The essay isn't hard because your student can't write. It's hard because there's no time to think.

Built around a real schedule

Coaching hours run Monday through Friday from 9am to 1pm and 4pm to 8pm PT, plus Saturday 9am to 2pm PT. The evening and weekend blocks exist because students are in school during the day. They fill up first in the fall, so booking early in the season is worth it.

Sessions are on Zoom, which for Sherman Oaks families usually beats adding a drive to a Tuesday evening. In-person sessions are available too, since I'm based in Calabasas, a straight run west on the 101.

Families here come from Grant and Van Nuys, from Buckley and Notre Dame right in Sherman Oaks, from Harvard-Westlake and Campbell Hall over the boulevard in Studio City, and from Crespi in Encino. The private-school families are, if anything, the ones with the worse version of the scheduling problem: a longer day, a longer commute, and a set of expectations that fills every hour the school day doesn't. Own Your Essay is not affiliated with or endorsed by any school. I work directly with families.

What a packed schedule does to an essay

It produces the draft that got written at 11:40pm. It's structurally fine. It has an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion, because that's the shape a tired brain reaches for. It also has no moment in it, because finding the moment requires sitting still and remembering, and nobody has done that.

The well-advised version of that draft is harder to spot, because it isn't bad. A student at a school with a real college counseling office arrives on time with something competent. It has a structure, a theme, and a closing line about growth. What it doesn't have is a single sentence that could only have come from this particular seventeen-year-old, because producing that requires an unscheduled hour of remembering, and the whole system around the student is designed to fill hours, not to leave one open.

So the first working session is not a writing session. It's a conversation, and its only job is to surface material. What the student actually thinks about. What they fixed, quit, argued about, or got stubborn over. Most students have three good essays in them and have dismissed all three as not impressive enough.

Then the drafting starts, and it goes faster, because the student is no longer writing toward a topic they don't believe in.

How the notes work

Every draft comes back with written notes in the document, plus a short summary at the top of what to fix first, and then a Zoom session to talk it through. This is the same process a screenplay goes through in development, scaled down to 650 words.

For students applying early, I build the calendar backward from the deadline. Most ED and EA deadlines fall on Nov 1 or Nov 15, though each school sets its own. For UC applicants, all four Personal Insight Questions get handled as one set, so the four responses cover different sides of the student instead of repeating the same two weeks four times.

Who I am

A professional screenwriter and film director of twenty years. 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 over a decade I interviewed applicants for Penn as an alumni interviewer. I don't write students' essays, and I'll tell you on the call why that matters.

Services

Single Essay Review, UC PIQ Package, Full Application Package, and a standalone brainstorming session for the student who has no topic yet. See full service details →