The College Admissions Essay — Tell Your Story!
The college application essay doesn’t have to be scary! You’ve got stories to tell and an audience who wants to hear it. Now all you have to do is capture the story and make it sing. I can help.
Together, we
- find your best material;
- craft the story; and
- edit and re-write it until it shines. Done. Easy.
What’s my job?
- Inspire you to find joy in writing.
- Work with you on the structure of a solid essay.
- Give you writing prompts to spark your creativity and get you writing.
- Dig into your targeted schools to figure out what you want to write about and what the schools want to hear.
- Help you craft your draft material; revise and edit it with you; help you polish it until it shines.
What I don’t do.
- Write your essay for you. (That’s cheating.)
- Badger you and nag you to get your work done. (That’s on you. Welcome to college.)
- Make you diagram sentences or bore you with grammar lessons or blabber on about “back in my day.” (You wouldn’t listen anyway. I don’t blame you.)
How’s This Work?
On Oahu, I prefer in-person sessions with assignments between our meetings.
For folks elsewhere in the world, we get together on Google+ at a mutually convenient time for the virtual face-to-face, then do the assignments between meetings.
I do both private sessions and small group workshops. In a private session, it’s all about you, which gives us plenty of time to dig into your stories and create a masterpiece. The small group dynamic is pretty cool too, however, since you get to brainstorm ideas with your peers and inspire each other. Plus, you hold each other accountable in the small group. Nobody wants to be “that guy” who doesn’t do the work.
What’s this cost?
No situation is the same, so there’s no cut-in-stone rate scale. Here’s what I recommend, but especially for private sessions, we can structure rates based on where you are in the process and how many essays you’re looking to crank out with me.
- A minimum of three sessions together (averaging 90 minutes each) should get you focused and cranking out work. This includes some email assignments between sessions and answers to any emailed questions you might have. It doesn’t include much editing, unless your essays are already in pretty good shape when we start. $475
- Don’t know where or how to start? Or maybe you just need some editing and revisions, and want to bounce around your ideas? Either way, $100/hour
- Want to work with a group of friends? Join up with up at least two (and no more than five) other friends and we’ll work as a team. We’ll do 90-120 minute sessions together; brainstorm ideas; do writing prompts and share your work; focus on the essays you want to write, and start banging them out. I’m available for email questions and will do one additional session one-on-one with you to edit and polish your work. $50/student/session.
Want to learn more or get started? Just fill in the contact form and tell me a bit about you and what you’d like to do. I’ll be back in touch right away, and then we get started. Easy.