I’ve read hundreds of MBA essays. Not an exaggeration. When you spend years in admissions consulting, you start to see patterns that most people miss. You notice what makes an admissions officer pause mid-coffee, set down their pen, and actually lean forward. And it’s rarely what applicants think it is. The conventional wisdom says you […]
I didn’t always know how to do this. In fact, I remember sitting in a lecture hall at UC Berkeley during my sophomore year, staring at a problem set that felt like someone had scrambled my brain and left it on the desk. The professor had explained everything. I’d taken notes. Yet when faced with […]
I’ve spent the last eight years reading student essays, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the difference between a mediocre essay and a compelling one rarely comes down to the evidence itself. It comes down to how that evidence gets introduced, contextualized, and explained. I’ve seen students cite the most fascinating research, […]
I’ve spent enough time staring at blank pages and watching word counts climb that I can tell you with reasonable confidence: a 500-word essay usually lands somewhere between one and two pages. But that answer feels incomplete the moment I say it, because the truth is messier and more interesting than a simple range. When […]
I’ve spent the better part of a decade reading college essays, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that Duke essays occupy a peculiar space in the admissions landscape. They’re not the most technically demanding prompts you’ll encounter, but they’re somehow the ones that reveal the most about who a student actually is. That’s […]
I’ve been writing about travel for nearly a decade now, and I still remember the moment I realized most travel writing is forgettable. I was sitting in a café in Barcelona, reading through a collection of essays from The Best American Travel Writing series, and I noticed something odd. The pieces that stuck with me […]
I’ve spent the better part of a decade reading essays. Not the polished kind that win prizes at prestigious universities, though I’ve seen plenty of those. I mean the messy, uncertain, sometimes brilliant attempts from students who are genuinely trying to figure out what they think. And you know what I’ve noticed? The essays that […]
I spent three years in college thinking double spacing was just something professors demanded to make our essays look longer. Turns out, I was both right and completely wrong about that. The truth is more interesting than the cynicism I carried into my first semester. Double spacing refers to the vertical distance between lines of […]
I’ve spent enough time in testing centers and college counseling offices to know that the SAT essay scoring system confuses almost everyone. Students walk out of the exam thinking they nailed it, then get their scores back and wonder what happened. Parents call in frustrated because the breakdown doesn’t make sense. Even some guidance counselors […]
I used to stare at blank pages for hours. Not the productive kind of staring where you’re contemplating the universe. The paralyzing kind. The kind where your brain feels scrambled, like someone threw all your thoughts into a blender and hit puree. I’d have this vague sense that I had something important to say, but […]