Sample of Our Work
Below are two essays. The first is a draft essay the student sent us, before we started working together. The second essay is the final version our student submitted to colleges after completing our College Plus Essay Package. This student was such a talented and creative writer, who wasn’t tapping into that creativity until they worked with us. They felt boxed in, writing their college essay and, uninspired. With our guidance and support, they were able to use their passion for creative writing and produce an unstoppable college essay. Using this as their personal essay, this Midwest student was accepted into NYU, their first college of choice.
​
​​​
Draft Essay
​
My Modern America professor wasn’t openly sexist. He simply quietly, constantly reinforced historical figures’ notions of female roles such as “Andrew Jackson would likely roll over in his grave at the thought of a female president,” I managed to hold my tongue, however, largely in part due to Mildred Trotter.
I first met Mildred Trotter in the pages of Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains, where I was indulging a secret passion of mine, criminology. Fascinated by her work with hypertrichosis, excessive hair growth, I had to read more.
​
When Trotter was in high school, she got in trouble because she wanted to take geometry over home economics, which, at the time, was perceived as unsuitable for a girl. Later, she spent years in a silent struggle with the glass ceiling at Washington University where she formed a tight-knit bond with the female students on campus.
​
A fiercely-spirited woman, she suffered the indignities of sexism to a far greater degree than I will probably ever be subjected to, yet she handled them brilliantly. She taught me that it’s not always about fighting the fight. I knew that after I took the above-mentioned class I’d never hear from my professor again and in the scope of my life his views and opinions on my gender were irrelevant. I am reminded of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters the Minister of Information printed in England during WWII as a message to their citizens in the event of an invasion. It’s not about cutting down everyone who doesn’t share your opinion; it’s about picking battles and saving energy for the ones that are worth it.
​
Mildred Trotter was an incredibly successful woman. I firmly believe she was so successful because she knew which battles were worth fighting. She did not waste her time arguing with every sexist male who came through her classroom; if she had, she wouldn’t have had the time to be successful. She even waited patiently for a promotion. After fifteen years of knowing she deserved a promotion, she finally confronted the head of her department at Washington University.
​
I remain indebted to her for this lesson that I so desperately needed to learn. I have applied it to various aspects of my life, especially as I took college courses in high school. When I founded the only social organization for post-secondary students on my college campus, we had a lot of small fires, so to speak, and I, as president, could either take the time and energy to put them out by hand or I could let them burn out by themselves, conserving my energy for a massive wildfire. I chose the latter.
​
Mildred Trotter will always be an idol of mine, not only for her work in forensic anthropology, but also for her grace under the pressures of sexism.
​
​
How I Found Out Naked Can Be Good
It really bothers me whenever I read a book in which someone supposedly died in their sleep from strychnine poisoning. It’s not the poisoning part that bothers me. In fact, I’m really fond of poisons. What bothers me is the fact that no one can die in his or her sleep from strychnine poisoning. Strychnine causes severe convulsions; while people may die from the exhaustion the convulsions cause, no one can actually die in their sleep from strychnine poisoning. After the first seizure happens, the victim is going to be conscious.
I write murder mysteries. I’m not one of those creepy basement people obsessed with death. I’m also not a Goth girl either. I am a petite blonde, with severe weaknesses for pink, fountain pens, and pedicures. It surprises a lot of people that I write murder mysteries.
​
I write because of the puzzle. There are so many pieces to a mystery. It has to be factually correct and sound plausible. The murder weapon has to be realistic; if it’s a poison, I make a point of making sure it’s chemically and symptomatically correct.
All of my work is character-driven and I try to make my characters as humorous as possible. If it was bone-dry, even I wouldn’t want to read it. I write series, which allow me a lot of time to develop my characters.
Writing has been my passion since I was very young. Before I could even write, my mother used to tell me how I’d bring her paper and pen and ask her to write what I said. It has evolved considerably over the years. I’ve written about detectives, police officers, and spies.
This fall I took a creative writing workshop class at a large, local university. I have never, ever shown my work outside of my immediate family, and this class filled me with dread. I did it to grow as a writer. It was abundantly clear from the start of this class I didn’t fit in and I wondered if this was a huge mistake. My fellow students included a bearded, hippie science fiction writer, a redheaded psychology major with black polka-dots in her hair, a war veteran, the girl with the animal ears on her hat, the casual skateboarding guy with a Farrah Fawcett bouffant who smelled of tobacco, and the guy who could describe in detail how a bong worked. Beside the casual skateboarder was the girl with an incredibly dirty sense of humor and the really tall guy who could speak and write Japanese and routinely drew anime bears on the board.
And there I sat, in the midst of all of them. I didn’t fit the profile. I didn’t fit in there. I wasn’t angry, full of angst, in a drug induced haze, or Against The System. I didn’t care too much about “fighting the power” or “working against the man.”
They scared me. They were all workshop veterans who knew exactly how the class was supposed to go. I, on the other hand, had never been in a workshop before and I had never shown my work to anyone for fear of rejection and humiliation. I wasn’t scared of the letter grade; I was scared of peer review.
My mother compares my writing to having a baby. You want it to be good and sound smart, witty, and humorous. You want people enjoy it and not to find fault with it. You want to protect it and have nothing bad happen to it. I feel like my writing is me standing buck-naked for the entire world to see. And I’m no exhibitionist.
Then, something strange happened. On the predetermined day that I had to metaphorically stand in my birthday suit, my workshop members started laughing at my baby. They thought it was funny!
It was like Sally Field’s Oscar acceptance speech: "They like me! They like me! They really like me!" I had intended for the story to be humorous, but surely it was a fluke. Surely next time I would get pelted with rotten vegetables until I left the seminar room, scrambling to find my clothes and my dignity.
The next workshop was poetry. I haven’t written poetry since the fourth grade and I didn’t consider myself a poetry writer. I thought poetry was for emotional people. I’m not an emotional person. I decided to describe a pair of partying college students who came upon a corpse.
Nobody laughed.
But it wasn’t supposed to be funny, so that was good. I got some good criticism, but then the redheaded, polka-dotted psychology major pulled me aside. “I really liked your poem,” she said. We’d been in the same workshop group for three sessions and she always wrote something equally morbid. “Why did you seem so nervous about presenting it to workshop? It’s very much you.”
I was dumbfounded, but then I realized something. It’s not about having the best work. It’s not even about having good work. It’s about having work that is uniquely you and being proud of it. I hadn’t been proud of it before. Now I was.
I still wasn’t necessarily thrilled about standing stark naked for the world whenever anyone read my work, but I know that if I didn’t feel that way, I wouldn’t know my work was uniquely mine.
.