Before You Hire Anyone
The four questions a parent can act on tonight without paying me.
Does my child need a college essay coach?
Plenty of students don't. A kid with a decent draft, an English teacher with time, and a parent who can read it without flinching is in good shape already. The families who come to me are usually stuck in one of a few specific ways. The essay is competent and the child has vanished from it. The topic is impressive and dead on the page. Everyone in the house has read it so many times the words have stopped meaning anything. An outside reader with no stake in the outcome fixes that in a single pass.
My child's essay seems fine. What's wrong with fine?
Fine is usually a good sentence wearing a raincoat. An admissions reader meets your child as 650 words, after thirty-nine other essays that same morning, and competent prose about a meaningful experience is the baseline in that stack. What survives the pile is the student who noticed the thing nobody else would have bothered to write down. When a parent tells me the essay is fine, and that they have read it four times and no longer know what fine means, I already know what I am going to find. Nobody is home in it yet.
What makes a college essay fail?
The commonest failure is a draft that explains its own meaning. The student tells a story, then adds a paragraph instructing the reader how to feel about it, usually beginning with what they learned. Underline that paragraph and you have found a flag planted over buried treasure, because the scene beneath it has not done its work yet. The other frequent failure is the impressive topic. A student writes about the mission trip or the injury because it sounds like essay material, and the mind we actually wanted to meet never shows up.
Should I read my child's essay?
Read it once, then ask questions instead of fixing sentences. Four questions are worth more than any edit you could make. Could anyone else have written this? What were you actually trying to say here? Which part felt true and which felt like homework? Where are you still figuring it out? Then go quiet and let them answer. The most dangerous editor a student has is the one who loves them most.
How the Coaching Works
What does a college essay coach actually do?
I read what your child has written and tell them what is already working in it. Most of the job is finding the live sentences in a draft and building outward from there. I mark up the pages the way I wish every editor marked up mine, then write a letter explaining what I saw, what the essay seems to be about underneath its topic, and where a reader loses the thread. Your child does the writing. I do the reading, which turns out to be the part nobody at home can still do by October.
How much does college essay coaching cost?
Essay Review is $325 for a personal statement or a set of supplements, and includes margin comments on the draft plus a written synthesis letter. Activity List Quick Polish is $225 for up to five activities. A Full Activity List Revision, meaning all ten activities plus honors and awards, is $325. Summer Program Essay Review runs $300 to $375 and is available December through late March. I take four students a month for essay work. There are also guides in the store, from $27 to $97, for families who want the thinking without the service.
When should we start?
The summer before senior year is the best window, and August is when most families realize it. A draft that exists by Labor Day gives you room to be wrong once, which is the entire point of starting early. October is still workable. The week before a January deadline means we are polishing, and the finding is where the value sits. Juniors occasionally come to me in the spring, which is early enough that we are mostly talking about what to pay attention to over the summer.
Will you write or rewrite my child's essay?
No. Admissions readers can hear an adult in a seventeen-year-old's sentences, and the essay stops working the moment it sounds like a person with a mortgage. What I send back is a map. The revision belongs to your child, who also signs an affirmation on the Common App that the work is their own. A family that outsources the writing has paid for something that quietly hurts them.
Do you meet with students?
No. Everything is written. Your child submits drafts, the activity list, a resume, and an intake form, and I send back annotated pages and a letter. That is a deliberate choice. A seventeen-year-old on a video call starts performing for the adult on the screen, and performance is the exact thing we are trying to get out of the essay. Written feedback also lets a student sit with a hard note privately, be annoyed about it for a day, and come back to it at eleven at night when they are finally ready to hear it.
Do you work with students outside Connecticut?
Yes. I am in Mystic and I work with families throughout Connecticut, and remotely with students anywhere. Since all the feedback is written, time zones never become an issue.
What You Can Get Help With
Do you help with the activity list and the supplements?
Yes, and the activity list is the more underrated of the two. Ten entries, 150 characters each, and most students spend them restating the name of the club. Those descriptions get read closely, and they are the cheapest place in the whole application to sound like a specific person. I rewrite them with tonal options so your child can choose the version that sounds like them.
Do you help with summer program applications?
Yes, from December through late March. The selective programs, RSI and SIMR among them, want something different from the college essay. Shorter, and far more specific about what a student actually wants to find out. A sixteen-year-old who writes that she has always loved science has told a reader nothing. The one who describes the afternoon an experiment stopped behaving, and what she did next, has already made her case. Summer Program Essay Review is $300 to $375. One submission, one written response, the same shape as the college work.
Do you work with graduate school applicants?
Yes. A personal statement for law, medicine, physical therapy, or a doctoral program is a different job from the college essay, and adults keep writing it as though it were the seventeen-year-old version. The committee already holds your transcript. The statement is the one place where you get to say what you saw inside the work, and what question you are still carrying because of it. SOP Review is $495.
The Essay Compass and Self-Guided Tools
Is there a less expensive option than a full review?
Yes. Guides run $27 to $97 and carry the same thinking, without me reading your child's pages. Families often buy one in June and come back for a review in September, which is a sensible way to do it. If nobody in the house is sure what the essay is supposed to accomplish, start with The Essay Compass. If the activity list is the thing sitting untouched, the Activity List Toolkit at $67 covers the ten entries most families rush at the end.
What is The Essay Compass?
A $59 self-guided PDF for the student who has not yet worked out what her essay is actually about, which in June is nearly all of them. It is built around a reframe exercise called What This Is Actually About, plus the Now Lens test and a framework for choosing between two ideas she likes equally well. Every concept comes with a before and after, so she can see the difference rather than take my word for it. It works whether she has not started or has a draft that is not landing and cannot say why. The part that helps you: it gives your kid a structure for working through the essay without you in the room.
About Kristie
Who I am, what I’ve written, and how to get started.
What are your qualifications?
I taught English for twenty-five years, and I am a working writer, which is the part that matters most here. My essay "Molasses Brain" won the 2025 International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir; the judge, Sharon Butala, described it as "an altogether mature piece of writing." I am currently reading entries for a memoir prize, so I spend a good part of the year on the other side of the pile, deciding which pieces hold and which ones lose me on page two. I hold degrees from Smith College and Harvard University, and I am a former Fulbright exchange teacher. My coaching draws on the Morganelli Method, developed by my mentor John Morganelli.
How do we start?
Email me at kristie@kristieschmidt.com and tell me where your child is in the process. I will tell you honestly whether one of the services is the right fit, or whether a guide would do the same job for less. Slots fill first in August and again in late October.
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Anything this page didn't answer, email me at kristie@kristieschmidt.com and tell me where your child is in the process.
College Essay Office Hours is free and comes out twice a week. It's written for the parent at the kitchen table at 11:47 p.m., trying to help without quietly rewriting the sentence. What admissions readers actually respond to, and how to help your kid without taking the keyboard out of their hands.
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