Whether you’re a brand new counselor or have decades of experience, essay coaching can be the hardest part of college counseling.
It doesn’t have to be that way!
We’ve guided hundreds of your colleagues through our signature training program, The College Essay Experience.
Now it’s your turn to write a college essay with a Wow coach.
Over the course of four weeks, you will write your own essay with a private coach, who will guide you through our simple 10-step process, using the same writing exercises, brainstorm process, videos, and reading materials we use with our students.
When you’re done, we’ll share our 60-page CEE resource packet. It explains the purpose of each step, provides the writing exercises and review guidelines you used for your essay, and includes templated versions of the emails you received from your coach.
Once you’ve completed the College Essay Experience training, your Community Membership will take on a whole new dimension. Get access to:
There’s just one meeting with your coach. Everything else happens via email. The training wraps up with a final webinar, which is recorded for those who can’t attend live. Click on any of our CEE schedules for a sense of what you’ll be doing during your training.
Each year, CEE fills up more quickly than the last. Don’t miss out!
After you sign up, you’ll choose your training dates.
For the best choice of training dates, don’t delay!
Schedule 1: Jan 8 – Feb 3 FULL
Schedule 2: Jan 29 – Feb 24 FULL
Schedule 3: Feb 19 – Mar 17 FULL
Schedule 4: Mar 12 – Apr 7 FULL
Schedule 5: Apr 2 – Apr 28 FULL
Schedule 6: Apr 23 – May 19 FULL
Schedule 7: May 14 – Jun 9 FULL
Summer 2023: Limited availability
This year is nearly full. Fill out this form to let us know you’re interested for this year or next.
Whether you feel confident or nervous, confused, or clear about the college essay, we’ll show you how to teach students to write strong, effective essays with less stress and greater confidence for you, your students, and their parents. What more could you want?
Our approach is unique. Our philosophy is eye-opening. We’ve helped hundreds of professionals like you improve their college essay coaching practices.
“CEE was an eye-opening experience. The Wow process is foundational—a building block. It helped me understand what I was doing, how, and why.”
“Wow is really structured; each step is easy to grasp and understand. And there is no step that required me to have a miracle happen.”
“CEE is different from other programs. I learned to follow the process, and how and why to back off and leave the students alone.”
“The Wow process will help any AP English teacher break out of the academic writing boxes. I am a much better writing teacher now.”
“Before CEE, I was looking for an English class essay. I did not understand that colleges don’t need another five-paragraph essay. Wow makes total sense.”
“You don’t have to be a great writer to help students tell their stories. CEE gave me tremendous confidence that makes my life much easier.”
We’re so sure THIS is going to change the way you think and guide your students, we can’t wait to include you!
As a CEE-trained pro, you’ll earn a Wow-certified Essay Coach badge to use on your website, social media, email signature, print pieces, or any other way you communicate with parents, students, and colleagues.
We’ll help you become the college essay expert you’re meant to be! But hurry, CEE sells out quickly every year.
As a college counselor, and business coach, Cyndy McDonald was curious about CEE when the program began in 2020.
Cyndy is a force in the college counseling world. She founded the Higher Education Consultants Association. She created GuidedPath, a technology platform for college counseling professionals, and teaches in UCLA’s online college counseling certificate program. She was already familiar with Wow’s approach to the college essay when she started hearing friends and colleagues talk up the program, but she wasn’t ready to write her own essay quite yet.
She was ready in 2022.
Cyndy loved how everything in the Wow process has a purpose. “There are certain things we all do, and we do not know why we do them. The Wow process is foundational — a building block. CEE was an eye-opening experience.”
Cyndy has a lot of respect for the Wow process, its step-by-step instructions, and the hands-off approach to revision; she appreciates how easy it was to write her own essay and has incorporated what she learned from CEE to improve her essay workshops.
“Being the student gave me a new perspective. I was able to really understand what students were going through as they wrote their own college essays,” she said. “Going through the Wow process, from beginning to end, was a valuable opportunity. No matter how much experience any of us has, we can all update our process and add new things to what we do and learn how to do things differently.”
In addition to coaching her colleagues, Cyndy works with students; she says CEE helped her become more empathetic toward them as they write their application essays. She believes any pro who guides students apply to college can benefit from CEE, and that it will help new counselors “save time and prevent them from making mistakes.”
“A lot of people come to this business from such diverse professional backgrounds with limited experience guiding students with the essay,” Cyndy said. “Following the Wow Method helps jumpstart the brainstorming process and shortens the essay revision cycle.”
Writing his own college essay with a Wow coach was “transformative” for Venkates “Swami” Swaminathan, founder and CEO of Lifelaunchr, an online platform he designed for college admissions coaching.
Swami, a former engineer, already had a process he liked when he signed up for Wow’s signature CEE program but was looking to improve it. Previously, he had completed another essay company’s training, but it did not resonate with him the way CEE did. He liked systems and structure, which the other program lacked.
“Each step is easy to grasp and understand,” Swami said. “And there is no step that required me to have a miracle happen.”
He realized, too, that the student essay was not supposed to be a masterpiece.
“I realized the essay was just supposed to be a story about me and that my job was to get the person who is reading it to get to know me as a human being,” Swami said. “If that is all it accomplishes, that is more than enough.”
Essay coaching has become easier for Swami, and his students are finishing personal statements in less than four weeks. He is down to three or four drafts, rather than six or seven.
In addition to incorporating Wow’s ten steps into his process, Swami has even added some of Wow’s language to his vocabulary. In the new introductory video for essay coaching services on his platform, Swami talks about helping students write “effective” essays, rather than good, perfect, great, or excellent essays.
“Good or great suggests the writing itself is remarkable. That’s not what this is about. It should be an effective essay, not a good essay. I love that. I use the phrase constantly now.”
Quyen Nguyen used to push her students too hard on college essays. She had always been a high achiever, putting pressure on herself to succeed.
Soon, she realized she was not helping her students.
“I was wearing myself out – and my students. That was totally unnecessary,” she said. “I treated my students’ essays as if they were my own, as if they were going to get published.”
She wanted to change her approach, but she didn’t know how. Quyen had been using tips and ideas she picked up from webinars, conferences, and colleagues. She had tried other professional trainings and created some of her own materials; that wasn’t enough.
“It was nice to pick up tips here and there, but I was overwhelmed,” she said.
Quyen had participated in many selective educational programs and fellowships herself, and she had also earned her Ed.M. from Harvard in international education policy. With her credentials, applicants to college and grad school came to her for guidance. She later took a job in Asia for an IEC startup, where perfection was the goal.
When she started her own firm, she understood how important process was in business. But Quyen still did not have an essay process. And she could not get the idea of perfection out of her mind.
That all changed once she started CEE and wrote an essay of her own, guided by a Wow coach, using Wow’s step-by-step process.
“CEE is different from other programs,” she said. “I learned to follow the process, and how and why to back off and leave the students alone. I don’t want to be pushing and stressing out the students.”
Suzanne Lewis, a former AP English teacher, completely change her approach to essay coaching after starting her college counseling firm.
“It’s so different from the expository and persuasive writing I taught in high school,” she said. “Teachers get so bogged down in the other writing that we forget about the richness in personal narrative.”
Suzanne found what she was looking for in CEE.
At her high school, she was an academic advisor/educational planner who helped students apply to college. Suzanne focused on the writing, not the writer. She measured essay quality by word choice, flow, style, transitions, sentence variety and structure, spelling, and grammar.
“I wanted them to sound like good writers, as opposed to telling their own story in their own words.”
In hindsight, Suzanne realized she did not have adequate time, nor did she understand the purpose of the college essay well enough, to question her approach.
She learned a lot when she wrote her own essay with a Wow coach.
“I had no idea what I wanted to write about when I started,” Suzanne said. “The process helped me figure it out.”
Today, as a Wow Partner, Suzanne uses the ten-step process with her own students. She’s much more confident, and she has a message to share with other English teachers.
“The Wow process will help any AP English teacher break out of the academic writing boxes,” she said. ”Focusing on content, then structure, and then polish is a far more organic process. I wish someone taught me how to teach writing when I was learning to be a teacher. I’m a much better writing teacher now.”
Susan Gentry, a counselor at a private school in Orlando, began working with juniors on college preparation during the pandemic.
As a people person, she loved connecting with her students and felt good about her counseling abilities, but she did not have any instructions or guidelines for effective essay coaching. So, she just dove in, talked to students about their ideas, and then waited to see what they wrote.
She did not know how to give helpful feedback, and without realizing it, Susan overstepped. She expected to read essays that looked like English class papers, complete with an introduction, supporting paragraphs, and a neat conclusion. She added transitions, suggested word changes, fixed sentences, and even rewrote some pieces of her students’ essays.
She had already taken an essay coaching training through another company, but it did not help. The program provided tips sheets, exercises, videos, and sample essays, but that giant pile of resources did not add up to a process. Susan had no idea what to do when that training ended.
“I was terrified and felt like I was drowning.”
In contrast, Susan felt relieved and empowered after writing her own college essay through CEE. With a Wow coach supporting her, it was so easy to follow the ten steps and finish her personal statement in less than four weeks. Susan knew she could apply what she learned to a group workshop for her school.
Susan is able to help students get started with ease, and she has become a lot more efficient guiding her students to the end of their college essays. She no longer oversteps her role when she reviews essays. And even better, her students are more prepared and trust the process too.
After a decade working as a software engineer, Amardeep Bhatia decided to change careers; she discovered she was a natural at guiding students – especially those who were STEM-focused – to best fit colleges.
But she struggled with essay coaching. As good as she was at her job as an international college counselor, Amardeep was not a confident writer. She believed her students, for whom English was not a first language, were not good writers, either.
“I was terrified of the essay,” she said. “My students are known for STEM, not language skills. I thought creative writing was out of my league, and that it couldn’t be a process like math or science.”
Amardeep spent too much time on each essay draft, allowing her students to endlessly write and revise. She would routinely meet three to five times with each one, just to brainstorm topics.
Because of the time she devoted to essays, she could not accommodate all the families who reached out to her and had to turn many away. That cost her time and money, which was not a good business model.
Everything changed after she completed CEE.
“I was wrong; writing is a process,” Amardeep said. “CEE has given me confidence and helped me tremendously. I have created a process with customized instructions for my students based on what I learned from the course. This made my life so much easier.”
Since learning the Wow Method, Amardeep has been running small group workshops with four to five students at a time. She takes each group through the first four steps of the Wow Method in just two hours. And she no longer has to turn families away. In fact, business is up 40%!
