AWe’ll give you 24,926 reasons. That’s the average number of applications submitted by the Class of ‘07 to the 20 selective colleges on the chart below. Stacked, that’s as high as a 31-story building, and up seven stories from just a few years ago. Look at the last column of our chart: that's the weight each school attaches to your essay. It’s why you need a college essay that’s Uniquely U.!

BC 28,850 20,743 I
BROWN 19,097 16,806 VI
COLUMBIA 23,752 16,000 VI
CORNELL 30,383 20,000 I
DARTMOUTH 14,176 10,259 VI
DUKE 17,748 14,000 VI
G-TOWN 16,163 13,244 I
HARVARD 27,462 (2008) 18,693 I
N-WESTERN 21,930 15,460 VI
PENN 22,646 17,666 VI
PRINCETON 21,262 13,654 VI
STANFORD 23,958 17,919 I
TUFTS 15,387 14,193 I
BERKELEY 55,464 31,108 VI
UCLA 50,755 41,500 VI
UCONN 22,796 11,781 I
UMICHIGAN* 26,796 21,132 C
UNC-CH** 19,728 17,000 C
UVA* 18,048 17,060 I
YALE 22,813 (2008) 13,270 VI AVERAGE 24,926 18,074 VI !!!

VI - Very Important , I - Important , C - Considered
*ONLY ACCEPTS 1/3 OUT OF STATE
**ONLY ACCEPTS 17% OUT OF STATE

A
Yes, we do:

Uniquely U.'s Guarantee

Total Peace of Mind that every application you submit is the absolute best effort you are humanly capable of.

24/7 Personal Service throughout your college application process: for scheduled appointments, spur of the moment drop-ins, e-mail exchanges, online I-M conferences, even house calls!

Domestic Tranquility when you write your college essays with us, all parental nagging ceases. (Guarantee applies only to your essays; when it comes to picking up your room, you’re on your own.)

The Professional Techniques you learn working with us will permanently improve ALL your future writing.

AHa ha ha ha ha.

No.

ASince so few teachers in this country are fluent with the writing process, Uniquely U. devoutly hopes so. There are people with impeccable credentials who agree. For the sanest, most authoritative stance on the subject we know of, here are some thought provoking observations from Seymour Kreisberg's classic take on the subject in Getting Into College: The Application Essay: Texts, Subtexts, and Teacher Intervention, The Harvard Education Letter, November/December 1995.

The debunking of the old myth that the SAT is not “teachable” has given rise to a huge SAT-cram-school industry, and college counselors now admit that preparing for entrance exams is essential for most students. But not enough attention is paid to helping students with their application essays, where the guidance of an experienced coach can potentially have an even greater effect on the outcome.

Help can come from many sources: teachers, college counselors, parents, family friends, and even the Internet. Students in private schools and certain well-endowed public schools have long enjoyed this kind of personal coaching on their applications. Yet even in these schools help can be random, varying by luck, student initiative, and parental intervention. Many teachers feel unsure about the propriety of helping students with application essays, and few schools have set up systems for doing so. Most public high school students are completely on their own.

College officials agree that help is allowed, but how much?

...from an educator’s point of view, I would argue that a course, or some type of clinic focused on the application essay, is both good pedagogy and good politics. After all, there is no real difference between this kind of coaching and what is otherwise called education: leading the student out by guidance, questioning, and discipline.

AWe're sincerely happy for your good fortune IF your English teacher has enough time and energy to devote to guiding you through the comprehensive series of steps deep rewriting requires.

BUT...

• What if you both recognize that there is an awkward patch in your essay's middle?
• Will your English teacher know that the source of the problem is a still buried unifying metaphor upon which your essay's internal logic hinges?
• Will he/she know which specific creative writing techniques to call into play to swiftly, concretely, and successfully solve your problem?

If all you want is an essay, you’ll be fine. If you want an essay that stands out from the pack, you need Uniquely U.

AUniquely U. has achieved some of our most personally gratifying successes with college-bound seniors who have learning disabilities—and with tons of kids who were simply spooked by writing. One of Uniquely U.’s most fundamental directives for anybody is "write the way you talk." If you’re more comfortable relating what’s on your mind out loud, we’ve proved to be fast and accurate transcribers! The simple eloquent essay that then interactively emerges from our five-step process invariably results in a stratospheric boost in a feeling of mastery and confidence on the part of its formerly shaky author.

AAll professional writers work with editors. Not one of them would ever dream of submitting his/her work for publication under any other circumstances. Too much is at stake for YOU not to do the same. Tellingly, often it’s the most secure writers who gain the most from working with us—perhaps because they are already comfortable with the "given" that real writing is re-writing.

ANot calling Uniquely U.! No parent is completely sane your senior year. "Did you start your college essay?" We at Uniquely U. have come up with the solution. Parents hand you over to us, secure that a brilliant essay will ensue. In exchange, parents agree to completely remove themselves from the essay writing process until you decide it’s ready to be read. They stop nagging; you relax. This is a wonderful thing.

AIronically, students who receive the fullest academic support from elite, private, and suburban schools tend to produce the most vanilla essays. Uniquely U. will not let you write a blandly vapid essay. We promise to guide you to that totally unprogrammed place within yourself you thought you’d lost, reconnect you with your inner child you thought you weren’t still allowed to be.

AUnderestimating the amount of time it takes to write a good one! Come fall, you’re going to be stressed out beyond your wildest capacity to imagine. Should you apply early? Retake your SAT’s? Pile on a few more SAT2’s? Can this and more be done without your GPA going into free-fall? Do yourself a favor; write your essay in the summer!

AEach year the University of Chicago devises three all new questions for applicants to choose from. They are always thought-provoking. This is our favorite:

Names have a mysterious reality of their own. We may well feel an unexpected kinship with someone who shares our name, or may feel uneasy at the thought that our name is not as much our own as we imagined. Most of us do not choose our names; they come to us unbidden, sometimes with ungainly sounds and spellings, complicated family histories, allusions to people we never knew. Sometimes we have to make our peace with them, sometimes we bask in our names’ associations. Ruminate on names and naming, your name, and your name’s relationship to you.

A
MIT's, 1999:

a) In 100 words or less (yes, we will count) what interests you most intellectually? Why? Why are you good at it?

b) In 100 words or less (yes, we will count) what interests you most extracurricularly? Why? Why are you good at it?

A"...It was the most I ever threw up, and it changed my life forever."

A"He looks crazy! Reading his essay would waste valuable seconds!" (Balls up Homer’s application.)

A
Yes, we do.

THERE IS ALWAYS ONE MOMENT IN CHILDHOOD WHEN THE DOOR OPENS & LETS THE FUTURE IN. —Graham Green

A
Yes, we do.

Oz: So you're going to Michigan next year?

Heather: Yeah. My parents want me to go to Northwestern, but I don't want to write all those extra essays they make you do. I mean, how am I supposed to know what my "most emotionally significant moment" was?

—from American Pie (1999)

A

The Little Known Story of
How the Teaching of Writing
Went Off Track in the United States

Cambridge, Massachusetts.The year is 1851. Francis J. Child, Harvard professor of Rhetoric has just returned from an exhilarating three-year leave of absence spent studying drama and philology at the Universities of Berlin and Göttingen. Compared to Harvard, German universities are temples to the creative intellect. Professors there do not have to lecture on Classic Oratory and Forensics, subjects students preparing to be theologians and lawyers have grimly ground away at since the Middle Ages. At German universities, being a professor means you get to conduct pioneering research the way the Brothers Grimm do. There, professors hand the scut work over to lowly graduate students. Upon his return, Child announces to Harvard that unless some changes are made in what and how he teaches, he will be departing for Johns Hopkins, which is just opening its doors, the first American university based on the German model.

Harvard hastily kowtows to Professor Child’s demands. The mandatory composition course he detests is no longer part of the curriculum. In its place: English Literature, a brand new course of study. It will draw upon a required reading list of fifty books, which under Child’s successors A.S. Hill and Charles W. Eliot become known as “The Harvard Classics.” The arrangement frees Child to devote his energy to his academic passion: the cataloging of English and Scottish ballads.

Still, how to guarantee that incoming freshmen will be able to write clearly and concisely if Harvard no longer teaches courses in rhetoric, oratory, and English composition? In 1874, an ingenious pass-the-buck solution evolves which other colleges hasten to adopt, and which remains in place to this very day:

“…each candidate for admission will be required to write a short English composition, correct in spelling, punctuation, grammar and expression, the subject to be taken from one of the following works: Shakespeare’s Tempest, Julius Caesar, and The Merchant of Venice; Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield; Scott’s Ivanhoe and Lay of the Last Minstrel.”

Already knowing how to write becomes a prerequisite for admission.

AYou can solve that epiphany-generating mystery yourself by exploring Our Classical Roots.

A

The triangle represents the classic Aristotelian narrative arc, to which short story writer Alice Adams, by way of Anne LaMott in Bird by Bird, has applied the formula, A-B-D-C-E. Because the college essay is most akin to a short story, Uniquely U. has devised a powerful effective way to tailor the A-B-D-C-E triangle, "even" to writing your college essay. For more information about Uniquely U.'s classic but revolutionary approach to writing, check out Our Classical Roots.

AThe essay is attributed to Hugh Gallagher, who reportedly submitted it in 1990 at the age of 18 to New York University, where he was admitted. It won first prize in the humor category of the 1990 Scholastic Writing Awards, appeared in Literary Cavalcade and Harper’s.

3A. In order for the admissions staff of our college to get to know you, we ask that you answer the following question: Are there any significant experiences you have had, or accomplishments you have realized, that have helped to define you as a person?