the college application essay tutors

the college application essay tutors

The Impact of College Application Essay Tutors on Student Success

1. Introduction to College Application Essays

The college application essay serves as a student’s opportunity to capture a small portion of the admissions officer’s time and explain why the school would benefit from the student’s attendance. This essay, then, provides students with a much-needed opportunity to present themselves as thoughtful, analytical, and mature young adults with unique, inspiring visions for their futures. However, opportunities for such self-expression come with significant challenges. Not yet tempered by the fire of experience, college applicants need to be able to demonstrate their burgeoning potential in a mere 500 to 1000 polished, reflective words. They need to identify and choose topics that reveal depth and maturity. In addition, they need to reflect on specific events and experiences that capture the specific nature of their potential in an unconventional and informal, yet highly polished, way. Writing such sophisticated essays represents a daunting prospect for students who find it hard enough to reveal their natures and academic aptitudes to their high school teachers, never mind to a panel of college admissions officers who will forever alter the course of their academic and professional lives.

2. The Role of Tutors in the College Application Process

Not only are more high school students than ever applying to college, but they are also applying to more colleges each. Research suggests, however, that the college application process is becoming increasingly complex and time-consuming. The application for each of the hundreds of colleges available comes with its own set of required information. The first step is to consider the college, which can be impacted by the college’s size, location, and available fields of study, and its probability of admission. Beyond these simple decision rules, the process can quickly become more complicated. For example, many colleges have supplementary questions or different essay requirements; students sometimes have to write eight essays, and high-scoring students often have as many as 20, in order to have options. Finally, there are the logistical issues of testing potential. College entrance exams, curriculum choices, and required courses. Do these essays and resumes reflect students’ real experiences? Are they really representative for admissions officers in the college application process? Do they perhaps contribute to inequality in higher education?

The role of private tutors, or tutors, in the college application process, is offered as the demand for private tutoring intensifies. These tutors could help students through a long, complex process by providing information to provide students with practical help in brainstorming ideas, better education, revising drafts analyzing stories, or editing drafts writers. There is no shortage of individual qualifications held by these instructors as they range from college students to graduate students. Additionally, with tutors ranging from current college students to graduate students—or recent college graduates and each student requiring the assistance with various levels of college education—there is no dearth of individual qualifications for these tutors. In many private high schools, essay writing tutors also play a role, and it is assumed that school guidance and teachers will spend a little time.

3. Benefits of Working with College Application Essay Tutors

Application essay writing tutors offer a range of benefits to clients. First, they assist high school students in generating ideas for their college applications and, through their questions and prompts, help students identify unique strategies for tackling essay prompts. Engaging in structured brainstorming sessions can be particularly useful in eliciting associations between past experiences and future goals for a student who may not have previously reflected on the significance of activities or experiences on their intrinsic values.

Second, essay coaches offer assistance organizing ideas and selecting topics, with coaches providing recommendations, oversight, and the consolidation of the multiple essay revisions. As one participant stated in her MediaSense interview, “I think I finished a lot more confident and knowing that my essay was completed and is completed and I can send it with my application.”

Next, dialogue-based coaching can help students to expand upon their experiences so that they can perform a more comprehensive exploration of a given topic. This process allows students to meaningfully engage with readers, introducing multiple facets of their personality and creativity into their applications. Though tutors help answer question prompts, they never provide ready-made answers and always facilitate the process with student thoughts. This empowers students and helps them draw connections between various subjects or experiences.

Another benefit of enrolling in essay tutoring services is manifested in the opportunities for accountability that arise. With college applications for top-tier schools taking up a significant portion of a student’s to-do list, students face numerous distractions as well as internal turmoil.

4. Effective Strategies and Techniques Taught by Tutors

Workshop leaders and college application writing tutors use various effective strategies and techniques to teach students how to write exceptional application materials. All college application writing workshops, as well as writing tutors, teach and reinforce a process for writing successful college application essays and supplement this process with specific activities. This paper describes how writing tutors, including both university students and high school teachers, teach students a process for writing exceptional college application essays. This section forms the conceptual framework for this paper.

To describe the strategies and techniques for essay writing success taught by tutors, I have divided the college application writing process into the following five stages: (Step 1) Brainstorming and Selecting Topics, (Step 2) Writing a Draft, (Step 3) Revising the Draft, (Step 4) Editing the Draft, and (Step 5) Formatting the essay. Using examples to explain how the various activities addressed the four critical instructional components expands a reader’s understanding and gives a sense of the intensity of the prescribed process. After each description, the instructional components are revisited to demonstrate their organization and interconnection with the various strategies and techniques.

5. Case Studies and Success Stories

Participation in the student’s writing process is hands-on, individualized, and embedded within the summer application process. The student realizes that, by graduation, he has grown into a remarkable writer and a more confident communicator across every dimension of learning and living – all from the creative and critical thinking habits he has been incubated in while practicing his craft and telling the story of his life; all with no prior time previously spent on writing attainment.

Upon graduation, a student proudly beams that he has earned the confidence, skills, and academic focus to have finished high school, while telling his interesting story, in a joyful-as-opposed-to-stressful Summer 2012. He is finally ready for a school leadership opportunity, which before-team effort-resisted embrace. During the break in preparation time, he has participated within a team athletic event, with a lucky number 12, after recovering from a strained back. Visibly relaxed when together with a team member after working side by side, the tutor had noticed teamwork strength improvements – which thematic competent writing growth parallels. The discussant received acknowledgment for a well-told and polished-written 35-page essay that had been required for the advertised Summer 2012 elite interview experience completion.