Services & Pricing
Essay Coaching • Candidacy Building • Private SAT Tutoring
Essay Coaching
Most Popular Packages
$6,500/1 college (professional 1-on-1 support with everything you need to apply to your top-choice college, including: 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 or twice per week.)
$18,500/15 colleges (everything you need to create and apply to a balanced list of 15 Reach, Target and Safety schools, including: pros/cons of each one, ED/EA strategy, all essays including honors and scholarship essays, video submission help, portfolios and research descriptions, interview prep, etc. This process takes 3-5 months, meeting twice per week.)
Full List of Options
$6,500/1 college (6-8 weeks)
$10,000/5 colleges (2-3 months)
$15,000/10 colleges (3-4 months)
$18,500/15 colleges (3-5 months)
$3,500/Common App Essay Only (brainstorm topics, refine writing, includes both offline editing and multiple Zoom consults; takes 3-5 weeks)
$750/Application Review (professional feedback on one completed college application + 1-hour Zoom consult; takes 1 week)
$500/1-hour Zoom consult
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. Once we receive payment, we begin.
Our rates…
For $6,500, 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.
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 a complete essay package, you can also sign up for a single Zoom consultation ($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 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, 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 writing session, we give you a few days to work on a new draft, before reconvening again to make 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, or how many times we meet over Zoom; we keep working with you until we get the job done. Most students meet with us once or twice per week, plus email us drafts of their essays to review and edit in between sessions. But some students meet more frequently, and others meet less, depending on their scheduling needs.
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
$7,500/6-Month Program (includes weekly half-hour Zoom meetings to work on resume-building activities including: strategic high school course selection, enriching extracurricular activities, summer program applications and essays, essay competitions, internships, research opportunities, and signature capstone project development)
$12,500/Full 1-Year Program (includes weekly half-hour Zoom meetings for a full year of strategic resume-building)
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 week-in and week-out 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 weekly half-hour Zoom sessions with your student 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 $7,500 covers the entire 6-month period of candidacy building, including live Zoom sessions as well as offline editing and support.
We typically meet every week with a student for a half hour (pending their travel schedule or other commitments). These friendly, low-stress, regularly-scheduled coaching sessions 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 instruction, spread out over the course of 4-8 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 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 4-8 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 SATs by up to 200 points.