Your Kid Might Not Be Interesting

Highly selective colleges want kids who aren’t boring. Is your kid boring? Would you even know?

Ok, maybe you don’t think your kid is very boring. He or she probably isn’t. Maybe your son is a super nice kid who has a big heart, is a really good soccer and hockey teammate, does a lot of volunteering and is just the kind of kid everyone wants to be around. That’s fantastic! Who wouldn’t want to raise a kid like that? But if you’re a regular reader of our college admissions blog, we have a feeling you know what’s coming. In the world of college admissions, how we’ve presented that kid in the previous sentences is totally and completely boring. ZZZzzz. Can you say snoozefest!?

Parents often call us and tell us that their kids are great, well-rounded kids. And if you’re a regular reader of our college admissions blog, you know that highly selective colleges expressly don’t want well-rounded kids. Rather, they want singularly talented kids to form a well-rounded class of talented students. Malcolm Gladwell taught the world that you need to spend 10,000 hours to excel at a particular task. It’s how Bill Gates learned to code. It’s how Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian of all-time. When we correct these parents and suggest that colleges don’t want well-rounded students, they quite often immediately backtrack and say that their kid is singularly talented, that they don’t do a host of activities for a couple of hours a week. But most of the time the evidence doesn’t back them up, as they themselves often acknowledge. And the case that they made for their kid initially is the case that these kids end up making on their many college applications. And it’s a case that’ll lead to long prison sentences. No, we’re only kidding. It won’t lead to long prison sentences. But it’s not going to help them get into highly selective colleges. Rather, it’s a case that’ll hurt them in the admissions process.

Boring kids on paper can be exceptional kids. We know that. You know that. Duh. But how your kid presents himself or herself on applications matters a great deal and we find that too many kids present themselves as totally and completely boring. These kids and parents often don’t even know what boring is because they put too much of a halo around their own boringness. It’s like being in a room for hours with dead fish. After a while, dead fish is the only smell you know! The students of Ivy Coach don’t present themselves as boring at all and the earlier you come to us as clients, the more we can help make your kid less boring and more interesting. Even if she’s already interesting to begin with and she just doesn’t present that way on paper and to her teachers, guidance counselor, and, well, the world. This is all part of our secret sauce at Ivy Coach.