Personal Statement and College Essay Writing

TAYLOR: Thank you, Daniel. Yes, I am Taylor Piva. I’m Program Director here at Prepory. I’ve been with Prepory for the last four years. I came to Prepory after working in Higher Ed in places like Carnegie Mellon and University of Chicago. I have a Master’s degree in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon. So my background is very writing-extensive as you’ll sort of hear as we go through today’s conversation, but I’ve supported many, many students through the writing process of college applications. As Daniel said, I’ve supported students getting into Ivies such as Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, as well as other really elite schools like University of California, UC Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. I started at Prepory four years ago as a Coach and Writing Specialist, and then I began to oversee our writing team, and now oversee our coaches and writing team and all of our support to our students. I’m very passionate about the work that we do and I’m very excited to walk you through the writing process.

DANIEL: But before Taylor shares a little bit more on the writing process, I just want to share a bit more about who we are and who you’ll be meeting with here at Prepory. As Taylor pulls up that slide, I think a few pieces, especially if this is anyone’s first time getting to know Prepory, obviously we’re an admissions consultancy. We’ve worked with 14,000 students since our inception in 2012. What this means is that we’ve got a massive set of historical data on what exactly it takes to get students like your children, whether you’re in California or Texas or New York or Minnesota, from where they are to the set of schools that they want to be at. For some students that might mean an Ivy League school, for other students that might mean a UC—University of California—school, or for other students, it just means their flagship state school, whether that be UMich, UVA, really about getting to know your students, getting to know your family and their goals and helping them realize that whatever that might be for your kid.

Some quick admission statistics is that, last year, our students were about three times more likely to get into any of their top schools, and what you’re seeing now on your screen is just a smattering of a bunch of logos where our kids were admitted this admission cycle. If you guys don’t know or you’re not in the college admissions zeitgeist, last Thursday was actually Ivy Day, which is the day that all Ivy League schools announced their outcomes and sort of who was admitted and we were so excited. We absolutely crushed it. On Ivy Day last Thursday, we had many admits to all eight Ivy League institutions and outside of Ivy Leagues, we did wonderful at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA. So it’s been an incredible year for our team. We’re so so proud of our students and our team of college admissions coaches. We’re working with each of our kids in the thick of it from as early as 9th grade as all the way through when they hit submit on their Common Apps and UC Apps.

TAYLOR: Alright, so this is just a little preview of what we’re going to talk about this evening. We’re going to just do sort of an overview of what college applications include in terms of the materials and then really dive into those essays, which is our main event. So we’ve got the personal statement, which I’ll walk you through, and then just a glimpse into supplemental essays to show you some of the common prompts that you might see and sort of the best approaches to those. We’ll talk a little bit about admissions trends and then of course why Prepory is so helpful in this process. And then, as Daniel said, we’ll be answering questions throughout this in that Q&A, but if there are questions at the end that we can answer to make sure that you have all the information you need, we’ll leave some time for that as well.

Alright, so college applications include obviously the high school transcript. They’re going to have the grades of students, standardized test scores—which are your AP, IB scores, SAT or ACT exams—things like that that are a little bit more quantitative. The general application is going to be that sort of standard profile information. And then we have these qualitative pieces, which include the letters of recommendation and then these essays. The letters of recommendation, obviously there’s strategy to those, but the personal statement and the supplemental essays are the students’ opportunity to really highlight their personality, their values, who they are to these college admissions advisors, and really understanding how they’re a good fit for these schools. So that’s what we’re going to focus on today.

So just to give you a little overview of what these two pieces of the application look like and how they are a little different from each other: the personal statement is what is sent to every single school. This is a longer essay. We’ll talk a little bit more in detail about it, but every single school is going to receive the same version of this, and so it’s really important that it’s a little bit more general to the student and their experience. It’s really aimed at providing an overview of an opportunity of growth, or an experience of growth. It’s a chance, as I said, to show personality through the writing style. It’s meant to be a little bit more creative. This is not an English class essay where we’re analyzing things, and ideally this is a chance to show something that’s not already in the application.

So really, what more can we say besides your grades? What can we say outside of your extracurriculars? Really trying to find other things to highlight here. The supplemental essays, on the other hand, are specific to each school, so these are chosen by the admissions officers. They’re meant to be really specific. They’re typically shorter, which is good in terms of having that level of detail, and these are going to be a little bit more targeted to academics, why they want to study certain things, what their aspirations are professionally and things like that. And we’ll talk a little bit more about those common trends in a little bit.

So we’re going to get started with the personal statement. As I mentioned, this is a longer essay, but 650 words is not that long. It’s about a page, single-spaced. I think a lot of students often find that this feels like a really big task, but it goes by very quickly. And so it’s really important to take advantage of this as an opportunity to show that personality, highlight an experience of growth, as I mentioned. Most applications go through the Common Application or the Coalition for college, and both of these platforms have prompts for students to choose from, and the student is going to choose one of those and then again, is submitted to all of the schools that they’re applying to.

These are the prompts for the Common App. I’m focusing on the Common App rather than Coalition mostly because this is the more common, as the name suggests. I’m not going to read these prompts aloud. They’re available on Common App’s website. What I do want to highlight is sort of the themes that these prompts are really pointing toward these various prompts. There are ones that are going to give students an opportunity to talk about their background, their passions, things that are really meaningful to them outside of academics, as I mentioned. It can be a challenge that they’ve overcome. Prompt number four can be a reflection of gratitude, which can be really meaningful for a lot of students. It can be, again, that personal growth.

You’ll see that the last one here is in red, and that is because I do want to call attention to this that we really recommend students don’t select this option. It can be very tempting because it’s a topic of their choice. The reason why we really recommend against this is because one, essays that respond to this prompt tend to be a little bit more disorganized. They’re not responding to a specific question, and so they can try to tackle too much, they often don’t include the type of reflection that admissions officers are really looking for in this essay, and most of the time when I see a student who chose prompt number seven for their personal statement, they most likely could have chosen one of the other six and still address the question. So, I highly recommend choosing prompts one through six and sort of pretending that number seven doesn’t exist.

In terms of picking a topic, and this is something that Prepory really helps students go through the process of thinking big-picture, what are all the options, and then narrowing things down, there are some topics that we do recommend avoiding as much as possible. The reason for this is because these tend to be a little bit more common, and if you imagine that an admissions officer is reading hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications, if not more, the more common of a topic, the less a student is going to stand out to that admissions officer and really be a shining point in the process. So some of these topics to avoid include talking about moving schools or moving homes. This is oftentimes not something that students are able to offer more reflection on, besides the fact that maybe it was a challenge. Breakups are not usually something that are helpful for students to reflect on at this moment. Talking about COVID-19, this is something obviously we all went through as a collective, but it’s not usually a fruitful topic for the personal statement.

The others of these, obviously, as I will say, as we sort of progress, we want to have a really meaningful topic for the personal statement, and a lot of these would be something that I would imagine students care a lot about or it was a big moment in their lives. What we really want to emphasize is that the personal statements should be unique to that student. It should be highlighting something that is going to help them stand out, and that’s how we are picking and choosing what topic is going to be the most strategic for their application.

Here are a little bit more do’s and don’ts in terms of approaching that personal statement. As I’ve mentioned, you really want to make sure that that topic is something that isn’t found elsewhere. We’re not talking about the same extracurriculars or recounting all of the courses that we’ve taken. It’s really meant to be a chance for storytelling. This is a place to flex those creative writing muscles. You really want to make sure that that opening paragraph is especially interesting because you really want to grab that reader’s attention and make them remember you as an applicant. On the flip side, really making sure that we’re not trying to capture too much. As I said, 650 words may feel like a lot, but it’s not a ton of space, and so trying to capture your life story from ages two until 17 is a bit too much for this.

So really focusing on specific moments and trying to have a little bit more recency is really helpful. This is a personal narrative. It really should be personal to the student. We don’t want the focus to be all about a teacher or a parent because they’re not the ones applying to school. This also should not be school-specific. As I mentioned, this is going to every school on that college list, and so we don’t want to mention, say Harvard, and then, oops, this also got sent to Yale. Lastly, we want to avoid having that overly negative tone. It can be really challenging when we’re talking about difficult experiences or overcoming challenges to not come across as having a chip on our shoulder, but we really want to have that growth mindset in this personal statement. As a strategy tip, we really recommend starting early with the personal statement. This is, as Daniel mentioned at the beginning, a very different type of writing. So getting started early, really having time to practice, to draft, to revise, is going to make a better final product in the end.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think before Taylor jumps into the don’ts, I want to share a bit more on topics. We’ve got a few questions on it in the Q&A and keep those questions coming if you have them, but I think this is, especially right now, if you are in the audience and you are the parent of an 11th grader, I really, really think that coming up with an idea that’s strong for this essay is oftentimes the most difficult part of this kind of writing because this writing is just so different than what is happening in their classroom. This is not an expository essay or persuasive essay. This is ultimately a creative writing, reflective, introspective style of writing that is really rare, not happening in AP or English classes or really most English classes at all. And I think especially if you’re, again, the parent of a junior, really spending time now on thinking about what should I write about, what should I think about what really makes me a unique person or something that is just not necessarily super common in this day and age, I think is really, really helpful and a really good use of time. Because ultimately, no matter how good of a writer you are, if you write an essay about, like Taylor said, divorce, or a high school breakup, or moving from schools or a new state or a new country, no matter how good that essay is, it’s probably not going to be a winning essay because it’s just such a common topic. And so the more unique or the more specific, really I think is the word, a topic can be to your students, the better.

TAYLOR: Yeah, absolutely. And I think really focusing on even if it is maybe a little bit more of a common experience, thinking of what that unique perspective toward it is can also be a part of that strategy as well. So it’s both the storytelling aspect, it’s finding something that’s specific to the student in terms of topic development, but also thinking of what makes your experience in this particular moment different than anybody else’s.

Alright. So I want to go through an outline of what this might actually look like because we’ve been talking about it in a more or less abstract way. And to do that, I’m going to give you an example and we’ll sort of follow along with that in these different pieces and break it down a little bit.

So, let’s pretend that I am a senior in college and I am writing my personal statement. My topic is going to be about a bus driver that I had in 10th grade, 9th and 10th grade, and the relationship that I developed with that individual. And we’ll sort of talk through what that trajectory looks like in the essay. So, in the introduction, as I mentioned earlier, you really want to make sure that you have a strong hook, meaning that you have an anecdote or a piece of dialogue, a description that really grabs your reader’s attention from the moment that you get started. This is going to help, again, really make sure that you stand out to your admissions officer and just keep things interesting because they are reading so many essays. So for me, in my example, I might start with a single anecdote about one particular day that I was engaging with my bus driver. I was in a particularly not great mood and they’re saying hello to me on the bus as I got on at the end of the day. It really helped me feel seen after maybe a day of feeling a bit invisible in high school, especially starting out in 9th grade.

So this is really my moment of storytelling. I’m going to describe what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing, maybe what I’m smelling, getting on that bus, what my bus driver might’ve looked like, and really, again, flexing those creative writing muscles. As we move into the body of the personal statement, we’ve got a couple of goals that we have here. First, we’re going to establish some background context. We sort of have to understand what the situation is. Why is this bus driver so important to my story? So I might just take a step back and really describe who I am or who I was as a person in 9th grade when this relationship is developing. I was a bit of a shyer student and didn’t necessarily feel like I had a lot of friends, especially on my bus. And my bus driver really helped set the tone for the start and end of my day because they really approached those interactions with such positivity, and that’s why it was really meaningful for me.

The climax is that turning point. Something has to happen in our story. In this example, the bus driver retires at the end of my sophomore year and at the beginning of my junior year, I have a different bus driver who has different energy, isn’t saying is hello and personalizing that touchpoint as much, and I really feel the difference in how that impacts me and the overall energy of the bus. And then the growth following from that is that I understand the impact that people can have in these little moments of connection. And so I start thinking about, “How can I bring that energy instead of relying on the bus driver who’s no longer working at that school?” So I start greeting the bus driver in the way that I had previously been greeted, and I start also engaging in other environments in that way.

In my classroom, I’m trying to engage my peers in extracurriculars and I’m really just focusing on those little moments of connection and that’s my personal growth. I’m becoming a little less shy and understanding those connections. And then as we move into our conclusion, it’s really important in the personal statement to have some sort of future-thinking piece. This does not necessarily mean that you need to say, in college, I will do X, Y, Z, but it could be something like I have learned that now that these moments of connection are very important and I want to continue to not only do these moments of connectivity with my peers, but also learn how I can take that a step further. I’m sort of showing how that piece might continue without necessarily saying, in college, I will make friends. And I might refer back to my opening anecdote or that initial bus driver just to tie all those pieces together to make sure that the beginning of the essay and the end of the essay feel connected.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think before Taylor moves on, one piece I want to share on this particular slide is giving attention to that body section because I think students here pretty often that you want an engaging hook or engaging introduction, and so they’ll do a really good job of that, but where things start to slip through the cracks is through the body section of the essay. I think one thing that I could really want to share as a piece of advice for students who are writing these essays is that in your body, you want specific anecdotes or specific stories that you will tell that sort of give the reader a bit more context in terms of how you grew. And so instead of saying like, well, I just started being nice to everyone in my community, in Taylor’s example, you ideally want to tell a very quick story of how you implemented that learning from that experience with the bus driver through maybe a different kid in your classroom or maybe your younger sibling. Admissions officers really want to see how this has happened, and one thing that you’ll hear me say a lot when I’m talking about essay writing is that oftentimes, it is easier for students to be really descriptive or stronger writers essentially when they are telling a very specific story. Like Taylor said earlier, if you’re trying to tell a story that happened over the last four years, it is going to be much harder for you to offer specificity that often makes your story a bit easier to understand, a bit easier to follow. So if you can pick a particular moment, a particular week, that will be much more helpful to you as a writer when you’re going through the process of actually constructing your essay.

TAYLOR: Yeah, absolutely. And I saw, oh, I think Daniel, you’re trying to type an answer to this, but I was going to address this question about the topic of having a specific book or a show, a movie. I would say in general, one of the concerns that I would have about this topic is you really want to make sure that it doesn’t end up feeling like the essay is about that media rather than yourself and making sure that it doesn’t end up feeling like a book report and things like that. This is also a question that sometimes comes up in supplemental essays, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. I think you can sort of allude to the media in certain ways, but really trying to find something that’s more about an experience that you’ve had outside of the media is more likely to give you enough to speak about in that 650 word space for the personal statement.

DANIEL: Great. So, I think this actually speaks to one of the questions that I’m in the middle of answering, and we’ll briefly answer in just a second, around how long does this process typically take? So, what you’re looking at on this particular screen does not exclusively refer to the personal statement, which is what we’ve discussed so far, but generally all of the college admissions writing that a student will have to do. Writing, especially again if you’re a parent of an 11th grader right now, but really any grade level, is such an integral part of this college admissions process. It is in most cases the biggest way that students are differentiating themselves or standing out in this process because lots of kids can have a 3.9 GPA or 3.7 GPA, but very few kids have a coin collection that they can talk about really passionately, like one of the examples I addressed in a response to a question earlier. In terms of what this writing process will look like numerically, when you’re, on average, applying to about 10 schools, I would say most students nationally are applying to about seven-ish schools.

On average, our students are applying anywhere from eight to 12 schools. Most schools that you’re applying to will require that one Common App essay, which will pretty much be required everywhere and go to every school that you will apply to. And then you’ll have some supplemental essays which Taylor will jump into, which can be anywhere from two to three additional essays that are unique by school, or in the cases of schools like Stanford and Columbia, that’s six or seven supplemental essays. In the case of Penn, it’s four supplemental essays. So if your kid’s applying to about 10 different schools, this very, very quickly can become anywhere from 30 to 40 unique essays that they are writing for this college application process. And so it’s a ton of writing in a pretty tight window of time. And if you’re reviewing these essays at least three times, it can be 120 plus rounds of essay writing that they are going through in this process. Pretty much between, ideally, if you’re an 11th grader, you should already have a topic that you’re going to be writing about, and between now and June-ish, you should be working on your personal statements so hopefully by the time that Common App opens in August and supplemental essays are republished on August 1st, you are fully in that supplemental essay writing piece because you’re going to be writing a ton between August and December for your Early Action and Regular Decision applications.

TAYLOR: So, as we talked about at the beginning, the supplemental essays are ones that are going to be specific for these individual schools. As Daniel was just mentioning, there are different numbers of supplemental essays based on the schools. The questions can vary, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, but this is really a chance for admissions officers to learn more about these applicants and get another sense of who they are and are they a good fit for this school. It’s really understanding what your expectations are for a higher education experience and is that what we offer as an institution? It’s a chance for students to really articulate “This is why I’m interested in studying computer science and what I hope to do with it,” “This is why I want to be a physician in the future.”

There are schools that will have optional supplemental essays. These, generally speaking, I recommend treating as required. If there is any opportunity to provide additional information to institutions through supplemental essays, it is best to do so because, again, this is really their chance, admissions officers’ chance to get to know the students. And so taking advantage of those opportunities is beneficial in the long run.

There are a few different tropes or types of supplemental essays that we’re going to walk through. There are others that fall outside of this list or that wildcard category can be pretty vast. Most commonly, we will see supplemental essays that ask, “Why do you want to attend this institution?” You’ll also see, “Why do you want to study whatever it is that you are hoping to study?” Sometimes these are combined. And then, “Describe a community that you are a part of or a community that you hope to engage in at our school.” And then the wild card is pretty open-ended. A lot of these can be a little bit more creative. They’re really trying to see “Does the student think in different ways?” “Are they, again, a good fit for the cultural sort of environment of our school?”

Some of the examples that I want to name for you are Stanford, which has you write a letter to your future roommate prompt. So, revealing some information about yourself or your student through pretending to talk to their future roommate. UChicago is well known for having really quirky supplemental essay prompts and that students can choose their supplemental essay prompts from a selection. So there’s a lot of wildness that happens here. One example of those is, and I will read it directly so you can hear that it is quite quirky, “Daddio, far out, gnarly, the list of slang terms goes on and on. Sadly, most of these aren’t so fly anymore. Name an outdated slang from any decade or language that you’d bring back and explain why you totally dig it.” So, asking students to really think about language choices and then defend it. This is, again, a really great opportunity to show some personality, but this is UChicago’s way of understanding if a student is meeting their expectations of who is going to excel on their college campus. Another one that is maybe a little less creative, a little less wild that we do see across a number of institutions is something along the lines of “Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or an issue. How did you communicate that or engage with this person? What did you learn from the experience?” So the types of supplemental essays can range in terms of creative to a little bit more straightforward, but as I said, those first three are the most common that you’ll see across the board.

So I’m going to walk through each of those three as I mentioned. So the first one is “Why this college?” As I said before, this is really trying to determine A, have you done your research? Do you know things about this school besides that it is your state school or an Ivy League? Have you done some reflection on why this is going to be the best place for you in the next four years? A compelling “why this college” essay has specific information about the academic programs. It’s going to have explanations for how and why you would engage with resources or initiatives that could be extracurriculars, it could be research opportunities, working with specific faculty, but really understanding how are you going to do that? Is it through a formal program? Are you hoping to conduct your own research on campus and why? What benefit does that have for your future and your development?

In terms of what you should avoid in these essays? Having that more generic, this is a good school and I want to go there, is not going to cut it. As I said, these are really meant to be specific. You don’t want to do a negative comparison, right? We don’t need to put Harvard down in order to argue why you want to go to Brown. And then lastly, an overemphasis on the social life. Obviously extracurriculars and student life, in terms of the traditions and events on campus, are a really important part of the college experience, but if that’s all we’re talking about in this essay, an admissions officer might wonder, “Do you want to go to the school for the academics or are you just looking to have fun on our campus?”

DANIEL: Yeah, I want to add a little bit to what Taylor’s saying here, and I’ll be brief because we’re coming up against sort of where we want to end 7:45, 7:50ish. But the reason “why this college” essays are becoming so important is because of something called yield. So yield is a term that refers to the percent of students who are admitted to a school who actually enroll and go there. Colleges are obsessed with this statistic because it’s one of the most important factors that U.S. News and World Report will use to rank them in U.S. News and World Report College rankings, but also because they are trying to guarantee a number of freshmen students, and it’s really hard to know of, for example, the 10,000 students that you admit you need to build a class of about 2,000 students, how many of them are actually going to come here? And really strong “why this college” essays can signal that a student is very committed to their school because they did a lot of research on who the professors are there because they were able to drop information around things that you could only know if you followed them on social media or visited the campus or spoke with an alum. And so for students who are looking, especially for schools like Boston University, Tulane, USC, and Georgetown, these “why this college” essays are so, so important to demonstrate yield and that you really care and want to go to a school.

TAYLOR: I’m going to skip ahead. I had an example, but for the sake of time, again, it’s really being that level of specificity for the “why this major.” Again, I may sound like a broken record, but it is important to get this point across, the more specific that you are in these essays, the better. This is the chance to really explain why you are passionate about studying computer science or why you want to study business and what you hope to do with that in the future. That aligning with your future goals is also very important here. And it’s okay, obviously, you don’t need to know “This is going to be my future career. I have my 20-year plan,” but at least understanding “I’m interested in biology because I really want to help make a difference in the healthcare of a certain community.” That’s still a pretty significant understanding of how you might interact with the world post-college. In terms of what to avoid very quickly, it is not important to mention rank or prestige. Admissions officers know where they work, they know how their school is ranked. You don’t need to go beyond what is relevant to that academic major. And lastly, you do want to show some variety. It shouldn’t be “You’re only interested in this for one specific reason,” or “You’re only focusing on one class that’s relevant to that.”

And again, I’m going to skip my example for the sake of time. Lastly, the third common type is the community essay. This is becoming much more common across the board in terms of what we’re seeing for supplemental essays. This is a chance to see, for admissions officers, to see how you might engage on campus. And again, this is not just like social life, this is their extracurriculars. It’s how you might volunteer in the community. So, the way that you might see this question is one of the following a version of these. One being, “What is a community that you are already involved in or you’re already a part of, and how are you functioning within that community?” The other is, “What is a community on our college campus that you are hoping to engage with?”

So obviously, one is really looking at that current situation. One is more future focused. Again, we don’t want to focus on negative experiences. We don’t want to say “I love the community that I’m a part of now because I used to be a part of a different community and had a terrible experience.” We also want to be very careful of choosing communities that might be polarizing. Being mindful of the schools’ cultural, political, social environment is important when choosing how to answer these questions. And again, really avoiding that overemphasis on social aspects. We know that it’s fun to be on college campuses. We know there’s going to be social events often tied with these communities, but that shouldn’t be the only draw to them.

And then I just saw the question about word limit. Most of the time, supplemental essays do range. Typically, they are somewhere between 200 and 250 is sort of the most common. There are shorter ones, 100 to 150, sometimes shorter than that. Generally speaking, I would say 300 is the longest for most schools, but there are obviously schools that are on either end of that. But 250 is a pretty standard length for a supplemental essay.

And again, this is an example, I can just show you very quickly, this is for Northwestern. You can see in that first highlight, the student names a very specific club on campus that they are hoping to connect with at Northwestern, and then they give very specific reasons as to why and how that connects to their interest in language and engaging with language in new ways. And then they also mention a way that they hope to maybe bring a new initiative within that club to show what they add to that, what they’re bringing to the table, so to speak.

DANIEL: Alrighty, so that sort of brings us to the end of the essay focus on this. But before we sort of open up to a larger Q&A, we want to share a little bit more about how we help students through the college admissions process. I think it’s actually a great segue. It seems like a parent just asked, do we do specifically essay support? And the answer to that question is no. We provide end-to-end admission support from 9th grade all the way through 12th grade on every facet of the college admissions process. Taylor, if you want to go ahead to the next slide. A few pieces on how we work here at Prepory, all of our programming is 100% one-on-one. So your high school students will be working one-on-one with a dedicated college admissions coach through every facet of that admissions process, whether that be extracurricular building, launching a passion project, creating a college list, finding research or internship opportunities and applying pretty much everything related to the college admissions process from 9th grade all the way through 12th grade is the kind of work that we do with our students.

One of the coolest things that we do in actually where a lot of essays come up or where essays come up a lot is in our mock admissions committee. So at Prepory, one of the coolest things, and I think the biggest differentiating thing that we do is our Committee Review. Essentially, our team recreates a mock admissions office where we are going through your child’s entire college application; essays, resumes, activities, list portfolio materials, and our team of former admissions officers from places like Columbia, Penn, WashU, Northwestern are ripping apart your students’ materials, jotting down broad strokes insights, what they learn about them, strengths and weaknesses, and then give that back to them and their dedicated coach here at Prepory, so they can implement that change one time before it really counts. What’s also really cool is that for 9th and 10th grade students, we also do a version of this, but what’s different about doing this for a 9th and 10th grader is that they have two years or one year to take all of the feedback from the committee and implement it through their extracurricular involvements or the passion project that they’re launching, which is really special.

In addition to that, our programs all include unlimited support on essays, resumes and deferral letters, and parent check-ins. It seems like most of our audience here are parents, and so about every six weeks you’ll have a call with your student’s coach, just get a progress update on what they’re doing through Prepory, ask questions. There are so many unanswered questions in this admissions process, it’s hard to know everything. So just dedicated place where you can figure out where your kids are at, ask questions that you have, see with what you’re hearing in the parent rumor mill is true. That’s what those parent check-ins are for.

Another aspect that we talked a little bit on the Committee Review, is that when your child is working with Prepory, they will have a dedicated college admissions coach, someone who knows the ins and outs of their entire process, their extracurricular involvement, the set of schools that they’re applying for, but they won’t be alone with just their coach. We have a team of 50 other experts who will be working with them in the backend through providing insider knowledge specifically on maybe a school that they want to go to or maybe they want to look at BS/MD programs and they would love to connect with a former medical school admissions officer. Great. We have someone on our team who’ll be able to give them that insight as well as our leadership team, like our Program Director, Taylor, who’s leading this call and oversees our team of counselors, and James, who’s our Program Manager and acts as support for our team of college admissions coaches, too.

And then, we talked a little bit about this at the beginning, but what you’re seeing on your screen is a bunch of statistics in terms of how we contribute or sort of catalyze our students’ admission success. You’ll see that our students are almost four times more likely than the average applicant to get into Northwestern. Six times more likely for Tulane, four times more likely to get into schools like Amherst and five times more likely to get into schools like Brown. You can see more about this on our results page on our webpage, but essentially, we crush it. Our students really outperformed the national average.

And of course we will be on this Q&A for the next 10 or 15 minutes here. So you guys have any questions, please drop your questions in the Q&A, but also if you maybe liked what you heard today, if you feel like you have so many more questions about college admissions essays or maybe you learned a lot about the college admissions process through just sitting in on this webinar and you want to talk more and you’d like to hear how we can specifically help your kid and your family through this admissions process on your screen, you are seeing a QR code where that you can scan and schedule a 30-minute strategy session with our Enrollment team. Our colleague, Leti, who is backstage, will also be dropping a link that you can click to schedule about a 30-minute strategy session free for us to learn a little bit more about your students to understand what you’re struggling with in the college admissions process and recommend a way forward, answer some of your questions and talk to you about how we can help your family through the college admissions process. So again, if you’d like to schedule, go ahead and scan that QR code to schedule an initial consultation. And that brings us to the end of our webinar, but we will be here for the next 10 or 15 minutes for Q&A. So if you still have questions, you can drop them in the chat box and we’d be happy to address those live as they come in.

DANIEL: Alrighty, I will be going through some of these questions that we are answering live. So, around the word limit for community essays, Taylor addressed this already. The average word length for supplemental essays are about 150 to 300 words compared to 650 words for the Common App essays. We got a question on fees. So, our fees sort of depend on what grade level your student is at. So if you have questions and you want to get a better understanding about fees, I would encourage you to send an email to info@prepory.com with your student’s grade level and we can very transparently share our fees. It’s just hard to say what that fee might be if we don’t know if your kid is in 9th grade or 10th grade or 11th grade.

For some parents, I’m also seeing “Is it too late to start with twins? I’m in 11th grade.” No, it’s not. We work with 11th graders who are getting started this time of the year all the time. I will say, there’s a lot to do in this process. We talked a little bit about how many essays you’re writing, if you’re applying to 10 schools, 30, or 40, if you wait till much later, the quality of your applications is just going to decrease in this process. So, it’s really important that you get started because of just the sheer amount of work that it takes to really get this process started. And so I encourage you especially to schedule an initial consultation.

Great. So around waitlist offers, if your child was admitted or waitlisted from Wake Forest, I’ll be honest with you and say, admits off the waitlist are very rare in this process. It’s really hard to get admitted off the wait list, but it does happen every single year. Speaking for ourselves. Last year, we had students who were admitted off the wait list at NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Tufts, Princeton, and so we’ve done pretty well in this process on a wait list. So, we actually do have a service for that for waitlists. It’s $975 for three hours of support to construct a wait list. If you are interested in that, you can reach out to info@prepory.com and they will be able to provide instructions to enroll. But that one’s pretty easy. So a bit on that piece.

TAYLOR: There are a couple of questions about resources or reading previous personal statements. So we do at Prepory have sample personal statements that can be reviewed with our students. We have ones that we know were accepted by very prestigious schools that we can share, so that is something that our coaches are able to share with students.

DANIEL: Yes, we do have an internal resource like Taylor shared. There’s also a really great one on Johns Hopkins websites that I just shared with you, Phoebe. And then to answer Susie’s question around, “If your student is not applying to a prestigious school, like the ones we listed, is our services still worth it?” I would say absolutely, mom. The truth is, as I mentioned earlier, whether your kid wants to go to an Ivy League school or they want to go to VCU or UT Dallas, your state school, this process is really complex and it’s just a high stakes process. It determines a lot about their career, their academic experience, and for a 16-year-old, 17-year-old, it’s pretty hard to figure those things out. And we’re not about necessarily forcing every kid to go to an Ivy League or a Top 20 school. If that’s what your kid wants, great. We have the resources and expertise to support that. If you and your kid want something totally different, that’s fine too. We have the resources and expertise to support them on that front. Thank you to whoever said this webinar was helpful. That’s really flattering. Let me just clear up some of the questions here.

TAYLOR: Well, I can answer Tanisha’s question about scholarship essays. Yes, we definitely help with scholarship essays. We have a lot of students who apply to scholarships within the schools that they’re applying to. Oftentimes, those are connected to honors colleges or other programs within the school itself. And then can certainly help explain the process of how to find other scholarships and then help with that process of writing those essays, revising, so on and so forth. So, all of that is included in the support as well.

DANIEL: For the parent who asked about 8th graders. Actually no, 8th grade is not too early to start for our service, especially if your student is an 8th grader right now. We are actually already holding spots for 8th graders who will be in 9th grade come August, 2025 because we have very limited seats available. And so, a lot of parents will get their 8th grader enrolled. Now we will help them select their 9th grade classes if they haven’t already done that. If you’re even deciding on what high school you want your kid to go to or looking for some summer opportunities this summer, we can start that now and then they’ll fully start with the program in August, 2025 when they are in 9th grade. And, alright. Taylor, any other questions that we have not gotten to?

TAYLOR: There are a couple of questions about the essay writing only. I know that we addressed that earlier, or I believe that you mentioned it earlier, but I’m not sure if maybe these participants weren’t there for that part of your response.

DANIEL: Yeah, so to answer that question around, no, we offer all end-to-end college admission services. So, it’s not like we only do essays. We will help students select their extracurriculars, launch a passion project, figure out how to build an admissions narrative and a cohesive winning admissions narrative, build a college list, select what majors they want to apply for, so end to end, it’s not just essay writing services.

TAYLOR: And I would add that the benefit of that, as Daniel was sort of saying, is that it allows for the support to be comprehensive and make sure that those essays are really strategic to make sure that the application is going to be successful overall. Again, really wanting to make sure that those topics are selected with the other parts of the profile in mind that we’re sort of being intentional about the school choices and things like that. So it is helpful to see those pieces all work together and not do essay review in a vacuum.

DANIEL: I really agree. And that’s why it’s so important to work with a coach that fully understands your profile. Sometimes you have others, if you don’t know what the kid’s doing academically, what they’re doing extracurricularly, what they’re doing through their passion project, it’s very hard to offer the best degree of support for a student.

Alrighty. I think we are wrapping up with questions before we drop off. If anyone has any questions, now would be a time to ask. Well thank you so much to everyone who joined tonight’s webinar. Again, if you have any questions moving forward about the college admissions process, if you felt like you’d learned so much tonight, but you just want a lot more specific information for what your child should be doing in this process, please go ahead, scan that QR code, schedule an initial consultation. I would love to personally actually take your initial consultation. So if you do that, you’ll probably be most likely meeting with me and it’ll be really fun. And also the link is in your Zoom chat where you can click to schedule an initial consultation and meet with our team. But thank you again for joining, everyone. I hope this was helpful and hope that everyone has a lovely evening.

Bye everyone.