COLLEGE ESSAY COACHING

Notes from Parents & Students

I often tell students, I welcome you in my front door to help you craft your college essays, but I hope you leave not only with essays that you’re proud to submit, but also a few extra tools in your writing tool box that will serve you well in college and beyond. Tools that will help you hook a reader, convey and illuminate a point with clarity, and, as deceptively simple as this may sound, get words down on paper (or screen).

We begin with a questionnaire I send prior to our first meeting. Your answers help us brainstorm a list of experiences to draw from when writing. They also give me clues to questions I’ll ask to help you write essays that are uniquely your own—essays that allow a college admissions officer to meet you, the human being, behind your application’s data.

A college essay is unlike the five-paragraph form many students are most familiar with, where an assignment’s point is drawn from external, researched sources. A good college essay, or any personal essay, is a story sourced from within.

And, as we discuss by pulling back the curtain on ‘essays that worked,’ your main essay is not so much about what happened, or a particular aspect of identity, as it is the meaning you made, or lesson you discovered, from living it.

ON WRITING COLLEGE ESSAYS

THE PROCESS

Our initial ninety-minute meeting is held via Zoom. An in-person meeting option is available for those in the greater Washington, DC area. During that time we:

  • Discuss preliminary ideas based on the Common App questions and your completed questionnaire

  • Talk through ten elements that make a college essay compelling

  • Look at several “essays that worked” along with examples of those that did not and discuss ‘why?’

  • Review strategies for an essay’s flow and organization

  • Discuss tips for supplemental essays and what to pay special attention to as you visit colleges

By the end of our meeting, we’ll have brainstormed ideas for you to begin drafting your essay’s opening paragraphs.

From there we make a timeline for you to write and revise your main and supplemental essays, taking into account your summer schedule and application deadlines—both early decision/action and regular decision.

In the weeks that follow, we’ll meet again to discuss revision tips and strategies (by Zoom or phone) and work together through comments in your document.

My coaching package includes coaching on your main essay and supplemental essays for up to six colleges. You can also opt to swap one of the six supplemental spots for a long honors essay, if that fits your needs better.

NEXT STEPS

Also, consider saving this Washington Post Magazine resource to return to after your applications are complete. It grew out of my desire to help students (including my sons) navigate this pressurized part of applying to college. In it, high school seniors, school counselors and therapists share helpful, and humorous, tips—

“Tired of people asking where you’re going to college? Here’s what to say.”

I look forward to learning more about you!