Most essay advice is generic. Yours shouldn’t be.
I work mostly with STEM and international applicants, and I think the standard playbook fails both of them in specific, predictable ways. Here’s how I actually think about this work — so you can decide if it’s the way you want to work too.
None of this is a formula. It’s a set of convictions I’ve built from reading thousands of essays and writing my own — and they shape every session, every margin note, and every hard cut.
![[PLACEHOLDER: candid workspace shot — desk, laptop, and drafting notes]](/images/approach-desk.svg)
Why most STEM essays fail
Strong STEM applicants tend to write essays that read like a second resume — a tour of the research, the olympiad, the internship, ranked by prestige. It's the instinct that got you the credentials in the first place, and it's exactly what flattens the essay.
Admissions officers already have the list. They can see the awards on the activities section. What they can't see is why any of it matters to you, and that's the only thing the essay is actually for.
The best STEM essays are almost never about the achievement. They're about the small, specific curiosity underneath it — and they trust the reader to be smart enough to connect the two.
What admissions officers don't understand about your school system
If you're applying from outside the US, a reader may have no context for your grading scale, your national exams, or how selective your current school already is. A rank or a score that means everything where you are can land as noise.
That's not a disadvantage to hide — it's context to translate. We make the stakes legible without over-explaining, so your record reads as the achievement it actually is.
The goal is never to sound more American. It's to keep what's distinct about your perspective while making sure nothing important gets lost across the gap.
Listing achievements vs. building a narrative
A list tells the reader what happened. A narrative makes them feel why it mattered — and only one of those survives a reader who's on their fortieth essay of the day.
Building a narrative doesn't mean inventing drama. It means finding the real through-line already sitting in your material and cutting everything that doesn't serve it, even the impressive parts.
This is the hardest and most valuable part of the work, and it's where having an outside reader who will be honest with you changes the outcome most.
Specific beats impressive, every time
Students reach for the biggest words and the grandest claims because they're afraid small and specific won't be enough. It's almost always the opposite.
One exact, sensory, true detail does more work than a paragraph of abstraction. 'I alphabetized my mother's spices the week after the funeral' tells a reader more than any sentence with the word 'resilience' in it.
We hunt for those details relentlessly, because they're what a reader actually remembers a week later in a committee room.
The supplements are where applications are quietly won
Everyone pours energy into the personal statement and then dashes off the supplements the night before. That's backwards. The 'why us' and short-answer prompts are where fit gets demonstrated — or fumbled.
A great supplement is specific about courses, professors, and problems you actually want to work on. It reads like you've imagined yourself there, because you have.
This is some of the most coachable work in the whole application, and it's where a little strategy goes a very long way.
Your voice is the whole point
I coach, edit, and strategize — I never ghostwrite. Every word stays yours, both because it's the ethical line and because admissions officers can tell when an essay wasn't written by the applicant.
My job is to help your voice come through more clearly than it does in your own head on a first draft, not to replace it with mine.
If we do this right, the finished essay sounds unmistakably like you — just the sharpest, most deliberate version of you.
Myths I’d like to put to rest
A lot of essay advice is well-meaning and wrong. Here's what I tell students instead.
There's a formula that gets you in.
If there were, admissions officers would have stopped reading essays years ago. The essays that work are the ones that couldn't have been written by anyone else.
You should write what colleges want to hear.
Colleges read tens of thousands of essays written by students guessing at what they want. The ones that stand out are honest, not strategic in that shallow way.
A tragic story is a strong story.
What matters isn't how hard the experience was — it's how thoughtfully you reflect on it. Ordinary material, handled with insight, routinely beats dramatic material handled without it.
More accomplishments make a better essay.
The essay is the one place to be a person, not a list. Cramming in achievements is the fastest way to sound like everyone else.
How the philosophy becomes the work
Convictions are cheap without a method. Here's how these ideas show up in an actual engagement.
We find the material before we write
The first sessions are mostly talking. I'm listening for the story you tell almost by accident — it's usually the one worth writing.
We shape it before we polish it
Structure and voice come first. There's no point line-editing a paragraph that's going to get cut once we find the real spine.
We cut until only the true parts remain
The hardest, most valuable edits remove the impressive-but-hollow bits. What's left is narrower, sharper, and unmistakably yours.
We pressure-test the whole application
Personal statement and supplements should pull in the same direction. We make sure the pieces add up to one coherent person.
What I won’t do
The limits matter as much as the method. These are the lines I hold with every student, without exception.
- Write or rewrite your essay for you — this is coaching, never ghostwriting.
- Promise an admissions outcome. No one honest can.
- Push you toward a dishonest or exaggerated version of your story.
- Flatten your voice into something generically 'American' or 'safe.'
If that’s the kind of read you want on your essay, let’s talk before you commit to anything.
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