Her University Celebrated Her Inspiring Story. Then It Started Asking Questions.

[Nevilledog]

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https://www.chronicle.com/article/the dredging

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One Monday morning in the fall of 2020, Mackenzie Fierceton received an email asking her to meet with Beth Winkelstein, deputy provost of the University of Pennsylvania. That afternoon, she spoke via Zoom with Winkelstein and Jane Morris, executive director of the university’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. “There are questions that now need to be answered,” Winkelstein informed her, according to Fierceton’s recollection. Who were her parents? Did her mother go to college? Was she given a car? Who was Darren? Would medical records show she had broken ribs? What about injuries to her face? The questions kept coming. At one point, Fierceton took a sip of water and began to cry.

Throughout the conversation — Fierceton would later refer to it as an interrogation — the 23-year-old graduate student struggled to maintain her composure. Just a few days before, Fierceton had been selected as a Rhodes scholar, one of 32 scholars chosen from more than 2,300 applicants. She had graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in political science and was close to completing her master’s in social work. Her background made these accomplishments all the more remarkable: Fierceton was a low-income, first-generation college student who had passed through the foster-care system and had written her capstone thesis on how foster kids often end up in prison. And now she was off to Oxford.

But after The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about Fierceton’s scholarship, university officials received an anonymous email raising doubts about her biography. In reality, the email said, Fierceton had grown up in an affluent suburb of St. Louis with her mother, a radiologist, and had attended private schools. A similar email, sent to the Rhodes Trust, accused her of being “blatantly dishonest in the representation of her childhood” and included photos from her high-school yearbook of Fierceton skydiving, riding a horse, and whitewater rafting. The anonymous email led to the meeting with the deputy provost and would prompt two investigations, one by Rhodes and one by the university, that would result in further accusations of deception. Much of that scrutiny focused on an essay in Fierceton’s undergraduate application that details alleged abuse so severe that it landed her in a pediatric intensive-care unit.

Writing about personal trauma in your college application is common enough that there are guides on how to do it. In an op-ed published last year by The New York Times, a high-school senior confessed to mixed emotions about the pressure to “sell your pain” in your essay, as if suffering was somehow a prerequisite. While admissions officers at highly selective institutions will insist that it’s not necessary to highlight the darkest aspects of your upbringing, the need to set yourself apart is real. In addition, those elite colleges, sensitive to the charge that they cater to the wealthy and well-connected, are eager to show that they’re transforming society rather than laundering its inequalities. They are always on the lookout for remarkable kids from less-fortunate circumstances.

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[FM123]

1. Wow, that's quite a story.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

[femmedem]

2. Thank you. I never would have found that article had you not posted it.

It didn't go in the direction I expected, and it laid out all sides of the story fairly and with nuance. I appreciated the concept that something can be false in some factual details yet truthful as a depiction of what someone experienced.

[betsuni]

3. Thanks, interesting.

Reminds me of a woman, years ago, who wrote about being poor on a website group, asked the editor to share, went viral. Got a book deal to write about poverty and opened a GoFundMe account.

But she'd gone to private school, private music lessons, toured Europe, but had also had a bad relationship with parents. Things got more and more complicated with each contradictory explanation. Exaggerated stories about having little money is one thing, and she did have serious money problems at one time. Growing up in poverty is another.

Fact and fiction blurred. True and not true.