Sam Hodgson / The New York Times
Taylor Ferrante-Markham, center, works on the design staff for the Aerie, the school yearbook at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., March 6, 2018. With school shootings now a part of the fabric of America, college admissions officers regularly find the tragedies they watched unfold on television being grappled with in the pages of the applications before them.
Sunday, June 23, 2019 | 2 a.m.
To make their college admissions essays stand out, high school students have always written about their biggest personal hardships. For those who have survived mass shootings, ducking under desks and witnessing unspeakable horror, the big question is whether to recount the bloodshed to get into college.
With school shootings now a part of the fabric of America, college admissions officers regularly find the tragedies they watched unfold on television being grappled with in the pages of the applications before them.
Students recall their terror. They describe their transformation from quiet pupil to outspoken activist. For those who are willing to relive those awful days — and not all survivors are — the tragedies are life-changing.
“I kind of struggled with that a little bit, because I never really knew what colleges would look for,” said Taylor Ferrante-Markham, who graduated this spring from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But then she learned admissions officers liked to see evidence of personal growth.
“Of course, it was the first thing that popped into my head,” she said of the February 2018 massacre at her school, which left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded. She applied only to St. John’s University in New York — her dream college, she said — and edited her essay until she felt it was good enough to win her acceptance.
It did. Ferrante-Markham, 18, said she plans to study journalism and criminology.
Writing about that day has become a little easier over time, she said. Her essay recounts her feeling of apathy before the shooting and how the massacre angered her and made her look outside her own circumstances.
“I now care about much more than just my little world around me,” she wrote.
I hated waking up for school and going to any class that challenged me. My only concerns were my friends and our afterschool plans, boys, and how far away the next holiday break was. I did not care about what was happening in my community, my state, or even my country. All I wanted to do was finish my spreads for yearbook and go home or out. That is pretty much how my life went throughout the majority of high school. I was never expecting anything to change, that was, until February 14, 2018. ...
I did my research, which showed nothing has been changed to protect students. So I decided to walk in the March For Our Lives in Parkland with my friends, for our safety, to make change. I now care about much more than just my little world around me. I am ready to move forward onto my next chapter, furthering my education, bringing my new desire for change wherever I go throughout college, into my future career, and for the rest of my life.
The majority of college-bound students from Stoneman Douglas who were juniors at the time of the mass shooting wrote about it in their college admission essays, according to Sarah Lerner, an English and journalism teacher at the school who taught many of those students in their senior year.
“Some of the kids didn’t want to write about the event because it was too much already, but others did, because it truly shaped them and they wanted to talk about it,” said Lerner, who compiled stories from shooting survivors into a book. “I was very honest with them. I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it. If you don’t, don’t. Nobody is going to accept you because you write about it or not.’”
One Stoneman Douglas student who wrote about surviving the massacre was accepted to Harvard in the spring only to have his acceptance rescinded this week because of racist screeds he wrote months before the shooting.
Another, Spencer Blum, who moved into his freshman dorm at the University of South Florida on Tuesday, wrote about his fear on the day the shooting unfolded, when he initially struggled to get hold of his sister, a freshman at the school who was not hurt.
Blum, now 18, said in his essay that Feb. 14, 2018, was “the day I would become an activist.”
As we kept walking down this narrowing path behind the school, things started to become suspicious. For starters, we were still going; it seemed a bit over the top for a drill. Then, a cop car pulled up behind us on the field and came out in a full bulletproof suit and with an extremely long rifle. As some students began crying and screaming “THIS IS REAL!” the thought that this was just a drill began to fade. ...
Every morning I wake up and think “what if it was me?” Then, I think about how it could have been me. ... That’s why I lobbied in Tallahassee. That’s why I marched for my life. So I can wake up, hug my mom, dad, brother, and sister, an not worry about how it could have been me.
At Great Mills High School in southern Maryland, Alana White said she heard gunshots on the day in March 2018 when a 17-year-old student at the school fatally shot his ex-girlfriend and injured another student before killing himself.
Those memories came back months later as she wrote her college essay, focusing on the events that had shaped her view of her hometown. She wrote about suddenly not feeling safe in the tree-lined rural community where she had grown up, and about attending protests and rallies and working on a memorial mural.
“Whenever something bad happens in my life, I tend to keep it in and not talk about it,” said White, who is heading to Brown University. “I’m not the type of person who shares my problems with the world. Writing it down helped me come to terms with what I was actually feeling.”
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking for the whole day. I suddenly didn’t feel safe in the one place where I had spent so much time, where I had met some of my best mentors, where I had spent so long working towards my passions. Where a bright girl’s life had ended. My doubts resurfaced. But my community helped pull me up. Through our protests and rallies for unity, I realized I loved my school more than I ever thought I could, and that there was nowhere I would have rather become the person I am.
Imprints of school shootings are visible in other writings by student survivors, even after they arrive on college campuses.
At Northern Kentucky University, Mo Cox, 19, decided to write an essay for her freshman creative writing class about the day in January 2018 when a teenage gunman killed two classmates at Marshall County High School in rural western Kentucky.
“It was supposed to be 1,000 words, but I went over,” Cox said. “I kept writing. I just had to get all this out.”
She said she wanted to help other people understand the initial waves of shock and heartbreak, but also the lesser-discussed echoes of trauma: How she failed Algebra III, for the first time. The frustration of getting nowhere with calls for tougher gun laws. How people just stopped talking about what had happened.
Patricia Greer, the principal of Marshall County High, said that when they were applying to colleges, many of her students chose to tell admissions officers about their community’s success, not just its tragedy.
“We don’t want to be defined by the shooting, and our students don’t either, so a lot of times that’s not what they choose to share,” Greer said. “They’re proud of their school, they’re proud of the community for their resilience, but that’s not something they want to be defined by.”
