I applied for a small scholarship last year. In the essay section, I was asked to describe “a character-defining moment” or “a personal hardship or barrier” I’ve overcome. Great, I thought. I keep lists of character-defining moments lying around the house.

Actually, I don’t.

I don’t keep a list of personal hardships or barriers, either. Because if I did, that list would read something like this: I’m not good at sports, all my babysitting money is gone, I fell and started bleeding in public again, my sister woke me up by jumping on me, a possible employer never replied to my four emails.

Needless to say, my life hasn’t been particularly difficult thus far. I’ve encountered some challenges, but overcoming them wasn’t an epic triumph that other people want to experience vicariously in essay form. I’m not a character in an urban teen dance flick.

Millions of students have lived, and currently live, lives like mine. Uneventful childhoods aren’t a new trend or anything. And yet, scholarship and college applications consistently ask for essays about facing adversity.

Like desperate male hippos spraying urine into the air to attract females, many college-bound seniors start taking drastic measures to seem more attractive to certain colleges. So if a desperate applicant thinks a college wants to read about serious adversity, he will write seriously about adversity, dammit — even if the only challenge he’s faced has been wearing glasses.

“We lost everything in the hailstorm.” “All I wanted was to become a doctor.” “My seven brothers and sisters were dying of alopecia*, and I could only watch, powerless.”

I can hear the admissions counselors groaning already.

Health-care aspirations and hair-loss aside, some students actually have overcome significant obstacles. That doesn’t mean they want to write in detail about them. It’s rude for colleges and scholarship programs to assume that they will.

Furthermore, adversity prompts focus on the negative. They ask for descriptions of hardships, challenges, and obstacles. Such descriptions reveal nothing about a person, because adversity is random and external. Anyone’s belongings could have been destroyed in a hailstorm. Colleges would be better off asking for descriptions of how students overcame hardships, because the way a person reacts to adversity reveals much more about his character.

Enya**, the mother of a girl on my sister’s soccer team, is an admissions officer at the University of Washington. She and I started talking and I explained my frustration with adversity essays. She reminded me that the UW admissions team doesn’t expect to read 17,000 heartbreaking essays. After all, 18-year-olds have only experienced so much.

“Sometimes people write about trying out for a new sport,” she said. “It seems silly to me, but for them it was a real challenge.”

We laughed, wondering what type of person would think sports are a real challenge. Unfortunately, I was only pretending to wonder.

I’m the type of person who thinks sports are a real challenge.

After I recovered from Enya’s accidental blow to my self-esteem, I realized that her words were meant to be comforting. And ultimately, they were. She wanted me to know that an essay about adversity doesn’t need to bring tears to an officer’s eyes. It doesn’t even need to be completely serious. Admissions teams learn about applicants from their essays. If they learn that an applicant faced her fears by trying out for the bowling team, then so be it.

Members of the class of 2010 will spend the next six months writing about obstacles, character-defining moments, people who have influenced them, and those ever-vague “experiences you have had.” It won’t be pretty. But someday, it will be over.

And on that note, I wish all Garfield seniors good luck.

*Extreme hair loss

**Name has been changed