Agreement for College Essay Coaching
Please refer to the section(s) that corresponds to your selected package(s). Read about our process and policies. Sign/date at the end. We look forward to working with you on the college essay process!
Our Collaborative Process
When you work with us for an essay package, you get the best of both worlds. Our essay specialists are true experts in creative writing who can help bring your ideas to life. Our leadership team brings significant college essay experience and insight into the college admissions process, ensuring you frame the essay to appeal to its target audience.
You’ll work directly, 1-on-1, with an essay specialist devoted to guiding you through the process from start to finish. Our essay specialists are all expert writers and editors. Most possess MFAs in Creative Writing or PhD’s in English, have published works, and edit major (and minor!) publications.
Through our collaborative process, your essays are overseen by an essay manager to provide feedback, support, and an additional creative voice. The big-picture direction of essays will be guided by Eric, our founder, who brings over a decade of experience helping students with the college admissions process. He will ensure that topics are unique, compelling, authentic to the student, and (when necessary) delicately framed.
Ideally, you’ll feel like everything you hear is coming from your one essay specialist guiding you through the process. We don’t want it to feel like there are too many cooks in the kitchen. But behind the scenes, there will be a lot going on to ensure that we help you produce the best and most authentic essays you can.
Our collaboration and oversight only applies to the essay packages. Students opting for hourly guidance will only receive feedback from one essay specialist. See more in Section 3: Hourly Essay Coaching.
Location
All essay sessions are held over Zoom. This allows both the essay specialist and the student to work collectively on the same Google Doc, while also seeing and hearing each other. Working remotely has also enabled us to bring together a great team of expert writers from around the country.
What is the personal statement?
A 500-650 word personal essay required or recommended by most colleges. This essay should give a sense of who you are as a person by showing the reader how you’ve overcome, how you’ve evolved, how you think, what you’re passionate about, etc.
Why is the personal statement important? How is it used?
Your grades, test scores, and letters of recommendation show your academic prowess. Your activities and honors show your commitments, passions, and accomplishments. But your essay is the only place where you can open up and share your unique voice and personality. You want to give the admissions officer something to connect to and advocate for beyond just a set of numbers and activities.
What colleges want from the personal statement
Tell the admissions committee something they don’t already know about you
Share your unique voice and personality
Illustrate what matters most to you (your values)
Aim for a unique topic, or put your unique spin on a common topic
Strive for modesty, self-awareness, insight, honesty, and vulnerability
Display creativity and writing that is vivid and compelling
Common mistakes we help students avoid
Turning the personal statement into an extension of your activities or honors section. Expanding upon multiple accomplishments reads more like a resume than an essay.
Using the personal statement as an opportunity to brag. The activities and honors sections will display your accomplishments. Despite some parents’ instincts, the personal statement is not the place for showing off.
Working with very common topics. Many high school students have similar formative experiences (sports obstacles, death of a family member or pet, etc.). We help students avoid these cliches or find a way to make them stand out from the pack.
Speaking in platitudes and generalities. Does your essay have a lot of phrases like “I learned” and “this taught me the value of”? Does it use a lot of words like “hard work,” “perseverance,” and “overcoming”? If so, it might sound a lot like everyone else’s essay.
Writing in an academic style with a thesis statement and 5 paragraph structure. Ex. Starting with something like, “Playing soccer has taught me x, y, and z,” and then spending a paragraph each on x, y, and z.
Being overly formal with language and using esoteric words just to impress. Colleges want to hear YOUR voice—not what you think will impress them.
Writing about things that might make admissions committees worry about your ability to succeed in college. We’ll collaborate with parents and students to handle touchy subjects (mental or physical illness, past transgressions, etc.).
How do we know the “best” approach for the personal statement?
The personal statement, as a genre of writing, has conventions like any other genre. There are clear goals the personal statement is meant to achieve, and college admissions officers have communicated to the public what they do and do not want to see in these essays. Our process is informed by a large number of resources, mostly from former college admissions officers, who are the people reading and evaluating the personal statement.
What steps does the process follow?
Brainstorming activities
Freewriting on several potential topics
Drafting
Adding/subtracting content
Structuring and restructuring
Sentence-level editing
Important policies
We do not write essays for students. Every word in a student’s personal statement is written by that student. Every piece of content comes from their brain and we strive for the final product to maintain each student’s unique voice. We do make lots of suggestions, for how students might better communicate an idea, strike the right tonal balance, find the right word for the context, trim their essays to get them under word count, etc. We always explain our suggestions so students know why we’re making them. Students are always free to accept or reject any suggestion.
We are not accountable for the student’s final review after pasting the personal statement into the Common App. It is up to the student to check formatting before submitting.
Check-ins
We check in with parents only sporadically. We recommend parents remove themselves from the process as much as possible. We make this recommendation for a few reasons:
The essay process is a personal one, and we prefer to let students decide how much or how little to share with their parents.
The personal statement must be written from the student’s perspective. It doesn’t matter how a parent views their child; what matters is how the student sees him or herself.
Parents can provide really helpful suggestions, and we will check in occasionally with parents, since parents can provide unique insight into a student’s experiences and perspective. If a student is struggling, particularly to come up with an effective topic, we will make sure to reach out to parents. However, parents sometimes bring a skewed perspective of what the personal statement should be (see What colleges want from the personal statement and Common mistakes we help students avoid above). When parents feel one way, students feel another, and we’re stuck in the middle, it can turn a pleasant collaborative process into a stressful one. Though we know parents are paying for the sessions, our responsibility ultimately lies with the student. Any differences of opinion will be decided in the student’s favor.
Troubleshooting
The vast majority of the time, both student and parent leave the essay process extremely satisfied with the end result. But essays are subjective, and our process isn’t always the right fit for everyone.
If, at any point, you feel our process is not working for you, let us know. We’ll do everything we can to get on the same page and achieve the desired result. If you decide that our process is simply not the right fit and want to go another direction, we’ll refund your package payment, less the hourly rate ($120/hr) for however many hours of essay sessions the student has already had.
Payment
Payment is due when registering for a package. We typically charge credit cards (no fee added). If we already have your credit card on file, completing this agreement gives us permission to charge your card for the full package price. If you do not have a credit card on file, we’ll email you a form to submit your card information.
Please let us know immediately if you would like to set up installment payments.
We also accept checks, cash, and Zelle.
SECTION 1 CONTRACT: TO SIGN UP FOR THE PERSONAL STATEMENT PACKAGE, COMPLETE THESE FIELDS:
What are supplemental essays?
In addition to the Personal Statement, many colleges require applicants to submit supplemental essays. These supplemental essays ask students to respond to a wide variety of topics: their most meaningful activity, their interest in a particular college or major, an important community they belong to, etc. Essays range in length from just a few sentences to 650+ words.
What this package includes
With the Supplemental Essays Package, we will work with students on ALL of their supplemental essays, from start to finish. This package includes an unlimited number of college essays. We’ll help students identify and organize essay prompts, research colleges and determine how their offerings align with students’ interests, brainstorm essay topics for more open-ended questions, outline, draft, revise, and polish.
Policies that differ from the Personal Statement Package
No check-ins
Because the supplemental essays are less intensely personal than the personal statement and limit students by providing specific prompts, we generally find very little need to check in with parents about them. Also, students typically work on supplementals after completing the personal statement. By this point, they are usually more comfortable with the essay crafting process.
For supplemental essays, we will only check in with parents as needed or as requested by student or parents.
Confirming Essay Prompts
Students must find all required essays for their schools. Using our knowledge of essay prompts by college year-to-year, we will try to make sure they aren’t missing anything. However, sometimes essay prompts are newly implemented and not easily found on the application, so ultimately it is the student’s responsibility to find all essays for their desired colleges.
Fact Checking
Many supplemental essays require students to research specifics about colleges (academic offerings, special programs, extracurriculars, unique classes, etc.) Students are responsible for the accuracy of their own research. We will help when needed, but to be frank, we expect students who are striving to attend selective colleges to be able to accurately research basic information about those colleges.
Payment
Payment is due when registering for a package. We typically charge credit cards (no fee added). If we already have your credit card on file, completing this agreement gives us permission to charge your card for the full package price. If you do not have a credit card on file, we’ll email you a form to submit your card information.
Please let us know immediately if you would like to set up installment payments.
We also accept checks, cash, and Zelle.
SECTION 2 CONTRACT: TO SIGN UP FOR THE SUPPLEMENTAL ESSAYS PACKAGE, COMPLETE THESE FIELDS:
Difference between hourly and package options
The hourly essay coaching option does not include any oversight. Students will not benefit from our collaborative process (see Our Collaborative Process above). With hourly sessions, students must stay on top of their own applications and come prepared to sessions with what they’d like to work on. It will be entirely the student’s responsibility to manage workload and meet application deadlines. We will give you the full benefit of our expertise during the time we meet, but we will not provide any oversight, organization, or additional guidance outside of sessions.
Is hourly a good fit for you?
Typically, two types of students are a good fit for hourly essay coaching:
Students who already have a personal statement topic chosen and a strong draft written. They are just looking for some finishing touches, maybe a little restructuring, an additional insight or two, etc.
Warning: some students think they have an essay nearly finished, but when we see it, we find that to be truly effective, it needs a complete overhaul (this occurs most often when a student has chosen a cliche topic). In this situation, we may recommend the Personal Statement Package.
Students who have already completed the Personal Statement Package and have a few supplemental essays to work on, but not enough essays to make the full Supplemental Essay Package worthwhile.
These students typically understand the essay process and (ideally) have a good working relationship with one of our essay specialists.
Payment
There is no up-front commitment or payment. For hourly essay coaching sessions, we keep credit cards on file (stored securely through Stripe) and charge them on Mondays for any sessions held in the previous week.
The rate for hourly essay coaching is $120/hr. Session length can vary depending on need. The rates will always be consistent (e.g. a 45-minute session will be $90). For billing purposes, we round session length to the nearest 1/4 of an hour.