Our Blog
The admissions readers have heard your story 10000000 times, maybe literally. They know you mean it– but everyone does. They also know, because they have lived a little longer than you– that those take-aways are often temporary. So they are looking for something more. Sorry to say: Not the cliched journey with its predictable life-lesson.
Contiune Reading
Last year I was a contributor at TeenLife Mag and got to offer some advice on one of my favorite subjects: relationships. In particular, how parents and kids can avoid losing it over the college essay.
Contiune Reading
Why is it so hard to value NOW? Learning for its own sake is profoundly rewarding. It’s also a process of self-knowing rather than pure projection. I’m not against having goals. I’m just against living every aspect of our lives in subservience to them.
Contiune Reading
A good story can start with the obvious, it just can’t stop there. Or so I learned from breaking my toe and figuring out some new stories that could come from it. It’s the kind of deepened inquiry that will make your college essay way more interesting and fun to write.
Contiune Reading
If you’re stuck as you try to write something high stakes, back off. Seek opportunities to play with words, mixing the things you care about most with all the fun language can create. Humor can be a headlight for the truth lying right there in the road.
Contiune Reading
As a writing teacher, I find well-meaning cliched responses like “Everything that happens to you is for a reason” are born of other people’s discomfort with our discomfort. They are hard to stomach too. So I suggested a revision: what if you said to them (and yourself), “Everything that happens to you…is for art?”
Contiune Reading