Hi!

It's the end of July, which means my (metaphorical) desk right now is a pile of essay drafts from rising seniors, and I have to tell you, this batch is something.

One student is connecting religion and science in a way that seems like it wouldn't fit until you actually read it closely. Another is finding that the writing process about her meditation practice itself has turned meditative. And there's a heart-moving piece on a summer at a vet clinic in a low-income neighborhood about facing harsh realities with compassion. These are just the tip of the iceberg of amazing stories coming out of my student roster.

What I'm watching happen is the good part of this whole job. The self-awareness is clicking into place, the students are getting genuinely excited about their own stories, and those two things are coming together on the page in a way the admissions crowd is going to notice. And to my current seniors and parents reading this: you're doing the hard part right now, and it's working. This is the stretch that feels like the most work for the least visible payoff, but it's exactly the stretch that sets up everything after it. Keep going.

My whole approach is that the best essay is already in there somewhere. The student's job is to bring the raw material, the weird specific stuff they'd never think to write about, and my job is to help them dig until we find the story that could only have come from them. It takes more back-and-forth than people expect, but it's the part I love most.

So I have one small housekeeping note while I have you. My hourly rates for rising seniors go up on August 1st. If you're a rising senior and you already have hours with me, or you've been meaning to grab some before the fall gets loud, now's a good moment to lock in the current rate. It'll go up again in October as deadlines close in and time becomes a scarcer resource for everyone.

If you want to get set up before Friday, just hit reply and we'll sort it out.

Until next time... Nikki