What Makes a College Application Essay “Great”?

Are you starting to think about writing your college application essay? If so, you need to know what makes a great essay to know how to start brainstorming and writing your own. You can often recognize a “great one” when you read or hear it—but...

Essay Hope for Math/Science Students!

    I get a lot of students with my college application essay tutoring who fall into the “math/science” end of the learning spectrum. In general, that means that classes such as Algebra II and Chemistry come relatively easy to them, and English and...

A Q&A With Me!

One of my favorite student-run blogs on college admissions, The Prospect, featured this interview with me last week. I thought the writer, Oriana Halverson, did a terrific job, and flushed out some helpful information:   Essay Hell’s Janine Robinson: Everything...

How to Find Your Essay Voice

  Many students have trouble finding their “voice” while writing college application essays. One of the biggest problems I see is that students want to sound smart and impressive, and they often lose their natural story-telling voice by forcing in big...

How to Write Your Transfer Essay for the Common App

When my son wanted to transfer from his small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest into a larger university to pursue chemical engineering, I offered to help him with his college application transfer essay. I thought it would be a good opportunity to share my...

Believe in the Right Fit

  The winter flurry of letters is landing in mail boxes around the globe this time of year. I just heard from three ecstatic students who learned last week they were accepted into their dream schools–one was Harvard, another Wellesley, and a third...

A Peek into the Many Worlds of Prompt 1 of the UC Essays

UPDATE: The University of California announced NEW essay prompts for 2016-17. Read about how to answer them HERE. The following content in this post is no longer relevant and is outdated! About three years ago, I wrote a post to try to help students applying to the...