While we love helping students enhance their profiles early on, developing college essays is one of our primary areas of expertise. The Golden Ticket approach to essay writing balances a deep knowledge of the inner-workings of college admissions decisions with the art of helping teens draw out personally meaningful experiences. In doing so, we help empower students to highlight their backgrounds, goals, strengths, and interests. With Golden Ticket Admissions, essay writing is both highly collaborative and profoundly personal, requiring students to dig deep so they can capture not only their unique life experiences, but also their reflections on how those experiences have shaped their growth, development, and aspirations.
This level of written personal reflection can be a tall order for anyone to grapple with, not to mention a teenager, whose writing experience may be limited to literature reviews and persuasive essays. That’s why Golden Ticket Admissions supports students at every juncture in discovering their unique stories and voices through a proven, collaborative, step-by-step approach:
ESSAY
BRAINSTORMING
For students who need guidance prior to beginning a college essay, they will engage in a guided brainstorming session to discuss potential topics, explore the impact of their experiences, and determine the best approach. Students will leave essay brainstorming sessions with an understanding of the topic they’ll be focusing on, and a full essay outline--laid out paragraph by paragraph--to serve as a guidepost while writing. Focus will be on helping each student fully and authentically unveil stories in a way that highlights their strengths and puts their life experiences in context. From there, students will be assigned to review a handful of sample essays, and complete their own first draft. *
REFINING
STAGE
In the editing stages, students will submit drafts of their essays to Golden Ticket Admissions. Within about 3-4 days, their counselor will respond with in-depth edits, comments, and suggestions to address phrasing, flow, content, and clarity. Tracked changes will be marked for the student to review on a shared Google Document. From there, students can incorporate the changes they agree with, and engage in a dialogue with their counselor’s feedback to propel the essay forward. This refining process involves a continuous, asynchronous, conversation via Google Documents, and can usually be completed within roughly 3-4 “rounds” of edits on any one piece.
FINAL
POLISH
Once the essay content is rock solid, we’ll complete one of the most important steps: chiseling away superfluous elements to uncover ‘essay gold.’ Just how do we do that? Word-count edits. Word count edits are some of the most intricate a student will receive because they involve going through the material with a fine-toothed comb, and rephrasing and refining many sentences while maintaining the integrity of the student’s piece. Following this process, the student will land on a final (or very close to final) draft of their essay, which will fit neatly within the prompt’s stated word-count limit.
*For the shorter supplemental essays, brainstorming sessions will teach students how to approach every prompt as an opportunity to effectively present the mosaic of elements that make them who they are--and by extension, valuable potential members of their future college’s student body.
Beyond the nuts and bolts, Golden Ticket Admissions enhances student outcomes by maintaining an encouraging and inspiring buoy of support, from start to finish, in what can otherwise feel like a laborious and daunting journey.
ESSAY EDITING FAQs
How long will the writing process take?
Typically, assuming students are sticking with their proposed deadlines, they can comfortably reach a “final draft” form of a piece within about three weeks. That said, given the often extensive number of essays due to schools within a very short window of time, students should begin their writing processes at least a few months ahead of their schools’ official deadlines. For the smoothest application process, students should keep on top of all proposed internal deadlines.
What if the application is due in a few days?
In the event that a student needs a guarantee of edits/feedback provided to them in under 72 hours, there is a "rush editing" option they may elect to initiate in an emergency. Doing so allows the student’s document to "jump the line" in the editing queue to ensure they can meet an imminent deadline. While we’re committed to doing everything in our power to support students when needed, rushing something as high-stakes as a college essay should never be “Plan A.” Please note that additional fees are associated with this expedited service.
“After working for the past couple of months with Ariel on his essays, my son just got admitted to Stanford!!!”
“After working for the past couple of months with Ariel on his essays, my son just got admitted to Stanford!!! Now, granted, 'your results may vary'. He had perfect grades, high tests scores and an otherwise strong application. But, so did thousands of other applicants.
There is no doubt in my mind that Ariel's working with him to edit and clarify the focus of his essays, is what helped put his application 'over the top' into that tiny 'acceptance' pile. She was able to respond to his rough draft essays with gentle insights and suggestions that helped him rewrite and polish them to perfection. My son goes to a large and lousy public high school and received zero advice on writing college essays. He was floundering blindly through them until we connected with Ariel.
Ariel functions almost as a teacher, giving the kind of instruction and feedback that helped my son to understand what admission officers are looking for, and how best to achieve that. No, she can't get a B student into Harvard, but I think that she can make your child's 'reach' schools a little more reachable. I truly believe Ariel can help guide him or her to create an essay that is 'the best' of whatever group of applicants your child is part of. Her prices are quite reasonable compared to many others and I think it's a modest investment with a potentially big pay-off. Also, she's pleasant to deal with—polite, low-key, punctual. I'm a nervous helicopter mom with lots of questions, which she was unfailingly patient in answering.
We worked totally online—we live eight hundred miles away—and that worked out fine—we Skyped a few times and the rest of the time, she and my son worked online. I really can't see any downsides here, but (struggling to find one), Ariel seems to be a gentle soul, so if you're looking for a drill sergeant type to force your child to write an essay, she's probably not that. :) Really, I can't say enough good things, and btw, even if my son hadn't gotten admitted to Stanford, I still would have written this glowing review!” - Cynthia W.
Ready to Mine Your Story for ‘Admissions Gold’?
