Individualized Guidance toward the best college essays
College Application Essays can Open Endless Opportunities.
Don’t trust a major corporation or artificial intelligence to understand – much less explain – why YOU are a brilliant, worthy investment.
Most students (and parents) don’t understand the now outsized
role these essays play in getting into college.
Most who do understand put their trust in underpaid & undertrained workers at tutoring centers. Below, I will explain why that is a mistake.
I have a passion for helping others best express themselves and resent those who seek to squeeze any and every penny from caring parents. So feel free to email or text me. I’ve little doubt we can come to some agreeable arrangement.
Find my bio/credentials below.
My rates are negotiable, but about half of what tutoring centers charge.
Your time is priceless and your potential is limitless.
If you have questions or are eager to get started, feel free to
text or call me at 224-276-9992.
I’m happy to work over the phone, via webcam,
or in-person with students in Chicagoland.
A little background…
After getting my degree in journalism, I started an independent publishing company with my brother and edited books for about a decade. He decided to start a family, and I chose to focus on my main passion (music), but I picked up English tutoring as a side-hustle.
While I was happy to help students raise standardized test scores, I eventually realized that ACT/SAT prep was not the most efficient use of my talents or my time with my students. The difference I could make in their lives over a handful of sessions working on their essays was exponentially greater than the slow, gradual improvement of their test scores.
Don’t get me wrong: the SAT/ACT prep curriculum developed and provided by private tutoring centers is almost certain to raise a student’s score. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the general devaluing of test scores in college admissions.
But after working for about six years through tutoring centers, I’ve come to learn that the very part of the job I do best and find most rewarding, indeed the part I think helps the student the most, tends to be an afterthought to the companies. Though I was well known by my students to be the one to go to for their essays, the centers never paid me any more nor charged parents any less.
Hence this website. I would rather work directly with students and parents.
(I have tutored students of all ages in nearly every subject in the Humanities/Soft Sciences. Essays are just my wheelhouse.)
Why college admission essays matter…
The proliferation of tutoring centers means that no college can know the degree to which test scores reflect a student’s raw talent or a parent’s deep pockets. Grades and extra cirriculars obviously go a long way, but by far the best way to get their attention, to set yourself apart from the pack, is with a unique, powerful essay. It is your opportunity to emerge from a soup of numbers and letters into a singular personality worth investing in.
If it’s so personal, why do I need your help?
For one thing, even the greatest pieces of writing benefit from extensive editing. Maybe you’ve already got a great idea, or essay ready to go. Maybe your Magnum Opus wanted to get itself out of the way while you are still young. I would be shocked if you didn’t find my feedback helpful.
More likely, though, if you’ve already given it a go, you’ve found that these essays are deceptively tricky. Let me illustrate why by answering another question:
Can’t I just get AI to do it?
NO! That is far more likely to backfire than you would believe. While it is important that the essays adhere to proper grammar, have logical flow, and ideally say something original, the entire context of the exercise is that it is about YOU!
Most people don’t feel wholly comfortable selling themselves. But even people who love to talk about themselves seldom write about themselves. And yet, until you sit down to do your memoir, this is when life most demands you do just that.
Large Language Models (like Chat GPT) were trained on billions of peer-edited research papers, which may be why your classmate didn’t get caught using one to fabricate his midterm. Not so with admissions essays. AI will stick out like a cold, metal thumb to the folks reading your essay. Then they will put it down and move onto the next one.
That is a tragedy we shall not abide, my friend. Because, whether you know it or not, inside you dwells a brilliant, resilient perspective that is 1 in 8 billion. Alls we gots to do is coax it out and spin it around until it paints a few pages.