Coaching for Personal Statements
After you’ve attended a workshop, you can schedule personalized one-on-one college essay coaching sessions with me, on an hourly basis. Most students meet with me 3-5 times over the course of a few weeks.
Each hourly session will depend on your point in the process of drafting and revising your personal statement. Early college essay coaching sessions include brainstorming, and we’ll talk about the power of freewriting—allowing yourself to write without worrying about whether your writing meets formal expectations, whether it has a beginning, middle, and end, or whether it’s really what you want to say. Early drafts are about freeing yourself from those expectations, and learning how to see writing as a process, not a finished product.
As we continue to meet, you can expect to hear, and to work on answering, a LOT of questions. Those questions can help you deepen and develop your topic in ways that you might not even have imagined it could go. Questions are a way to help you reflect, to help you think about your own experiences in new ways, and to see yourself in a light you hadn’t realized was there.
Some students love the challenge of these questions— and if that’s you, you may jump right in answering out loud, and I’ll capture your spoken ideas by typing as you talk. I’ll email those thoughts to you, and you’re already on your way to a first draft. Other students prefer to work out their ideas in writing. In that case, we’ll work together to come up with a list of questions that can help you reflect through freewriting, before our next session.
As your personal statement evolves, we’ll talk about finding a focus, a single direction that you want to go. We’ll consider the specific details that will help catch a reader’s attention. And as your essay takes shape, we’ll move into considering the word count, shifting your writing toward a more streamlined version in order to tell your story within the 650-word limit of the common app essay.
Have you already attended a workshop? If not, let’s book that first.
Coaching for Supplemental Essays
Many schools rely on the Common Application’s personal statement. But some schools, especially more selective schools which receive many more applicants than they can accept, use supplemental essays to help further narrow the field. Supplemental essays usually include one question which essentially asks, “Why do you want to attend this school?” But they can also include quirky, specific prompts designed to get you thinking, to reveal different aspects of yourself that aren’t evident elsewhere in your application.
It’s best to finish your personal statement before embarking on the supplementals. For those additional essays, keep in mind:
- They are more important than you think. They matter to admissions committees.
- An essay with a single focus is more compelling than a list.
- Try to use each question as an opportunity to showcase a part of yourself that doesn’t appear elsewhere in your application. (This is why it’s important to complete your personal statement first.)
If you’re applying to schools with supplemental essays, I provide college essay coaching for these additional prompts as well. We would just set up additional one-on-one sessions as needed.
Ready to start work on your application? My college essay coaching provides the structured support and expert feedback needed to turn a good draft into a great one. Whether you are in Corning, NY or working via Zoom, we will ensure your personal statement is ready for submission.