From our founder, Ben Urwand:

“I always thought I was going to be a history professor. But when I was doing my PhD at UC Berkeley, I wasn’t interested in academic conferences or administrative duties; I was much more excited by teaching. I loved helping students improve their writing and find their voice, and I supervised 30 senior theses while I was at Berkeley.

At the same time, I found my voice in my own writing. I was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, a unique group of scholars across the disciplines, and I published The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler with Harvard University Press in 2013. The book attracted national attention because I identified a subject that was little known — Hollywood’s business with Nazi Germany in the 1930s — and I found a distinctive way to express it.

I soon realized that my specific talent lay in breaking through the noise and making an impression — and helping others do the same. I began working with students on their college essays in 2016, and I noticed that the vast majority of essays sounded the same. Students were getting a lot of advice about what they “needed to say” to get in. As a result, they weren’t doing the hard work necessary to answer a prompt and stand out on the page.

I found that if I sat with students and took them seriously — showing faith in their judgment while also being honest and direct — they always came up with a distinctive story about themselves. Not only that, but they felt proud of what they submitted. The essay turned out to be a critical part of their applications, and time and again I noticed that students could get surprising, impressive, results if they focused on their actual experience.

All of us at Real College Essays share the same vision: to help our students find their voice and tell the best story they can at this important moment in their lives.”