Consulting details:

During Christina's first meeting(s) with your teen, she will help them choose the “right” topic to write about—one that best captures their story and will set them apart from other applicants.

Then during subsequent meetings, she will utilize her natural aptitude for interviewing to help transfer that story onto paper in a well-structured and organized format and use her keen eye for details and knowledge of a plethora of grammar and punctuation rules to polish the writing.

The following Common App essay helped the student who wrote it gain direct admission to one of the top 10 business undergraduate programs in the United States (Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, ranked #9 [2025])  and receive a four-year academic merit scholarship.

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

I haven’t always been a hard worker. Prior to fifth grade, I did the bare minimum for school because I was able to effortlessly do well at everything my teachers expected me to do. Unfortunately, those teachers didn’t expect me to write properly, so I was unaware that I didn’t know how to do so until my mom brought it to my attention in fifth grade. Shortly thereafter, she began providing me with a supplemental writing education to ensure that I would have a solid writing foundation and would develop a love of writing that would make me myself want to continue to grow as a writer throughout my life; I will forever be thankful for her astute observations and unwavering support, for she not only has enabled me to thrive in my school English classes but also has instilled in me the importance of dedication, consistency, and hard work in all aspects of my life—both at school and outside of it.

Since fifth grade, I have been working diligently with my mom on improving my writing skills. In fifth and sixth grade, my mom helped me develop a solid writing foundation by teaching me how to spell the 1,200 words used most frequently in writing, how to methodically edit writing and associate rules with my edits, and how to understand the different parts of speech in sentences. She then taught me how to properly plan for, construct, and revise writing and how to use a dictionary to ensure that I use words properly. Once I had built a solid writing foundation, she had me apply the aforementioned skills in the real world by helping her with her writing business. Whenever possible, I tutor her students who need extra spelling and editing help, mentor middle school students in her weekly writing critique classes, and edit and proofread her business emails and monthly newsletters.

Initially, I was not thankful for the writing help that my mom was providing me with, but as I have progressed through middle and high school, where teachers focus more heavily on writing, I have become more thankful for her help. At the beginning of sixth grade, my writing skills were still subpar; thus, I continued to work on them with my mom. As the school year progressed, I became more comfortable with writing, and at the end of it, I earned the highest possible score for the English Language Arts/Literacy section on California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, which motivated me to continue to work on my writing skills. In seventh and eighth grade, I didn’t have to spend as much time working on my school writing assignments and essays and got better grades on them. Those grades helped me get accepted into the advanced English program at my high school as a rising freshman, and each year I have been in the program, I have earned mostly A’s on my essays—grades I most likely would not have earned without my supplemental writing education. Moreover, I received numerous positive teacher comments on them such as “Your effort the entire year has been outstanding.”

Seeing the results of my hard work with writing has motivated me to work hard in all of my school courses—not just English—and in my extracurricular activities. I spend approximately three hours each weekday night making sure I thoroughly understand all of the concepts that were taught in my classes that day. For my orchestra class, I spend multiple hours outside of class practicing for solo and small group performances, and for football, I religiously show up to non-required meetings, lifts, and practices, and I am always 20 minutes early to every practice. Ultimately, the supplemental writing education my mom has provided me with has inspired me to continue to work hard and to inspire those around me to work hard. (Word count: 643)

The following Common App essay helped the student who wrote it gain admission to one of the top 10 animation undergraduate programs in the United States (Pratt Institute, New York, ranked #8 [2025]).

Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Animation is “everything” to me because it allows me to take ideas and images that are in my head and bring them to life using animation apps. I first started creating animations when I was in elementary school. It was then that I used a stop-motion Lego app to bring playdough characters that I had created to life by taking pictures of them and then having the Lego app flip through the pictures, like a flipbook, creating animations. I loved seeing my playdough characters move around and say things like, “Happy Birthday,” to my friends. The moving and talking characters inspired me to continue to work on animation.  

At the beginning of middle school, I started to view animation as more than just a hobby—I started viewing it as a potential career. It was then that I was introduced to multi-animator projects, animation music videos created by collaborating animators, on YouTube. Seeing how animators came together to create impactful stories inspired me to become an animator, and I began focusing on learning as much about animation as I could. I read The Animator’s Survival Kit, by Richard Williams, the animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, multiple times and began to master the techniques I needed to fully understand the medium of animation—most of my animation knowledge comes from that book. That knowledge provided a solid foundation for me to build upon during the Disney animation summer camp that I attended just before seventh grade. In that camp, I learned about storyboarding, creating visual representations of animations scene by scene; character design; and how to do Cel Animation, the most traditional form of animation. About a month after that camp, I bought my first digital animation app, Animation Desk, that allowed me to experiment with digital animation, which was extremely exciting for me. Then, the following year, when I was in eighth grade, I created my first animation short film for my application for Ruth Asawa School of the Arts High School (SOTA), in San Francisco, California, and the film helped me gain admission to the Media + Film Department there. 

While attending SOTA, I continued to fine-tune my existing animation skills and to learn new ones. In ninth grade, I started creating a short film outside of school every semester for SOTA’s annual Independent Projects. Each film took me approximately 190 hours to complete and helped me improve my storyboarding, character design, and 2D digital animation skills. Then in tenth grade, I was asked by an animation teacher at the Youth Art Exchange in San Francisco, an institution that offers free youth art programs, to share my animation skills with his students for 17 weeks. Shortly after finishing that internship, I began working on an almost year-long Soundstage Project at school with my junior class, a project where we had to create multiple sets for one story. That project helped me improve my understanding of 3D spaces and later helped me create better backgrounds for my animations, both at school and outside of it. Eager to further improve my animation skills, I participated in a seven-week-long Animation Portfolio Workshop in Toronto, Canada, to continue to build my animation portfolio, and while doing so, I drastically improved my model drawing and perspective drawing skills.

Since the end of the Animation Portfolio Workshop, I have continued to apply the skills that I learned in it to my school and personal animation projects. Despite how time consuming each of my animation projects is, I love the work because it is a way for me to share my feelings and emotions without using words, and I am eager to continue to learn more about animation in college. After college, I want to use my animation skills to become an animator, so I can share my moving characters' lives with a wider audience; I also hope to create my own animation studio someday. (Word count: 648)