Dawn Roan, Founder of Dawn Roan Education, is a Harvard graduate, a 99th-percentile scorer on multiple standardized tests, and an elite admissions, academic tutoring, and standardized test preparation coach who has invested more than 30 years into transforming students’ learning, academic success, test performance, college admissions, graduate education, and career opportunities.

Q: Why Is Writing Personal Statement Essays so hard? How can I make the process easier?

Other than occasional throw-away prompts like How I Spent My Summer Vacation, most high schools do not provide opportunities for students to write personal essays, let alone teach them how to craft them well. High schools predominantly teach students to report, summarize, interpret, analyze, take a position on an issue, and support that position with argumentation using logos, pathos, and ethos. However, unless students take extracurricular classes on biography/memoir or keep a personal journal of thoughts, feelings, and happenings, students rarely have experience writing about themselves and their experiences. For many students, the college admissions process is the first time they write something substantive about themselves, and the process is high-stakes, overwhelming to even talented and experienced writers, and scary.

Writing about personal experiences also feels uncomfortable and vulnerable, like exposing the core of oneself for a college admissions committee to judge merit, worth, or value—like a modern-day jousting competition, except you can’t see the competition you face and don’t know the basis for the decision about how you stack-rank against peers. That setup inherently feels uneasy, uncertain, and intimidating.

In an effort to help students navigate the process of creating personal statements that are powerful, compelling narratives demonstrating students’ core values and personal character, Dawn Roan Education has created a Personal Statement Essay writing course that will guide students from brainstorming through essay creation and final edit.

The culmination of 30 years of private admissions coaching to selective, highly selective, and top-tier colleges and universities, this course helps students avoid admissions essay pitfalls; find their best, most pivotal stories; put them together into a cohesive, insightful narrative; and edit to improve voice, logical flow, and precision of diction.

To accommodate students’ varied schedules, the Personal Statement Essay course is designed to be self-paced.

If students would like to supplement the Personal Statement course with Private Admissions Coaching at a few key places, I would recommend (1) a brainstorming check, because there’s no way to improve an essay built on a bad idea; (2) a story check, to make sure the story is worth telling and is told in a logical, meaningful way; (3) a final editing check, to minimize grammar errors and ensure the writing is precise, active, and succinct.

Click here to receive an email or text message when the Personal Statement Essay course is ready for enrollment.

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