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The only limit we have applied thus far is on the number of characters you can submit and that is being set at a maximum of 50,000.
In theory yes but that will require a lot of work and professionals dedicated for this job. We are considering a way of letting the community participate somehow.
Typely does not do grammar checking because it's hard and almost impossible to get right. The aim for Typely is to be precise and reliable.
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College application essay editing expertise.
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Hourly Personal Statement Plans
Do you already have a personal statement or supplemental essays drafted, but you’re not feeling 100% confident about it? Then our hourly plan is perfect for you. This efficient service gets right to the business of fine-tuning your essay, and it’s priced by the hour, so you’ll only pay for what you need.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Broad Review
You’ll send the personal statement draft you’ve already created to your consultant. They will give it a once over, focusing primarily on readability and coherence.
They’ll also be looking to ensure that you have:
- Fully answered the question.
- Presented yourself in a unique and distinctive way.
- Organized your personal statement(s) supplemental essays logically.
- Developed engaging openings and effective conclusions.
Step 2: Detailed Edit
Now that your consultant has helped you shape your story on a macro level, it’s time to drill down. In this second round, your consultant will focus on the microelements. They’ll pay special attention to things like clarity, grammar, style, spelling, and word usage. Once they’ve finely combed through your draft, they’ll shoot it back to you with suggested corrections.
Step 3: Submit Your Awesome Essay
After you’ve made all the corrections, your essay should be in good shape for you to do a final read through and send it on its way. It’s that easy. If you’re wondering how many hours to buy, consider the number of drafts you want reviewed. Then think about the general quality of your writing and how close your current draft is to being application-ready.
You can use the estimate guidelines in the chart below to determine your needs and move forward with purchasing some time ASAP. Or, if you need further assistance in making the decision, you can obtain a free estimate before purchasing.
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We offer complete application packages too, initial personal statement package.
When you purchase our Personal Statement Package, you’ll receive:
- Up-front guidance and advising to save you “churn time.” Your initial introduction to your consultant will be through a questionnaire. They’ll look over your answers and then schedule time to meet with you via video conference or phone call. This 'face-to-face' meeting will provide them with the opportunity to get better acquainted with you. You’ll brainstorm together in real time and determine how to best present yourself and your unique qualifications in your personal statement. In this session, you’ll go over the core idea behind your essay and how to approach structuring it, as well as any important life experiences you might want to include.
- An outline for your personal statement. Based on your questionnaire responses and the ensuing discussion you had on the brainstorming call, your consultant will create an outline for your personal statement that provides structure and direction. It consists of bullet points and prompts and is not a full draft. Applicant feedback has been that between the meeting and the outline, our clients have the confidence and direction they need to start writing. This initial step saves them time in creating their first draft and ultimately helps to produce a superior final result.
- Personal statement editing. Once you’ve completed a strong first draft, your consultant will dig into the copy and begin editing. They’ll be focusing primarily on clarity, word usage, style, grammar, and spelling. From there, you’ll receive a draft with suggested corrections and changes. You’ll revise it based on those recommendations and then shoot it back to them. At this point, you’ll likely do a bit of back-and-forth with your consultant, fine tuning and editing until you have a personal statement you’re 100% happy with. Note that most personal statements benefit best from 2-4 rounds of review, but there is no clock ticking.
Our thorough and individualized Personal Statement Package gives you the confidence of knowing you are submitting the strongest personal statement possible.
Personal Statement Package
Starting at $107 /mo with Affirm .
Our regular rates provide prompt two-business-day turnaround. Our rush rates provide maximum one-business-day turnaround.
Starting at $ 80 /mo with Affirm .
- One Personal Statement Package provides all the editing and consulting you need for ONE essay at ONE school. Using our assistance in modifying this essay for other schools will incur additional charges.
- Packages must be entirely used in one application year.
- If you request to change consultants or work with a second consultant, you will incur additional charges.
Have a question? Not sure if a package is right for you?
Boring but important stuff.
- All rates are expressed and billed in U.S. dollars.
- Our regular rates provide two-business-day turnaround for each round of editing.
- Services are subject to availability.
- All prices are subject to change without notice.
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Admission Essay Editing Services
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Admission Essay Editing
If you’d like to boost your chances of getting into your university or college of choice, you need an admission essay that sets you apart. And this means making sure it is clear, academic, and error free. But with the help of our admission essay proofreading service, you can be confident of making a great first impression.
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Our expert proofreaders have helped countless university applicants win a place on the course of their choice. As a result, we know what makes a good admission essay. So let us put out skills to work and help you fulfil your academic dreams.
Make sure your writing is the best it can be with our expert English proofreading and editing
With our admission essay proofreading service, we will:
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In most cases, we will also provide two copies of your edited essay:
- A ‘Clean’ copy in the original file format
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You can use this second copy to view every edit we make, so you are always in control of the final draft. And if your chosen file format doesn’t support Track Changes, we will adapt our process to match.
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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, getting college essay help: important do's and don’ts.
College Essays
If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?
If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.
Table of Contents
What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?
What's Good Editing?
What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.
What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?
Who Can/Should Help You?
Advice for editors.
Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?
The Bottom Line
What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.
Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.
Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."
Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.
Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.
Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.
Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?
Help Brainstorm Topics
Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.
If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .
Help Revise Your Drafts
Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .
Revision questions should point out:
- Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
- Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
- Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
- Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear
But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.
Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.
You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:
- Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
- Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
- Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
- Tell you what to say and how to say it
- Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
- Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager
Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.
Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.
- An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
- An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
- An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.
Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.
Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.
Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.
Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).
Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.
A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.
Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:
- If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
- If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
- If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.
What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?
Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.
On the Importance of Editing
Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )
Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )
On the Value of Proofreading
Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )
Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )
On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence
Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )
Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )
Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.
Parents or Close Relatives
Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.
A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?
One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.
Teachers or Tutors
A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.
Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."
If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.
Guidance or College Counselor at Your School
The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.
At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.
Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.
Friends, Siblings, or Classmates
Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .
Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.
You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.
If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.
First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .
Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.
Introduction Questions
- Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
- Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
- Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.
Essay Body Questions
- Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
- How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
- Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
- Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?
Reader Response Questions
- Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
- Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
- Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
- Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
- What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?
Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?
One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.
My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.
When to Consider a Paid Editor
In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.
If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)
If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.
If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.
If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .
If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.
Should You Hire an Essay Coach?
On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.
But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.
If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.
Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?
On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.
On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.
Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.
Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?
Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!
For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:
I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )
For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.
Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.
- You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
- A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
- A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
- A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
- All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
- Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
- If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
- Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.
Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .
Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .
Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.
Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.
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29-year-old's side hustle made $114,000 a year, so he quit his full-time job: I'm more successful and I work less
Carter Osborne spent two months agonizing over whether to leave his full-time job for his tutoring side hustle.
He did both jobs simultaneously for five years. But in August 2023, he was promoted to director at his public relations firm, giving him more responsibility. At the same time, his side hustle — editing high school seniors' college admissions essays — had grown large enough that between the two gigs, he was working 70 hours per week, he says.
The side gig netted him more than $114,000 last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It — effectively doubling his salary, he says. By that November, he was looking for a new full-time job — and realized none of his options had "that deep, passionate, resonate feeling that education has,'" says Osborne, 29.
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Then, one of his tutoring students was accepted to his first-choice school: Pitzer College, a private liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Osborne was so elated that he paced around his living room for several minutes, frantically texting the student his congratulations, he says.
Decision made: Tutoring would become his full-time job. Osborne left the PR firm in January, and is already finding that with more availability, he can take on more clients . Despite spring being a slow season for college admission tutoring, he already has 24 clients on his roster, he says. This time last year, he had just nine.
"I've found more success, and frankly, more love for the craft," says Osborne.
Transitioning a side hustle into a full-time business
Osborne started his side hustle as a graduate student in 2017, hoping to make a little extra money. He had a mentor — someone he'd consulted when applying to schools himself, four years prior — who referred him some clients.
The business "snowballed" from there, growing almost exclusively by word of mouth, Osborne told Make It in August.
Currently, he's working three hours per week, he says — researching essay trends, admissions stats and developing new tutoring services. That could ramp up to at least 40 hours per week by the end of the summer, and possibly more this coming fall.
That's because demand for tutors is high: Last year, Osborne worked with 52 clients and had to turn others away, he says. More people are applying to college than ever before, and students are struggling with their essays more post-Covid than they used to.
Even for the most well-equipped applicants, applying for college is an "extraordinary workload," Osborne says. When he applied for college in 2013, he wrote five or six essays. Now, many students applying to multiple schools are required to write upwards of 20, he says.
If demand rises enough, Osborne might hire another tutor — possibly a part-time contractor — to help with the workload, he says. He could also expand his business' services: Other types of students also write admissions essays, from transfers and graduate school applicants to children hoping to get into their middle school or high school of choice.
Navigating financial unknowns
Osborne doesn't quite know how to project a full year's earnings yet, since the bulk of his business' revenue comes in the second half of each year.
Before leaving his full-time job, he calculated his next six months of his household expenses — including his mortgage, business insurance and average weekly spending — and found enough of a "financial cushion" in his savings to cover it, he says.
In the meantime, Osborne is mostly using his offseason free time to exercise more, walk his dog and visit his parents more often, he says. Simply having the freedom to unplug makes him feel less stressed about taking his side hustle full time, he adds.
"I had the money for [vacation and travel last year], but no time to do it," says Osborne. "So, what good was it? ... It's been very freeing to me to be able to control the scope and the growth of my business."
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