In a high-achieving school, the essay is the only part of the application that isn't interchangeable.

The specific problem in a competitive cohort

Families here come from Calabasas High School in Las Virgenes Unified, from Viewpoint School up on Mulholland, and from Louisville, Chaminade, de Toledo, and Sierra Canyon a few exits east. The public and the independent versions of this look different on paper and are identical underneath: a large group of classmates applying to overlapping lists, advised by the same general wisdom, drawing on a similar set of experiences. Varsity sport, leadership position, service work, a summer program, a moment of growth.

None of that is bad. It's just that as raw material it produces essays that blur together. Admissions readers move through a lot of pages, and an essay about learning perseverance through a sport is not memorable because the perseverance was fake. It's unmemorable because the writing gave the reader nothing that could only have come from this person.

The fix is not a more dramatic topic. It's specificity and voice. The exact thing the coach said. The thing the student thought and didn't say. The small decision that reveals a whole temperament. That is a craft problem, and craft is what I do for a living.

Own Your Essay is not affiliated with or endorsed by any school. I work directly with families.

Not a pin on a service-area map

I live here. Most of the coaches who surface in a search for this city are working from a list of ZIP codes they are willing to cover. I'm on the same roads your student sits in traffic on, and the schedule I'm building an essay plan around is the one I can see out my own window in September. In practice that means an in-person session doesn't cost anyone a drive across the Valley, and the intro call can happen over coffee if that's easier than another video window.

Notes, not edits

There's a particular risk in high-pressure school communities, which is that the essay gets over-handled. Multiple readers, a parent's rewrite, a tutor who smooths the sentences, and by the fourth pass the essay is clean and dead. A seventeen-year-old who sounds like a seventeen-year-old is more persuasive than one who sounds like a committee.

This gets worse, not better, with the amount of help a student has already had. A student advised since ninth grade learns exactly what adults want to hear: lead with impact, name the lesson, keep the register measured and grateful. By senior fall that is the only voice they can reach for. The schools are not doing anything wrong. They are doing their job, and the good ones do it well. But one honest byproduct of all that guidance is a seventeen-year-old who can produce the sound of an institution on demand and has lost the thread back to their own.

I don't write or rewrite essays. I give written notes on the page and ask better questions in session, and the student writes every word. When a draft has been sanded down, a lot of the work is putting the rough, honest parts back in.

How it runs

The free intro call is twenty minutes, by video or phone, parents welcome. I live in Calabasas, so in-person sessions are easy to arrange, and plenty of families run everything on Zoom because it's easier to schedule around practice and homework.

Sessions are typically 45 to 60 minutes. Every draft comes back with written notes and a short summary of what to fix first. Students applying early get a calendar built backward from the deadline; most ED and EA deadlines fall on Nov 1 or Nov 15, though each school sets its own. Students applying to the UCs get all four Personal Insight Questions handled as a set, not four separate assignments.

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. I also interviewed applicants for Penn as an alumni interviewer for over a decade, which is a decade of noticing which seventeen-year-olds were still memorable a week later.

Twenty years of development notes teaches you to spot the same failures every time: nothing actually happens, the details are generic, the writer announces the meaning instead of showing it, the theme gets stapled on at the end. Those are the exact ways admissions essays fail.

Services

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