Essay Magic
Your essays are what humanize you and set you apart from every other applicant. Imagine that you are an admissions officer, reading thousands of essays. What story or phrasing would catch your attention? What would help you really understand more about the applicant than the numbers show?
Helping you curate essay topics and write unique and beautiful essays is our primary mission. We work with you one-on-one no matter where you are in the process.
If you are starting early, we do this by creating a shared Google document as soon as we begin working with you that is your dossier. Through written questions and friendly interviews, we begin to discover who you are. In your dossier, we store your ideas, relevant experiences, and stories. This dossier will be the source of fuel for your essays, so that by the time you need to write first drafts, we have a resource with more than enough great ideas.
College Interview Preparation
Do the schools you’re applying to give you the option of an in person interview or a video submittal? Confused about which to do? We can help with that.
Our staff has interviewed hundreds of college applicants. We have an inventory of questions that were actually used in college interviews that we can help you prepare with. We will work with you on mock interviews, and work through what a video submission might look like for you, based on the responses to our questionnaire and on the material we capture in your dossier. Through this process, we can help lead you to the decision of whether to submit a video or take an in-person interview.
How to Prepare for a College Interview:
- Let’s say you have a day off – it’s the summer before you leave for freshman year of college. What does your perfect day look like?
- What’s the last thing you read – book, periodical, blog – that was not assigned for school?
- What are you most nervous about when thinking of freshman year?
Pathfinding and Passion Development
“Write what should not be forgotten.” –Isabelle Allende
“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
The biggest challenge when coaching you on your college essays is helping you pick an interesting, meaningful and unique topic that also tells admissions who you are. You are often good writers. But choosing a topic for the Common Application essay – arguably the most important of the essays – can be a challenge.
Why is it such a challenge? Because sometimes, y’all don’t come up with much that is interesting, meaningful and unique to write about. Why is this? There are two possible reasons:
- You don’t have enough life experiences or expression of your interests to write about (we can fix this if you start with us early); or
- You don’t recognize or remember the events in your life that make for the best essays.
We want you to write about something exceptional – it can be a moment, a week, a revelation. And to help you curate good topics, we have to interact with you, know you, and help you develop your passions. So that when it is time to write, you know who you are, and so do we.
A passion is something that when you are doing it, you lose track of time. Maybe your passion is skateboarding at the Beltline skate park. Maybe its gaming, or reading YA fiction. It might be debate, anime, fan fiction, rock climbing, dancing, or drawing. But you must develop your passion, not for college applications, but to become your true self.
We want to help you engage with the community to explore and expand your passions. We’ll talk on at least a monthly basis to discuss what’s evolved with you over the prior month, and we’ll capture vignettes and stories for your dossier. So when it’s time to write those essays, you will have a personal file of anecdotes and experiences available, along with a resume documenting your efforts to develop your passions.
Pre-Submission Application Audit
Each application needs to work as an integrated whole – which means you should try to use every blank space to tell the admissions officers something new. You should check for typpos and errors (did you catch that typo? We did).
Provided you are submitting at least two weeks in advance of the school’s deadline, even if you have not worked with us on previous steps, we can give your application a comprehensive read through before you hit ‘submit’. Please print out all components of your application to have ready to send to us at least two weeks before the date you plan to submit your application. The earlier, the better.
Test Prep + Tutoring
See our test prep and tutoring liaisons on our About Us page.