Dreamers' College
Essay Program
Beyond the numbers that define you, a memorable essay can make or break your college application. Yet, you have no experience writing them! Nobody in your life teaches you how to write about yourself creatively. Nobody. With this program, we’re going to do it.
In our post-program research, our first cohort of 154 students who took the course reported a 58% increase in their ability to ideate their life's experiences, a 44.4% increase in their ability to analyse essays and wield story structures, and a 96% increase in essay efficiency! These lessons have genuinely helped students elevate their writing, and we hope they do the same for you!
Syllabus
Beyond the numbers that define you, a memorable essay can make or break your college application. Yet, you have no experience writing them! Nobody in your life teaches you how to write about yourself creatively. Nobody. With this program, we’re going to do it.
The Dreamers College Essay Program features 17 episodes and over 16 interviews with students from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, & USC. We break down the college application essay like never before, featuring chapters on Reflection, Storytelling, Writing, & Editing. Through our exercises, we will help you carve each element of your writing till your words truly embody the person you are.
Move past the words today's college applicants are married to: passionate, determined, and persistent. Gordan Allport spent his life uncovering 4,500 words to describe the human personality, and now, we will uncover yours. In Mementos, we’ll help you complete a 35 statement brainstorming exercise in the hopes of discovering an idea that you truly want to write about. Lastly, in The Final Venn, you’ll learn how to strategically match your experiences with your core values to write your essay.
Congratulations! You've officially completed the first challenge of essay writing - knowing yourself. Now it's time to master the next challenge, storytelling. In these episodes, we're going to take a deep dive into the anatomy of a story, examining multiple frameworks that almost every essay revolves around like the 3 Act Structure and the Hero's Journey.
The founding father of Rhetoric, Aristotle put forward literary devices that have been practiced and perfected by actors, orators, politicians, debaters, and advocates. From repetition to anaphoras, chiasmus to metaphors, we will also learn different rhetorical devices by analysing the essays of students who have successfully deployed them.
You dread it, you run from it, you might even have finished it - but somewhere you're secretly dissatisfied with your Common App Essay. In these episodes, we're going to be looking at different kinds of common application essays, and offer a few nuggets of advice to keep in mind while ideating, writing, and editing your essay.
What sparked your love for Chemistry? Was it the daily concoction of home-made perfumes you’d make when you were seven? When did you truly realize you wanted to surround yourself with bubbling sulphates for the rest of your life? We'll help you uncover that in the Why Essays. To tie it all up, we'll look at the shorties of accepted students, discuss what made them work, and how you can emulate the same.
According to Helen Sword, most prose can best be characterized as flabby - maybe even yours. Don't take it personally because as she writes in her book The Writer's Diet, your work can be transformed into a lean mean machine in just 5 key steps.
In these episodes, we’re going to evaluate the effectiveness of your anecdotes, quotes, and paragraph structures with The Insight Template. We’ll also learn how to ‘prune the big limbs’ before trimming adverbs and adjectives. Finally, we’ll tie it all up by coming back to my Common Application essay, and why I chose to make the edits I did.
This course isn't limited to one perspective! Captured in over 10+ hours of content are our Dreamers interviews. Breaking down the college application essay with HYPSM admits, these interviews bring in experienced students to share their insights with you.