College Essay Guy Workshops
& Professional Development

Our standard rates start at $1600 per workshop. Most schools run a series of two or three workshops, because one session is enough to get students brainstorming but not enough to carry them through structure, drafting, and revision.

Reduced pricing is available for public schools and community based organizations. Tell us about your school or organization on a call and we will find what fits.

For in person workshops, travel and lodging are billed separately. We will give you an approximate figure before you commit to anything.

Sessions are normally 90 minutes, and most schools run at least two or three of them. That said, we know school schedules are all different. We can run one hour sessions and shape the series around what your students actually need.

This depends on which workshops you choose, and we want to be clear about it so nobody is surprised.

After the personal statement workshops, students leave with solid brainstorming, a real foundation for how to get started, and our Choose Your Own Adventure Essay tool to guide them as they write. They do not leave with a finished draft, and we would be wary of anyone who promises that from a 90 minute session.

If you run one of our multi-day boot camps, that changes. Some students in a boot camp can walk out with a solid draft in hand.

No. We have run sessions for a full grade in an auditorium and for small groups in a classroom. What we do recommend is that the students in the room are the ones applying to schools that require essays, so the time is spent on students who need it.

Students often write an essay that would earn an A in English class but will not do much for them in an admissions office. Those are two different genres. English teachers are trained in analytical and literary writing, and a personal statement is neither. We teach students to approach the essay from an admissions perspective: what colleges are actually looking for, and how to write with that reader in mind.

Counselors usually sit in on our sessions, and your English teachers are welcome to join as well. It is the fastest way to see what we are asking students to do, so your team can reinforce it long after we leave. If you would rather your team learn to teach this themselves, that is what our professional development sessions are built for.

Our free content is complete, and a self motivated student can work through all of it alone. Most students don’t. A workshop puts them in a room where the work actually happens: they move through the workbook together, do the introspective part in real time, and get live feedback on what they come up with. The material is the same. What changes is that they finish it.

Your workshop will be led by a trained CEG facilitator, most of whom come from admissions and counseling backgrounds and have run these sessions with hundreds of students.

Yes, and that is the beauty of the private workshops. Tell us what your students need and we will build the right series with you.

Yes. We offer professional development for counseling and teaching teams, and parent nights for your school community.

It depends on the season. May and June are our busiest months, and schools that want spring dates usually commit between January and March. For a fall workshop, reach out at least a month ahead. If your timeline is tighter than that, ask anyway. We can sometimes make it work.

Tell us about your school using the form above and we will follow up with details.

Your students can still get expert help. Each summer we run virtual boot camps through College Essay Guy LIVE, led by Ethan Sawyer, the College Essay Guy himself. Schools bring these to their students at low cost, and schools and organizations that qualify can run them at no cost at all. Either way, your students never pay anything. You can find the details and get started here.

And for individual students from low income households, our Matchlighters Scholars Program offers free one on one college counseling support.