Services & Pricing
Essay Coaching • Candidacy Building • Private SAT Tutoring
Essay Coaching
Most Popular Packages
$7,500/1 college (professional 1-on-1 support with everything you need to apply to your top-choice college, including: your main Common App essay, all supplemental essays, personal branding strategy, ED/EA guidance, activities and honors list, major and minor selection, etc. This process generally takes about 6-8 weeks, meeting once a week over Zoom plus unlimited rounds of offline editing.)
$10,000/5 colleges (the best value for an entry-level package at only $2,000 per college.)
$18,750/15 colleges (everything you need to apply to a complete and balanced list of 15 Reach, Target and Safety schools, including: pros/cons of each one, ED/EA strategy, your main Common App essay, all supplemental essays, any special honors or school-specific scholarship essays, video submission guidance, research descriptions, interview prep, etc. This process generally takes 3-4 months, meeting once a week over Zoom plus unlimited rounds of offline editing.)
Your essays must be extraordinary.
Admissions officers read thousands of essays each year, looking for those rare diamonds in the rough: students who have a remarkable personal story, or a deep passion for something outside the classroom, or a gifted way of looking at the world. With so many applicants vying for so few openings, you need to identify what makes you different — what makes you extraordinary — and then sell it to the best of your ability. That’s where your college essays come in. And that’s where we can help.
Read some examples of winning essays that helped our students get into top schools.
What you can expect…
We begin with a FREE half-hour consultation. We can meet on Zoom or over the phone, whichever you prefer. If you’re the student, we want to know a bit more about you: your grades, your test scores, your passions, your interests, your achievements, your intended major, and your top choice college if you have one.
If we agree to work together, we’ll request a credit card payment for the package you choose. Once we receive payment, we begin.
Our rates…
For $7,500, we help you with everything you need to apply to one college. (Our rates are the same for freshman applicants and transfer students.)
This package includes your 1) main Common App essay, plus all 2) Supplemental Essays. Supplemental Essays may be shorter, but they are just as important — if not more so — and must be approached just as thoughtfully. Supplemental Essays can be challenging because they frequently ask you to explain why you’re a good fit for that particular college. This is where our insights into each school’s unique culture, strengths, and programs are key.
This package also includes 3) strategic branding, so we position your candidacy in the best possible way including your choice of major/minor/concentrations, and covers your 4) Honors and Activities Lists, where you must present your resume highlights in the most strategic, concise form and in a way that supports your overall personal narrative. (The process for completing your first college application takes about 6-8 weeks, meeting every week over Zoom plus unlimited rounds of offline editing.)
Which essay package is right for me?
Since students always apply to more than one college (even if they apply Early Action or Early Decision), we offer discounts on package deals. For example, for $10,000 we help you with all the essays you’ll need for up to five colleges, etc. These days, the vast majority of our students apply to 15 or more colleges. The more competitive a college is, the more unpredictable their admissions response will be, even for the best students. So we compose a strategic list of Reach, Target and Safety schools to hedge our bets against all possible outcomes, including deferrals and waitlists, which have become increasingly common in recent years.
Instead of signing up for an essay package, you can also sign up for individual 1-hour Zoom sessions ($500/hour) to get live feedback on your writing, brainstorm essay topics, or discuss your application strategy. These live consultations do not include offline editing, and are not meant to replace the comprehensive nature of our complete essay packages.
How our sessions work…
We conduct our weekly writing sessions over Zoom. If you’ve already written a draft of your essay, we review it carefully, looking to improve structure, content, grammar and flow. If you haven’t started, we brainstorm topics together, paying particular attention to what makes you stand out as a candidate. Aside from academic achievement, colleges are particularly interested in finding students with passion, purpose and drive — or a compelling backstory — and we highlight these qualities in you.
After each weekly Zoom session, we give you a few days to work on your essays and email us new drafts to edit (you get unlimited rounds of edits), before reconvening the following week to discuss further improvements. We go back and forth like this, refining your writing each time, until we get them right.
NOTE: Unlike most college consultants, we do not cap a limit on how many rounds of editing we provide; we keep working with you until we get the job done.
Full List of Options
$7,500/1 college ($7,500 each)
$10,000/5 colleges ($2,000 each)
$15,000/10 colleges ($1,500 each)
$18,750/15 colleges ($1,250 each)
$3,500/Common App Essay Only (brainstorm topics, refine writing, includes both offline editing and weekly Zoom consults)
$750/Application Review (professional offline review of one completed college application + 1-hour Zoom session to discuss feedback and suggestions)
$500/1-hour Zoom Session
$150/Initial 1/2-hour Consultation (FREE when you purchase any package)
Your college essays can’t be average — they have to make you look like a rock star.
Peter’s college essay about “garbage” helped him get into Yale where he’s studying environmental science.
Candidacy Building
$5,000/6-Month Program (accelerated resume-building package includes bi-weekly Zoom meetings to work on career exploration, capstone project ideas, high school course selection, enriching extracurricular activities, summer program applications, science and writing competitions, internship possibilities, research opportunities, and more)
The key to college admissions: uncommon achievement
The single best piece of advice we have for parents is this: start early. Getting into a top university is a marathon, not a sprint. And while there’s a lot we can do at the 11th hour to package your student into a compelling candidate, there’s infinitely more that we can do if we start the process early. That means sitting down with students when they’re still a freshman or sophomore in high school (or earlier: many of our students are in 8th grade) and really taking a hard look at what they enjoy doing, where they can excel, and how they can differentiate themselves from all the tens of thousands of other applicants.
Read a Case Study of how we helped one student get into Cornell.
We don’t believe in pursuing activities that you don’t really enjoy, because it’s simply not sustainable. And on top of that, you’ll be miserable. Don’t play the flute if you don’t like the flute. Don’t join the debate team just because you think it will look good on your resume If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t excel. And if you don’t excel, it won’t help your application stand out.
It’s far better to tap into things that genuinely interest you, and for us to strategically come up with ways that you can explore those passions in ways that challenge you, push you out of your comfort zone, offer opportunities for leadership and growth, and possibly even coincide with your long-term career ambitions.
What it’s not…
Candidacy building is not about simply padding your resume. It’s about growing as a human being, which is exactly what you should be doing in your formative high school years. When you find something you love, and devote yourself to it consistently, that’s where you find growth, success and happiness. College admissions officers love candidates who demonstrate uncommon passion, purpose and drive, and they routinely select those candidates over other students with better grades and test scores.
That’s not to say that your grades don’t matter. Of course they do. But simply having a perfect GPA is not enough to get you into the best schools these days, because there are simply too many candidates like that. You need to offer them something much more: some kind of personal spark that gets them excited. And that only comes through uncommon extracurricular achievement.
Our pricing…
Building a student’s college candidacy is like hiring a private athletic coach to help them elevate their game from average or above-average to extraordinary. It takes considerable time, focus and dedication — and someone being there consistently to guide them — but the results are often the difference between getting in and not getting in to your top-choice schools.
Our 6-Month Candidacy Building program provides half-hour Zoom sessions with your student every other week to offer inspiration, ideas and support for the following: enriching extracurricular activities, internship ideas, summer program advice, summer program application support, essay competition support, research project ideas, strategic high school course selection, career guidance, community service ideas, new business ideas, capstone project development, and more. Our flat fee of $5,000 covers the entire 6-month period of candidacy building, including live Zoom sessions as well as offline editing and support.
During that 6-month window, we strive to achieve tangible results that can serve as both a model and a source for inspiration for future endeavors, and many of our students follow up their first Candidacy Building program with subsequent sessions, often leading right up until the time they apply to colleges in the summer before senior year of high school.
Our timeline for tangible results…
Our 6-month schedule typically looks something like this:
Month #1: Intro to candidacy building, learning about student’s interests, strengths, and goals (including long-term career aspirations)
Month #2: Brainstorming ideas for your first big project: it should be something fun, challenging, maybe even a little scary for you (meaning it’s a bit out of your comfort zone), but also doable in the timeframe of a few months
Month #3: Refine the short-list of project ideas: do research on them, see what similar projects are out there, figure out which ideas keep rising to the top of your list in terms of interest and feasibility
Month #4: Get started on project: whether it’s starting a new club at school, founding a volunteer organization, applying to competitive essay contests, or building a robot from scratch, we begin work with a clear timeline of deliverables
Month #5: Keep working on project: your mentor will provide you with support, encouragement, problem solving tips, and creative workarounds because you will encounter bumps along the way — and you will get past them!
Month #6: Finish your first project: Congratulations, you’ve just completed your first real step towards candidacy building, and you’ve accomplished something in your field of interest that was nothing more than a vague idea only 6 months ago. Now you’re ready to build upon that first impressive experience with something even more ambitious, challenging and rewarding. Plus, you already have something great to write about for your college applications.
Our sessions…
Our friendly, no-stress coaching sessions (always 1-on-1 with our company founder) are designed to help us build rapport with a student, so that we can offer insights, inspiration, support, and guidance for how to explore academic areas of interest and build a rewarding and impressive extracurricular record that aligns with their future college goals.
The best extracurricular activities 1) tap into your genuine interests, 2) show leadership and initiative, 3) create an impact on your community, and 4) differentiate you from everyone else.
Private SAT Tutoring
Full 4-Week Course: $3,500 (Includes 8 hours of private, personalized 1-on-1 instruction, spread out over the course of 4-6 weeks, with daily practice and homework assignments, and up to 6 full-length digital practice tests)
Covers all Math and English content, time management strategies, test-taking tips, common traps, and Desmos shortcuts.
1-Week Bootcamp: $2,000 (Includes 4 hours of private 1-on-1 instruction, generally completed in a single week or two, plus 2 full-length digital practice tests)
1-on-1 Remote Tutoring…
Most test prep centers feature large classrooms with no personalized attention. They are based on student volume, and they are designed as “one size fits all” programs. Our private SAT tutoring is the exact opposite. We structure our entire program to work around the specific needs and learning style of your student. And we drill areas of weakness until they become areas of strength, tracking a log of the types of questions that give you trouble. Plus, we work around your busy schedule, and conduct all of our sessions on Zoom so you never have to leave your home.
Full 4-Week Course ($3,500 for 8 hours) — This comprehensive program gives you all of the preparation you need to take the new digital SAT. We cover practice tests, test-taking strategies, time management, and all content curriculum, with weekly homework assignments. Plus we offer flexible scheduling. Most students prefer to meet twice a week, for an hour each time, over the course of 4-6 weeks. But it’s whatever works best for you and your schedule.
Either way, you get 8 hours of private 1-on-1 instruction. And students who complete our full course (including daily homework assignments and practice tests) typically see substantial improvements in their scores, up to 200+ points from their first test.
1-Week Bootcamp ($2,000 for 4 hours) — Our 1-week bootcamp is designed for students who don’t have time for the full 4-week course, but who really need to brush up on their SAT skills, whether it’s Math or English or both. Most students schedule all four sessions during a single week, but you can also spread them out over two or more weeks.
Students of our Full 4-Week Course frequently boost their SAT score by 200 points or more.