So, you’re a “boring” person.
You don’t belong to a marginalized community. You’re middle class, maybe even upper-middle class.
You’re about as basic as Starbucks and Vanilla lattes. So, how on God’s green Earth are you going to write a college essay when you’re the most basic and boring person to ever exist?! Well, here’s a secret. Ready?
You’re probably not boring.
Don’t believe us? Well, we’ve worked with countless people who would qualify as “basic” and regular students. They had average grades, extracurriculars and hobbies and tastes. Nonetheless, these only needed a little elbow grease to create fantastic essays that were accepted into T20 schools! You DON’T need a top-tier topic to get accepted into top schools!
That’s why we created this guide to writing a college essay / Personal Statement if you’re boring. It holds your hand through the process we give our clients to help them write top-tier essays despite self-identifying as “boring.”
Table of Contents
- The “Interesting Student” Fallacy.
- Controlling the Narrative.
- People are NOT a Checklist. They’re People.
- How to Write a Personal Statement if You’re Boring.
- Conclusion.
The “Interesting Student” Fallacy.
The #1 mistake people make is categorizing students in different camps. They make the presumption that some students are interesting, and others are not.
And, while it can be argued some students are more interesting than others at some level, it’s seldom the case that there are boring students. In fact, it doesn’t take much digging beneath the surface to uncover many interesting things about people.
There are plenty of people whose lives are mired in tragedy and hardships. Some have struggled through adversities that people cannot even comprehend. Many fight through problems that are difficult to articulate in words.
Frankly, boring people are quite rare. It’s just that people expect themselves to present interesting, digestible interesting things as if it could just be conjured on a silver platter. And, that’s not reality.
In reality, people have small talk. People speak pleasantries and talk of the weather for a little. Then, little by little, people start to open up about their lives. And, it’s in this opening up that you discover human beings are unimaginably interesting in every way.
But, again, it doesn’t come easily. The reason people feel like they’re boring people is because they just haven’t really
Controlling the Narrative.
So, what actually makes someone “boring” then?
Well, it’s control.
More specifically, college essays are boring when students wrest control of the narrative. This includes students telling not showing, students shoving down leadership titles and positions down their readers’ throats, and trying to “force” admissions officers to think of them as interesting.
Interesting college essays are organic. Boring college essays are inorganic. The ones that actually pique the admissions officers’ interests are often the ones that are open and transparent. Good essays allow room for interpretation. Bad ones control the narrative, robbing readers of their liberty to come to their own conclusions.
When you’re trying to force yourself to sound interesting, you ironically start to sound boring. This is because the admissions office isn’t given the room needed to come to their own decisions.
Try to leave your writing up for interpretation. For, allowing your readers the autonomy of interpretation is what truly gives them space to find you interesting.
People are NOT a Checklist. They’re People.
Boring college essays try to shove too many things into the essay. They shove in their work experience, their perfect GPAs, their skydiving experience, so on and so forth.
This changes the college essay from a window into your life to a checklist. It itemizes your personality, rather than making it a pleasurable thing to be explored.
Remember: when you meet people in real life, who are the interesting people?
Are they the ones who shoehorn as many of their hobbies, interests, and achievements down your throat? Not really. In fact, those people happen to come off as narcissistic and distasteful. You don’t want to associate yourself with those people.
Instead, you’ll often find the most interesting people with the most captivating stories are those who speak about everyday experiences that to some level connect with you.
This is where empathy comes in.
If you can write a topic (any topic, even if it’s not relevant to other people) there are bound to be themes and motifs that outsiders can personally connect to. For instance, not everyone is a soccer player. But, a reader who doesn’t play soccer can still extrapolate and infer the sweat in your palms and the feeling of your heart bursting through your chest and crawling up your throat. For, everyone has had that physical response to fear before. Use your experiences to connect with your readers at an empathic level. That’s the key to writing a solid college essay as a boring student.
We’ll explore more of this in depth in the sections below.
How to Write a Personal Statement if You’re Boring.
There are 5 steps to writing a personal statement or college essay as a boring person. It doesn’t matter if you have no personality, no interesting hobbies, no hooks, and no cool topics. This applies to everyone.
Step 1: List All Your Life Milestones. That’s Right. All of Them.
This is going to be boring. And, we mean very, very boring. But, it’s still important. Don’t skimp out on this.
Get a blank white sheet of paper and pen.
Then, list on the paper all the life milestones you remember. These don’t have to be significant or important things. They just have to be “checkpoints” in life that you seemingly remembered.
Do this for every year, from year 1 to your current year.
For example, there may have been a time you spilled orange juice when you were four years old, then remembered getting scolded for it.
Is this going to be a significant college essay topic? Well, probably not: after all, college essays are often about your high school experiences (for freshman applicants) and college experiences (for transfer.)
Nonetheless, list these items anyway!
Why?
Well, because they’re nodes in a web of connections!
While your insignificant experiences may not sound interesting or compelling, they share thematic connections with other topics in your life. Take the spilled orange juice example again. You may have learned from getting scolded that you as a lady have a fear of men screaming loudly. And, this may have planted a seed of curiosity about soft male abuse in the household —which inexorably made you interested in psychology.
This is why listing every significant life milestone or memorable experience is important when brainstorming college essay ideas. It helps you create nodes of datapoints to make logical connections.
And, when you’ve got a solid topic you’re interested in writing about, having many life experiences listed out helps with analyzing your topic. This is called deconstruction, which we’ll get to in the next section.
Step 2: Deconstruction Time!
The next step to creating an interesting college essay topic is to deconstruct your chosen topic.
Deconstruction is a critical analysis of topics, whereby students look at their topic and try to connect it with other similar themes or motifs in their lives (often by taking apart their experiences and analyzing them bit by bit.)
To deconstruct your topic, analyze its themes and create connections with other topics.
Let’s say you remember receiving your first low grade as a gifted and talented student. And, you’re someone who is unfamiliar with the feeling of failure. You may notice that this fear of failure had rippling effects across time. It may have made you less likely to pursue extracurriculars and concerned about how other people view you.
This can become an interesting essay topic, as it shows you’re someone who had encountered failure much later in life. It also shows the difficulties you had to endure are much different from what others had.
Step 3: Analyze Your College Essay Topic at Multiple Levels of Analysis.
Another way you can deconstruct your college essay topic is to look at it from different literary lenses. While you don’t need to be the next Shakespeare, understanding literary lenses can actually help you write interesting college essays!
Below we’ve listed some of the easiest literary lenses to view and analyze your college essay topic.
- Feminist/Gender theory
- Economic
- Psychological
Perhaps the most powerful of this list is the third item: psychological. Psychoanalyzing your topics is a great way of uncovering a multitude of fascinating ideas and motifs embedded in your essay. It’s also a great way for admissions officers to understand you on a more personal level.
And, better yet, they can draw from these inferences important character traits that help them determine why you would be a great college applicant.
The main advantage of looking at your college essay topic through thematic lenses is to draw important conclusions for admissions officers. It assists them when they’re combing through your application, as they’ll have an easier time dissecting the significance of your experiences.
Step 4: Relatability. Relatability. Relatability.
Be relatable. Seriously. One of the best (and most underutilized) ways to make any college essay topic interesting is to be relatable.
Relatability helps connect you with your admissions officer. It’s what helps prevent college essay topics from sounding “flat.” For, relatability helps you connect with your readers on a personal level. It turns your essay from “talking at people” to “talking to people.”
Think back to our discussion on empathy in section 3. By connecting with others using relatability, you can show your readers the human side to you that actually digs into the root of your character. Writing about emotions and experiences others can feel on a personal level connects you no matter what your topic is. You’re connected by shared emotion and feeling; and, it helps your admissions officer empathize with you.
One way to conceptualize this is your own interesting discussions. Look aback at the past. Chances are, your interesting conversations didn’t always involve skydiving from burning buildings. Interesting conversations involve speakers telling stories with emotional relatability. And, that doesn’t always involve exactly similar life experiences. They just need to have similar themes.
Car accident? Practically everyone can relate to the shock and first few minutes of feeling lost. Burnout? Perfect! You’re writing to overworked staff in academia, after al!
It’s by empathizing with the storyteller that people become interested, no matter the topic.
If your topic covers being the top performer in your basketball team, consider talking about the adrenaline rush that comes with having your position of “MVP” challenged by other great platers. For, others can often relate to the unusual excitement of challenging competitiveness. This is just one example. The world is your oyster. Have fun with it!
Step 5: Writing an Interesting College Essay as a Boring Person.
After doing steps 1-4, you likely have a worthy topic and relatable themes to draw from. This is where you start writing about yourself. And, guess what? You’ll still feel like your writing… well, sucks!
There are 2 reasons for this.
- First drafts suck in general.
- The anxious mind that categorizes you as a boring person will find every reason to think your essay is still boring.
The first point is self explanatory. Everyone writes poor first drafts. Just be patient. Your essay will need some work regardless. Be conscientious and give it a few thorough edits and review before submission.
The second point is a bit more complex. I explain this further in a Reddit post I wrote up a while back, which you can check out in the link below.
When you’re editing, one thing you’ll notice is that the mind will consistently return to the same conclusion: “I’m a boring person, and this essay looks bad.” And, no matter how many times you modify your essay, you’ll notice it still “feels” boring, bad, or dumb.
It will never feel good enough because the proclivity for toxic perfectionism will look for any minute mistakes; and, even if the essay is virtually perfect, it’ll make up mistakes to feed the anxious mind.
Thus, the key to writing an interesting college essay even as a boring person is to write many drafts. Additionally, you must learn to recognize the false-positives when drafting your work.
This is where a professional college consultant comes in handy. An experienced veteran can guide you through what actually requires editing and prevent overthinking: a more common problem than you may think!
Conclusion.
Let’s be frank. There are some people who are just plain interesting. That is, listening to them is just so… cool. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean the average Joe can’t write an absolutely stunning essay.
Being boring is a combination of misguided mindset and superficial analysis. And, the cure to this is a mix of deconstructing your topics on a deeper level and leveraging empathy to connect with your readers.
Of course, nothing is perfect. And, we’re all prone to mistakes.
That’s why if you’re still concerned about writing a solid college essay as a boring person, you may want to consider scheduling a free consultation with us. We can help you every step of the way: from brainstorming interesting topics to dissecting your themes and drafting them from start to conclusion.
And, we’ve repeated the same process with countless others to help them get accepted into some of the greatest institutions in the nation, including Dartmouth, USC, UCLA, UCB, Brown, UPenn, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, and more!
