Somewhere buried beneath ten years of being asked what you want to be when you grow up is the answer to that ominously daunting admissions prompt. Our job is to help you find it. Yours? Stop apologizing because “you’ve never done anything significant” and stop writing soul-sucking and snore-inducing essay drafts telling us what you think the colleges want to hear. The truth? They don’t know what they’re looking for. They know when they see it.

The coaching process is the excavation of the raw material that is already in you, shaped into prose that is precise, personal, and unmistakably yours. Trust us, you have it in you.

Scarlet Margin is, by design, a small operation. One counselor. A short roster. In exchange for this, we ask that students arrive prepared to do the actual work. We are not a ghostwriting service or a particularly patient audience for drafts hastily scribbled five minutes before session time or rough drafts that need 8 hours of “last minute” help at 11:30pm the day of the deadline. We are, however, an exceptionally good reason to start early and rigorously dedicated to the success of those students who are mutually committed.

Never in my youth did I dare imagine that once I had finished writing the hundreds upon hundreds of essays required for matriculation that I would one day sign up to read and edit thousands more for the next generation. And yet here we are.

One day, someone asked me to help with their college essay. Then someone else did. Thirteen years later it has officially become my most epic of side quests, and the only one I have never once considered abandoning.

My actual background is in the arts. My education is in English literature, with a particular fondness for writers who understood that the most interesting thing about a person is usually the thing they’re most tempted to leave out. This turns out to be useful in college admissions.

I spent a meaningful portion of my Harvard winters walking frozen riverbanks in a black coat of operatic proportions, listening to Hans Zimmer at a volume that precluded all human interaction and then reclusively retiring to a dark practice room where I would compose deliciously eerie melodies into the wintry night.

I bring this up because what I have learned — and what I bring to every student — is that the essay is never about the résumé. It is about the person underneath it. For thirteen years I have sat across from students who arrive convinced they have nothing to say. They are, without exception, wrong. They are also, without exception, considerably more interesting than their first draft suggests. It is my job — and my immense pleasure — to help them see just how remarkable they truly are.

There’s this moment at the end of our time together where I see each student begin to walk boldly in who they always were, but just hadn’t seen yet. That moment is why I continue to do what I do.