The most advised students in the country often write the least distinctive essays.

What years of coaching does to a voice

A student guided since ninth grade learns, correctly, what adults want to hear. Lead with impact. Name the lesson. Keep the register measured, grateful, faintly institutional. It is the voice of a school's own website, and by twelfth grade most students can produce it on demand.

None of this is a knock on the schools. A college counselor who tells a student to lead with impact and name the takeaway is giving good, defensible advice, and it is advice that works on almost every other document in the application. It fails on exactly one: the 650 words whose only purpose is to sound like a person rather than a candidate. The more competent the guidance around a student has been, the more thoroughly that failure is hidden under a draft nobody can find fault with.

Then they sit down to write 650 words meant to make a stranger feel like they met somebody, and that is the only voice they can reach. The result is an essay nobody can fault and nobody remembers. Clean sentences. Sound structure. Details that could belong to four hundred other applicants, and a meaning announced in the last paragraph instead of discovered anywhere in the piece.

That is not a character flaw. It's a craft problem, and craft problems have fixes. The fix isn't a wilder topic. It's specificity and voice: the exact sentence someone said, the thought the student had and didn't say out loud, the small decision that gives away a whole temperament. Getting that out of a student trained toward polish takes questions, patience, and somebody who isn't grading them.

Families here come from Beverly Hills High, and from the independent schools this neighborhood commutes to: Harvard-Westlake over the hill in Studio City, Marlborough in Hancock Park, Brentwood School and Marymount on the Westside, Buckley and Campbell Hall in the Valley, Milken up on Mulholland. These are excellent schools with real college counseling offices, which is precisely the condition this page is about. Own Your Essay is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or working on behalf of any school. I work directly with families.

About the drive, since you already know the answer

I live in Calabasas. Beverly Hills is over the pass, and depending on the hour that's twenty-five minutes or fifty. You know that better than I do, so I won't put a pin on a map and imply I'm around the corner, which is more or less what every coach listing this city does.

The honest version: I come over the hill for Beverly Hills families, and I'd rather do the first session that way, because you learn more about a seventeen-year-old across a table in half an hour than in three weeks of email. After that most families run on Zoom because it fits the week. That isn't a downgrade. Written notes and a real conversation about them work the same on a screen.

The line I don't cross

I don't write or rewrite students' essays, and I'd be wary of anyone here who is vague about that. Notes on the page, better questions in session, and the student writes every word. Where an essay can pass through four capable adults before anyone submits it, the most useful thing I do is put the rough, honest parts back in.

Why a screenwriter

Twenty years of being paid to make a story work on the page. I created TV projects that sold to ABC and YouTube Originals, with Kerry Washington producing, and to Warner Bros. TV, with John Wells producing. I wrote Sharon, the Osbourne biopic, named to the 2018 Black List, and the 2008 Fox feature The Rocker, and I wrote and directed This Is Happening. I studied History and Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, cum laude. For more than a decade I interviewed applicants for Penn as an alumni interviewer, never an admissions officer and never reading a file, but several hundred conversations with seventeen-year-olds and a clear sense of which ones I could still describe a week later.

How it runs

Free twenty-minute intro call, parents welcome. Sessions of 45 to 60 minutes. Every draft comes back with written notes and a short summary of what to fix first, then a session to talk it through. Most ED and EA deadlines fall on Nov 1 or Nov 15, though each school sets its own. UC applicants get all four Personal Insight Questions handled as one set.

Services

Single Essay Review, UC PIQ Package, Full Application Package, and a standalone brainstorming session. See full service details →