The best thing about your student is usually not on the transcript.

Where the essay actually comes from

Most students assume the essay should be about the most impressive item on their list, so they write about the leadership position, the service trip, or the season the team came back. Those essays are fine and interchangeable, because the writing gives a reader nothing that could only have come from this person.

Meanwhile the student has worked Saturdays at a restaurant on Main Street for two years and has never once considered it as material. Or paddled out before school and thought about something specific while waiting. Or built something nobody asked for. That's the material. It isn't impressive in the way a seventeen-year-old measures impressive, which is exactly why it reads as real.

So the first working session isn't a writing session. It's a conversation whose only job is to surface that. Most students have three good essays in them and have dismissed all three.

The students with the most support are often the hardest cases here, not the easiest. Four years of good advice teaches a kid to sort their life into the impressive parts and the rest, and then to write about the impressive parts. The restaurant job, the water at six in the morning, the thing they've been obsessed with since they were eleven: all of that got filed under "rest" a long time ago by someone who meant well. It's still there. It just has to be asked for directly.

A genuinely mixed set of schools

Families here come from Santa Monica High in SMMUSD, and from Crossroads, New Roads, and St. Monica Catholic right in town, plus Windward in Mar Vista and Brentwood School and Harvard-Westlake for the families willing to make that drive. Students arrive with very different amounts of essay support behind them: a full class period at one school, a handout at another, a dedicated counselor and a standing appointment at a third.

Own Your Essay is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any school or district. I work directly with families.

I'm not going to pretend I'm local

I live in Calabasas. Santa Monica is over the hill and then some, and on a Thursday at five that is a real drive. Every coach whose service-area map includes this city knows it and most don't mention it, which is a small thing that tells you something.

Here's how it works instead. I come to the Westside, and I like doing the first session in person when the schedule allows, because half an hour across a table tells me things a video window won't. After that almost everyone runs on Zoom, not as a compromise but because it's the version that survives October. The notes land on the document either way.

Not a template, and not a rewrite

I don't write students' essays and I don't rewrite their sentences. Admissions readers are good at hearing an adult, and a seventeen-year-old who sounds like a seventeen-year-old is more persuasive than one who sounds like a committee.

Why a screenwriter is the right kind of help

Twenty years as a professional screenwriter and film director. 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, and interviewed applicants for Penn as an alumni interviewer for over a decade.

Turning a real person's messy actual life into something a stranger will sit still for isn't a metaphor for this job. It is the job.

How it runs

Free twenty-minute intro call, parents welcome. Then sessions of 45 to 60 minutes, with written notes on every draft and a short summary of what to fix first. For UC applicants, the four Personal Insight Questions get built as a set so they cover range instead of retelling one story four times. Most ED and EA deadlines fall on Nov 1 or Nov 15, though each school sets its own.

Services

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