Ethan Sawyer 49:09
Yeah. I mean, that's my hope too. I mean, and I've seen it happen for other students, where writing about their challenges and their struggles can be useful. But I think you made such a great point that there is, like there was so much writing that you were doing, and then there was the writing application, and I think that's so such a valuable distinction. I'm so glad you made it, and I'm so glad you made it, and I'm so grateful for you spending some time with me. And,
Emi Neitfeld 49:33
yeah, thanks for your work. Thank you so much. Thank you for what you do. I hope this is really helpful students. You music
Ethan Sawyer 49:43
as promised in the show notes. We'll link to a guide that explores whether or not to disclose mental health challenges in the college essay or application. And if you do decide to disclose, how do you do it? That's at college essay guy.com/podcast and hey, if you're not on our email list, if you. To college essay guide.com and opt in to any of the free guides on the website, including our free guide to the personal statement, or our top 10 resources for counselors, or even our family handbook. You'll get the chance to opt in for the newsletter. That's it. Thanks, friends. Stay curious. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Show transcript
Emi Neitfeld 0:00 Bemy, what do you hope folks will take away from our conversation? I hope that students will come away with the understanding that there's a big difference between being comfortable with reaching out for mental health help, with sharing your story and owning your story and what you decide to disclose in your college applications. When I was applying, there was so much emphasis on this idea of college admissions essays being a reflection of who you are as a person and showing the committee like your true self. I really don't like that rhetoric. I think it put on way too much pressure, and it also made it really hard for me to be strategic about what to include in the applications. Ethan Sawyer 0:56 Hi friends and welcome back to our series exploring mental health and the college application process. If you haven't checked out the first two episodes yet, I recommend them on today's episode, my guest is Emmy neatfeld, author of acceptance, a critically acclaimed memoir of her high school journey through foster care, homelessness and the troubled teen industry, to attend college at Harvard. In this frank conversation, Emmy opens up about, among other things, how the notion of disclosing or not disclosing mental health challenges in the college application process may actually be somewhat problematic. We talk about the difference between writing about challenges in general and writing about them specifically for the college application. We discuss the role that she believes high school counselors can play in supporting students with mental health challenges during the college application process, and there are even some takeaways for college admission officers who evaluate applications that include mental health disclosures. A former software engineer Emmys, a full time writer on mental health inequality in higher education for New York Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. I hope you enjoy our conversation before we start talking about college stuff. I'd love to just have you share with folks a little of your background and your story. My Emi Neitfeld 2:19 name is Emmy. I am a author. I was a software engineer for a number of years after college, I applied to college back in 2009 to 2010 which feels like a million years ago. I ended up getting into Harvard, which we will probably talk about a little bit in this episode, but since then, I have written a lot about my journey through the mental health system. As a teenager, I was in foster care for a while, and experienced homelessness in high school, and these were all things that I had to write about when I was writing my college essays, and I really, really struggled to do so, and especially struggled with how much I needed to disclose and how much I should disclose about mental health challenges, including eating disorder, self harm, hospitalizations, PTSD and so as as an adult, I really made it my mission to talk more about those topics, help students who are in difficult situations try to navigate disclosure in applications, and also educate counselors admissions officers who might not understand what is going on for a student, and especially how trauma and other life factors can lead somebody to being in a really dark place who might really excel and thrive on a college campus. You Ethan Sawyer 3:50 wrote this New York Times op ed. It's called, I edited mental illness out of my college applications. I'm not alone, and you raised this question. You said, quote, should applicants play it safe and conceal their emotional troubles, even when it means leaving low grades and gaps and transcripts unexplained, or should they tell the truth and risk getting flagged as a liability? So I want to ask you, what what advice would you give to students? What should they do? I Emi Neitfeld 4:14 should make the caveat that I am not your college counselor. I'm not an admissions officer. I've just been through this myself, and have talked to a lot of students who have and admissions officers and college counselors when it comes to the nitty gritty of mental health, like diagnoses, hospitalizations, stuff like that, it seems like It's generally good to err on the side of caution and not be super explicit about it, and really think about how things are framed. I think that the question of whether or not to disclose is in some ways a false dichotomy. There are a lot of ways. To disclose, and a lot of different things that you can disclose, and often those gaps in a transcript or things that might show up in other places on the application, often there's a way to to explain them and to get rid of any potential confusion without getting into a lot of details about what is really like, personal, private medical information, I think that this is also a can be a challenging question, because a lot of times students want To disclose, right? I think in many ways, I really wanted to, because it was really fundamental to my identity. I had spent all this time in and out of hospitals. I had read the DSM like, I really, you know, I had thought a lot about mental health and mental illness, and it was really hard to imagine describing my life without describing all these drugs that I had taken, and at the same time, I don't think that that was necessary, and that wasn't the lens through which the college admissions officers wanted to get to know me. You know, even if it was the way that I was thinking about myself as a teenager, that was not the way that they were thinking about me. And so really, like, you know, college applications are so short that a disclosure, especially in detail, it can take away from, you know, writing about your passion for like, I don't writing about your passion for photography, which is, which is something that you really do want to give space to. So I think Ethan Sawyer 6:50 you're making such an important point. And a question that I'll sometimes ask students to this end is when you're thinking about, Do I disclose, or do I not disclose? I think students are also, to your point, in the kind of binary, because they're thinking, here's this huge thing. Do I write about the huge thing or not about the huge thing? It's like x or not X and Y. Hope that students can do is brainstorm a wide range of possibilities. So they have photography and their love of koala bears and this purple and, you know, all these other things. Yeah, so that it's it breaks it out of that, should I or should I not? And that, to me, seems like an important, important process to go through. And yeah, separate from that, I think students, the question that I'll often ask them is, what is the best way, or what is a really good way to show the skills, qualities, values and interests that you're going to bring to a college campus? And if they're thinking through that lens, and this is I'm also speaking to counselors here, if they're speaking through that lens of like, thinking through, okay, which topic is going to help me do that? Yeah? Then that might be a slightly different orientation, as they're thinking about, yeah, disclosure, yeah. I love that. Emi Neitfeld 7:56 And also, as a professional writer, in some ways, college applications prepared me very well to be writing op eds and essays, because in every single piece that you write, there's the question of, like, a frame of reference. And in some pieces, you know, I drop in there, like, Oh, I was in foster care, right? And in some pieces, I go into the whole story, like that's the point. And in other things, you're just gonna leave like a detail or two, and then in other essays, it's totally a distraction, and you're not gonna bring it up. And I think that's it's a pretty advanced writing skill to really master, and to be able to have the emotional like strength to to be able to, like, leave out something that's really hard, but I do think it's that's super valuable in a college essay where you might need to say, like, hey, my brother was sent to jail and my grades dipped, but you might decide to leave out that you were hospitalized in the aftermath of that. Yeah, and I think there should be, I just think that, like, if students decide not to disclose, there should be absolutely zero guilt in doing so, because it really is your private information, and you cannot control how an admissions officer is going to respond. Ethan Sawyer 9:20 So for those who don't know, and you wrote an amazing book. It's called acceptance. I've read it. It's incredible. It's powerful. It's strong. Some of the content in it, you know, for some folks, is, is, you know, well, you know, I can let you speak to it more, but I'd love to let you share just a little bit with folks about, like, what's in the book, and give them some context to you mentioned some of these things that you went through, but leading up to that college application process where you get folks to whatever extent you're able, you know, a sort of summary of, like, here was sort of my experience leading up to being 16 and 17, just by way of context. Yeah. Emi Neitfeld 9:56 So both of my parents struggled with mental health problems and. And when I was 11 years old, they divorced, and it really exacerbated things for both of them. My mom dealt with compulsive shopping and hoarding, something I write about a lot in acceptance, but she couldn't really tell that she had a problem, and so instead, I was taken to the doctor, diagnosed and medicated, and I ended up taking a dozen psychiatric drugs in a little under two years, starting with ADHD medication and then going all the way to antipsychotics. And so my book acceptance really opens when I was 14, what would be my freshman year of high school, and my life just felt totally hopeless when a doctor suggested that maybe I could get into college early. And I had always been a huge bookworm, and so to me, this idea was absolutely thrilling, but there were so many roadblocks in my way, especially as somebody who spent my freshman year institutionalized in a locked residential treatment center, I had been hospitalized, I think five times before that, on psych wards and one eating disorder unit, and I would be hospitalized again my sophomore year. But you know, and I had a very tumultuous high school experience, where I attended five or six different high schools. I spent my sophomore year in foster care, and then as a junior in high school, I got a scholarship to art sporting School, which was an incredible experience. It was very fun to write about, but during breaks, I still didn't have a place to stay, and so I found myself sleeping in my car, couch surfing, writing my college essays from a shelter, and then really having a crisis, being like, okay, how am I going to explain all of this? Ethan Sawyer 11:55 And what, what advice were you getting from your premier college counselor? And what was that relationship? What was that connection Emi Neitfeld 12:00 like? Yeah. So even though I was attending a private school my junior and senior year, my college counselor was very overworked. She had 250 graduating seniors, and I didn't know this, but she was also looking for a new job and interviewing on the side, and so I had gone to her hoping for guidance, and she really was like, you know, I do not have time to talk to any juniors like we can talk about this when you're a senior. And that was hard for me, because I didn't even know where I was going to be staying over the summer. And so I ended up getting help from a private college counselor, who I write about in the book. I was able to get pro bono assistance from her. And you know, she's very talented at what she does. And at the same time, I don't think she had ever had a client who had a history exactly like mine before. And so our first her advice for me was, really, you have to make things extremely clear. For colleges, whatever you're going to tell them, it has to be comprehensible. And that, in and of itself, was really hard as a 16 year old, because I was in the middle of it, right? And I did not have adults in my life who were explaining like, you have trouble coping with your emotions because you have been neglected and experienced like this abuse. So I didn't have anybody to spell it out for me. So just trying to make things comprehensible was a huge challenge. It was a very complicated story, like even the book acceptance is 383, pages long. And so how am I going to describe this in, like a one page letter of extenuating circumstances? But then the other question that we really faced was, okay, how much are we going to disclose? And in the first round for early decision. It was really my counselor advised me that honesty is the best policy. We're just going to lay it all out there, and hopefully, if they see that you had these mental health problems basically your freshman year, that will tell schools how bad your living situation was. So that was our first that was our first attempt. And Ethan Sawyer 14:25 my sense is, but this is from previous conversations with you that it was pretty explicit, like you said, you know that it was pretty much just laying it all out, laying the facts like, say more about that, because I said that there was, like there was a redraft. But tell us about the first draft before you tell us about Emi Neitfeld 14:41 Yes, so the first in the first draft, there was a timeline, and it included, like, I was hospitalized. I was in this, like, locked residential treatment center. It included some diagnoses, like I had depression and post traumatic stress disorder, right? Which? Which are pretty i. I would say, pretty understandable diagnoses, but it was, yeah, it was, it was a lot, and I definitely felt uncomfortable sharing it, although I you know, almost everything about the process was making me feel uncomfortable. So that was very explicit. And then I applied early action to Yale with that, and then I was rejected. And luckily, I had some adults in my life who could do some reconnaissance, and my school's guidance counselor called Yale. She at least she told me she called Yale, and they were basically like, you know, we don't get a sense that me has overcome. And then my private college counselor talked to people and was like, Hey, this is TMI. You know, colleges are going through a mental health crisis. They have a lot of people on campus who have psychiatric needs that they cannot support. And like this looks like a giant liability. Yeah, Ethan Sawyer 16:06 one of the things that I can imagine a student listening or a parent listening, who's been so students been through a lot of stuff, or a parent's witness their kid going through a lot of stuff. For those of you who are listening, we're not saying here at first blush, like, therefore, don't disclose anything, you know. But there comes it seems like a more complex question of like, what were, what were some of the, what are some of the questions that you would want students to be thinking about as they're thinking about whether or not to disclose, and even, like, how to disclose? Absolutely Emi Neitfeld 16:36 so at that point, after that rejection, it was clear that I needed to do something differently. And the first thing that I figured out, that I would recommend any student figure out right away is, what do I need to disclose? And so in my case, I had gone to a bunch of different high schools, and spent my freshman year, like, locked up. And so I had received credits on my transcript from this, like classroom in an institution, and so I had been sure that I would have to disclose that right, that there just wouldn't be a choice. It would just be so confusing. They had to know where it was coming from. And then I went and I got my transcript, the transcripts that they were sending to colleges. And what I found was that actually, basically, my my previous high school had lumped all of my past credits together, and so it didn't say what school that it was from. It didn't say anything about it. It just was, like, a bunch of random credits. And this was so important for me to know, because it really changed the game of, like, what did I have to disclose? Right? Yeah, what I'm hearing Ethan Sawyer 18:00 you say is that it seemed to tell a different story, like there was there was one story that you had told, and then if you were to just look at the transcript, it was telling a slightly Emi Neitfeld 18:07 different story. Yeah, exactly. And, and I think that it can be really easy for people to give blanket advice like, Oh, don't disclose, or do disclose, but a lot of people don't realize that there's often, like, things on your transcripts that you really want to explain. And so I was really lucky in this case, that I didn't have, you know, I didn't have any huge fluctuations in grades, like, you know, my transcripts, basically, I would have to explain where I had gone to school before, but I wouldn't, I didn't need to get into the weeds, and I think that that's just really important to know, because I wrote a piece for The New York Times about how other students have dealt with mental health in their college applications. And very often, a mental health crisis comes with like, a steep decline in grades, right? Or classes getting dropped out of stuff being done in the like, in the middle of the semester. And I think it's really important to just take inventory of like, what are the basic facts here that need some context, and then kind of thinking through, okay, well, what? What are the options for that context. And so in my case, I was able to basically simplify it and say, you know, I started high school in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and then my sophomore year, I went to foster care, and I changed schools. And then last year, I got the scholarship, so I changed schools again, and that was just a much simpler picture that did not include institutionalization. Ethan Sawyer 19:49 Yeah, and, like, just so that students who are maybe going through this process for the first time, or parents who are going through this, I want to give folks context for what these different opportunities are for disclosing so i. And I also want to hear how it went in your particular case. So there's the personal statement, which is what many folks call the college essay, which is this 650, word, one page essay. And then you've got your activities list, which talks about, you know, the brag sheet, all the stuff you've done. And then we've got this additional information section, which is often that place where the extenuating circumstances will go. In some cases, there's like an additional letter that might come from the counselor or a teacher or another supportive adult in a student's life. But I'd love to hear from your perspective and your experience what ended up in each of those pieces, with the caveat to students that it's not like we're saying, therefore, do all these things and you'll get into Harvard. We're just saying that. In Emmy's case, this was what the next draft looked like. So how did you what went into your personal statement, and then where did the other pieces? Like, what went into those other pieces, including activities, lists and like, how did that whole thing Emi Neitfeld 20:52 look my personal statement, I tried writing a lot of things about what was currently going on in my life, like about experiencing homelessness or my hopes for the future. And all of those essays were just so sad, and none of them were working, and they felt super exploitative while I was writing them. And I was very lucky, because I had taken a creative writing class the spring before, and I ended up sending my college counselor, one of the pieces I had written which was totally different. It was about something from my childhood, and one of my parents is trans, and I had written an essay about how that affected me and how it shaped my own kind of evolution and growth as a girl. And so we decided pretty early before all this, that that was going to be my personal statement, and it, you know, it told you a little bit about my parents, but it was not going to give you context about my current life. And then this, when I had the bullet point in depth, checklist of or in depth, like timeline of hospitalization and stuff like that. That was all in this letter of extenuating circumstances area, and I knew that that was going to be where I did, like the heavy duty explanation, my secondary essay that, you know, I wrote basically two main essays. One was the personal statement, which every school got, and then I had a secondary essay that was about studying photography in foster care. And that essay I cut down into various lengths for basically any school that required, like, an essay about an activity that I had done, or like any other prompts, basically, yeah, and I think that that one gave schools a little bit of like context into what was it like to be in foster care, like, here are some of the challenges of foster care, but it was framed around this passion that I had, that I really loved, and that made me feel more confident in sending that out. And then I think that the kind of the final piece where some of this information was coming from is that the common app had a section about explaining school changes, and so that was where I was able to say, you know, I started school in Minneapolis, and then I was in foster care, and now I'm at boarding school. Ethan Sawyer 23:19 And I think, but I don't know. I think that you probably had strong extracurricular activities and grades. I'm just curious about the rest of your applications. Because I think I'm curious because, yeah, because I think, and I don't think this is not a podcast on how, quote, unquote, how to get into Harvard or how to get into selected schools, but just to kind of fill out the picture for folks like, what did the rest of your application look Emi Neitfeld 23:38 like? Absolutely, I'm glad you're asking that. I actually, when I wrote acceptance, I wanted to include my full application as, like, an appendix in the back of the book. And I was like, Yeah, I would pay money to, like, read somebody else's college application. So I think the one other piece that I had that I haven't talked about is the brag sheet, and I think it probably looked a little different for me than it did for a lot of kids who had been in the same high school for four years. But I included a lot of things around writing and visual art, in part because those were things that I had continuity in. And so I was able to say, hey, like, I've done National Novel Writing Month, like every year for these four years, right? And the first year I did it in a hospital bed, which I wasn't going to say in the application, right? But I was glad that I could point to that. And then my application really was like framed around this talent for writing, this passion for writing and so stuff like the intramural soccer team that I joined in high school specifically to put in my college application like we did not mention that, you know, we cut that, but I really, I feel like I dug really deep to figure out, okay, what of all these moving pieces? What. Has been the same over the last four years. And, like, I love French, and even when I was on my own, I tried to read books in French if I could, and then getting the French, my French teacher to be one of the recommenders, because she could speak to that, to that passion and and be able for her to say, you know, like, oh, Emmy is actually Trey bien en Fauci, even if her transcript shows her, like, doing half a year, a quarter of a year, it being all broken up. What I'm hearing you Ethan Sawyer 25:33 say, and I want to so i want to say back to you, make sure I'm getting it right. Is that the new draft of the eight year application ended up sharing some of the challenges and some of the difficulties, but not sharing all the details. And you haven't quite said this, but I think what I'm getting is that you mentioned that the first draft was more about the challenges, and the new draft included, maybe the exterior letter included more of the sort of, did you include any of the what you've done and sort of what you've learned from the experience, or was it just sort of like a shorter version of some of the challenges. The new Emi Neitfeld 26:03 version focused a lot more on, quote, unquote, overcoming a term I don't like but was what they wanted to see. And will you say, Ethan Sawyer 26:11 Can I actually pause you say, why you don't love that term? Well, Emi Neitfeld 26:15 I feel like it's pretty unrealistic to tell a 17 year old that they need to prove that they've overcome these awful circumstances when they are still in the middle of it, and it's like, Oh, tell us how you've grown from being homeless while you're sleeping in your car, right? And that's just a pretty cruel standard. And at the same time, I realized that colleges are not charities. They are not looking for like the saddest story. But I did try to show like, okay, here is how far I've come, and this is why this makes me a valuable contribution to your campus, right? In a way that was less like, Okay, you should feel bad for me, right? Which I think they should have, and this should give me some points for getting good grades in the middle of that. But here's what I'm going to do for you. And I think it's also worth noting that in my first draft, I was an open book when I applied to Yale, and after I was rejected from Yale, my counselor advised me, you know, we need to tone it down. But I took a look at my transcript, and I thought really hard about the feedback I had gotten, and I decided that I wanted to completely remove any mention of mental illness from my application, and that basically, I was not going to disclose anything around diagnoses, around treatment, and I would just erase it from this application. Ethan Sawyer 27:48 And in retrospect, how do you feel about that choice? I felt great about it Emi Neitfeld 27:54 at the time, I was plagued with nightmares. I was convinced that I had lied, that I had cheated, that I was being extremely dishonest by not disclosing this stuff. And I think a big part of that is that I had had so many adults really make it seem like my diagnoses were who I was right, or that they were character defects like I had been told explicitly that I was locked up because I was bad, that I was in foster care because I was messed up, you know, that I was just a failure, and that I couldn't, like, hack living at home, and that if I was just stronger, I wouldn't be dealing with this stuff. And so I had all those messages going on in my head which made it really hard to think about diagnoses as something like medical or objective or that wasn't like core to my identity. It made it hard to leave it out of the application. But I think it also ended up being really liberating for me to think about, okay, how do I tell this story and reframe it a little bit, you know, and take back this narrative and take back the idea that, like, I do not think that having a diagnosis makes someone a bad person, that it makes you weak, that it anything like that, right? But I had really been living in this medicalized space where everything that I was going through was a disorder that, like, I was experiencing, and it ended up becoming an exercise in, like, Okay, I had these bad things happen to me, and I'm going to tell them that these things happened. And of course, I have faced consequences, and I have struggled to cope with those things, but I don't have to disclose all of that. I can really decide how I'm going to frame it, and that is my choice that I get to make with my private information. Question, Ethan Sawyer 30:00 and yet, I hear you saying that you were also doing a lot of writing at the time, and so it's like, it's also not like you weren't writing about these things still. So, and I'm guessing this is a bit of a leading question, so maybe I'll ask in this way, is, Will you talk a little bit about what role writing has played in your in your processing of everything you've been through Emi Neitfeld 30:23 in high school. To me, especially writing was so important to me as an identity and just to get through the the day and these challenges. So I had a personal writing practice that was deeply confessional, that where I just put it all on the page, and I wrote about my like, Adderall problem, I wrote about eating disorders, I wrote about everything. And luckily, I had some friends who I really trusted, who I could share drafts with, and I also had some creative outlets, like submitting to teen literary magazines. There's one called polyphony that it made me feel so special to be accepted and to be published. So I had those different avenues, but when the college applications came up, at first, I thought, Okay, this is my big chance to finally have my work matter, to have like an audience for it. And I, at first, I thought about my application as like a creative writing project, and I let myself really, like explore the dark stuff, really go there, and I'm glad that I gave myself that freedom and took a lot of risks early on in the drafting process, or even in the process of what I sent to my counselor. If I hadn't done that, I don't think I ever would have occurred to me to write a personal statement about my parents transition, even though I think it was a really I'm really proud of that piece of writing, and I think it was a really different perspective. But I think I also ended up realizing that the audience for a literary magazine is very different than an admissions committee that is trying to fill out their class. But I'm really glad that I had the people and the spaces in my life to have an outlet, to be having those tough conversations and to be processing everything that was coming up, even just while writing the applications. What Ethan Sawyer 32:35 you're saying to me, it's like, I'm doing resonance wiggle fingers, because it's so I think it's so important. And I just want to say, like, I think I skipped over the start, but I'm like, so grateful for your vulnerability and your bravery back then, but also now, like coming and talking about these things. So thank you. And I think what you're saying is so important about and I really want students to get this there's, I think there is a difference between writing about it, which I think can be such a valuable experience, and then, as you were saying that second part of going, you know, based on what colleges are looking for, they're shaping a class. And I'm saying just what you were saying, like, how is that piece different? And that's where I think a different perspective, talk to your college counselor can be really helpful. It sounds like, Emi Neitfeld 33:15 yeah, absolutely. Ethan Sawyer 33:18 So as you think back and you're you're thinking about speaking of your counselor. What advice would you give to counselors as they're advising students going through this process? What was helpful for you? What was less helpful? Yeah, speak to counselors for a minute. Yeah. Emi Neitfeld 33:33 I think it's so important to acknowledge the students full experience as we were talking about writing versus writing for the college essay. As a writer, even as a 31 year old, I can't edit a piece unless I've had someone read it and tell me, you know, I accept you for who you are. You are good enough as you are, and I hope that counselors with a million things that are on your plates, that when students come in with those messy, messy drafts that are really like vulnerable and raw, that you're able to give students that acceptance of like, I see this. This is powerful. I hear you, and begin the conversation with that. And then going on to what? What do we want to tell colleges, right? Colleges who don't know you, and this is the first thing that they see about you. I also think it's really important to to understand what students can and cannot leave out, like we talked about with the with transcripts, right with grades. How do we do that? And I also, I would have loved if my counselor could have taken a little bit more of an active role in explaining my family circumstances. Mm. Uh in in their counselor letter, and so it it was really hard for me to accurately describe what was happening at home without sounding really negative, because it was a negative situation, and I ended up getting a letter from a mentor. She was like my county assigned mentor, who had all these degrees, and she was able to write a very frank letter that did a lot to just put my situation in context and explain. And I think in an ideal world, if I hadn't had her, or even if I had my counselor might have been able to say, to lay out, here's some of the obstacles that Emmy faced, kind of freeing me of that burden to do so. And I think that would have had to be a conversation between her and me. I would not have felt comfortable if she disclosed things that I didn't want known, but I just imagined that that would have been such a weight off of me to not have to be the person to say, like, Hey, I was kicked out of my foster home. You know? Ethan Sawyer 36:11 Yeah, one of the things I imagine counselors listening are like, what does that look like? So rest assured that in the show notes, we'll we'll share some examples of counselor letters and additional information sections, so that listeners that you can see, you know, what does this actually look like? Practically speaking, when it comes to disclosures, it's not going to be Emmy's application, it'll be another sample application. So you can kind of see, practically speaking, what this looks like. I'd love Emmy if you'd be willing to speak to college admission readers for a minute, and what would you like them to hear Emi Neitfeld 36:44 when I reported on this for the New York Times, one of the things that really shocked me was that all of the students that I interviewed, they the range of their crises was not that Great. You know, some people ended up in the hospital. Other people didn't, but they're like people, people struggled, right? And we know lots and lots of young people are struggling, but what was so dramatically different was the amount of support that a person had around their academics with that crisis, and also just around how they were going to explain it. And so when I was talking to private school guidance counselors, they were basically like, you know, we can make it look like the kid had motto if they were impatient for depression, you know, we'll just pretend it was mono and versus if you are in a foster home and you have, like, even a small crisis, you might be forced to transfer schools, to drop out of classes, it could just upend your whole entire life. And so I think it's really important to sound the alarm of how different the very same crisis can look because I think it's really scary when you see that a student has been hospitalized, right? Or you see these kind of like, that evidence of a breakdown. And I just want people to have the context, you know, for like, what, who is protecting this child, right? And like, what kind of grace do they need? So I think that it can be really easy to say, like, okay, don't disclose. But when I was talking to students for the New York Times, there were cases where it seemed like it might have been beneficial for people to disclose, right? And either they chose not to, or they did. And one of the things that so impressed me with these students was the way that they modulated what information they gave and even the language that they used. Ethan Sawyer 38:56 And so examples, I'm curious, Emi Neitfeld 38:59 yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was one student who who had attempted suicide and then was hospitalized for it, and she described it in her application, as she said, You know, I was hospitalized during a mental health crisis, and then I quickly recovered. Blah, blah, blah, but she felt she felt she had to disclose that it was a mental health crisis because it had shown up on her transcript. She had gotten worse grades. She's like, if I had mono, you know, I would have still been able to do my schoolwork, right? But she was just very like, both matter of fact about it, but also just kind of deliberately vague, like it was a mental health crisis, and she got into every school where she applied, and there was another student. Their name is Jamie, and I featured them in the story in more detail, and their mom had died two weeks before applications were due. Yeah, and they believe that they. Would not have gotten into Stanford if it hadn't been for their essay that was about this topic. And I mean, I read the essay, it was so incredibly powerful, and Jamie mentioned their struggles with guilt and with depression, but omitted a inpatient hospitalization, and that seemed like, you know, all of these choices seem like a really good balance to strike. And while I talked to some other students where, you know, they had a situation that made a big impact on their transcript, and often not disclosing anything can lead to just a big, confusing gap. Ethan Sawyer 40:44 I want to make sure that students listening don't take any of these one things that we're saying and go, Well, if you had a hard thing and disclose it. And I know I said that earlier, but I want to make sure students hear it, in case they just logged in for this little part that I imagine that Janie also had, you know, an incredible application. And it wasn't just the story that quote, unquote, got them in, because I imagine that some students go, Well, this is my one chance. And if I this is my golden ticket. And if I, you know, have this thing that gave me entrance. But in each of these cases, I imagine, and in your case, there were other things that helped fill out the applications. In other words, there were other things that qualified you into getting into a selective school, and that story was one part of your overall application story in the broader sense, yeah, Emi Neitfeld 41:30 absolutely. And I think it's also it's frustrating, because we in American redemption narratives, something bad happens to us, and then as a reward, something good happens, right? So we have a crappy adolescence, and then we get into Harvard, or our mom dies, and then we get to Stanford. But I think in all of these cases where there is a disclosure, and that does become a part of the application, it really does seem to be as much about the telling, or more about the telling, than about what actually happened. And I think that was super frustrating to me when I was actually applying, because it was like, Why do I have to, like, spin this tail? But, you know, there it's not, it's not a competition of like, who had it the hardest they really do want to see like, okay, what can you take from this experience and move like, how can you move forward with it? Yeah, Ethan Sawyer 42:28 that's something that, yeah, I'd love to, again, reassure folks. We'll, we'll explore in the show notes with a practical guide of like, here specifically is how you can write about your experiences, and, yeah, how to write about what you've done and what you've learned from the experience? Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit about what, how has your life been different since writing acceptance? Because when I was reading the book, I imagined that this was kind of like rewriting your personal statement, but just much longer, like, I imagine that this is this epic, you know, sort of like personal statement, because it's definitely a personal statement. You know, writing a memoir, I'm curious, you know, in the years since it came out, like, what's what's changed for you? Emi Neitfeld 43:11 Oh, writing acceptance really changed my life so fundamentally, and I had a lot of shame around my adolescence, around omitting things in my college applications. And there had been a certain narrative that my mom told me, that these adults in charge, told me. And I think any process of writing is a process of rewriting and reinventing the narrative. And so I really had, I did so much work to track down the people I interacted with in high school. I found hundreds of pages of medical records and social worker nodes and read. I read every single email I sent in high school, more than 10,000 of them. I do not recommend that to anyone that is bad for your mental health, plus, we're talking about mental health, but it it helps me to to come up with a new story, right, and to have a story that really was on my own terms and reconcile the what you have to do, the kind of self marketing that it often takes to successfully apply to college, especially when you're in a difficult situation and you're trying to explain a story of Whoa. And so I, I honestly feel, it feels wonderful to be more open and honest with people and to realize that, you know, while I really the costs were so high of disclosure in high school that as an adult, I'm kind of free to talk about what I want to talk about, you know. And. Made me feel much more confident with this, with this belief that you know your medical information is really your private business, and that as a teenager, I did not owe that to anyone, and as an adult, I also don't owe that to anyone, and that is super it's super freeing and super liberating. Yeah, Ethan Sawyer 45:21 one of the themes that we've been talking about, and I just want to, like, underscore this, for counselors who are listening, is about affirming students as they're going through all of this. And you know, I'm hearing the double meaning, and at least the double meaning in the title of the book acceptance, that it sounds like it's something that you know that at least two ways you were looking for as a young person, and just the importance of giving kids that that yes, that's seeing them as humans, as whole humans, and giving them that affirmation. And then we can kind of move on to the practical technical aspects, which I imagine can be really of the application process, which I imagine can be really hard and complicated when we're time strapped? Emi Neitfeld 46:01 Yeah, absolutely, we're time strapped. And I think there's also a huge generational divide where, you know, I'm like a zillennial, I'm a younger millennial, but there's so much more acceptance now and discussion and communication of mental health issues, which I think is so positive and amazing, and also not everyone who's reading the applications is coming from that generation, right? And so it's a very that process too, is so much translation between different generations worth of experience, Ethan Sawyer 46:40 yeah. So as we wrap here, I'd love to hear what is your hope, either for admission officers, for the ways that they're thinking about this process, thinking about students writing about mental health, or even from parents and students as they're navigating, considering disclosing mental health issues in the college essay or application. Emi Neitfeld 47:05 I saw a statistic recently that said that the majority of high school seniors, the majority who are applying to college, had at least one diagnosable mental health condition. So mental health is not a niche topic. It is not a niche crisis. And I really hope that talking about this and talking about my own experience will help college admissions officers and other decision makers have greater empathy for students and have a more accurate context in which to be assessing people who are coming from different backgrounds, right, particularly people who do not have the type of counseling that I had or that people deserve. And I also, I also hope that the college application process. Maybe this is totally optimistic, but I really hope that the college admissions process for some students really can help them think about different aspects of their experience and life in a way that is not as medicalized as I was thinking about mine, right where it's like we we do have struggles, and I think those struggles are human and normal, and that there's more than one way to talk about mental health or to think about mental health. And really, inadvertently, for me, doing these edits and thinking through different lenses about my experience, it did kind of open up this, this door to start thinking about my reaction to trauma differently, and to start actually making a lot of progress in taking better care of myself, in coping better, and in finding seeking the help that I needed. So maybe that's Pollyannaish to think that it could do that for other students, but I really hope so. It's like a different it's a shift in perspective, and sometimes that's what you need. Ethan Sawyer 49:09 Yeah. I mean, that's my hope too. I mean, and I've seen it happen for other students, where writing about their challenges and their struggles can be useful. But I think you made such a great point that there is, like there was so much writing that you were doing, and then there was the writing application, and I think that's so such a valuable distinction. I'm so glad you made it, and I'm so glad you made it, and I'm so grateful for you spending some time with me. And, Emi Neitfeld 49:33 yeah, thanks for your work. Thank you so much. Thank you for what you do. I hope this is really helpful students. You music Ethan Sawyer 49:43 as promised in the show notes. We'll link to a guide that explores whether or not to disclose mental health challenges in the college essay or application. And if you do decide to disclose, how do you do it? That's at college essay guy.com/podcast and hey, if you're not on our email list, if you. To college essay guide.com and opt in to any of the free guides on the website, including our free guide to the personal statement, or our top 10 resources for counselors, or even our family handbook. You'll get the chance to opt in for the newsletter. That's it. Thanks, friends. Stay curious. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
