In the first week of class, students will spend the first few minutes covering classroom expectations and introducing themselves to their peers. The bulk of the class will highlight why colleges ask for an admissions essay, what the Common App prompts for the year are, and how to choose the best prompt for yourself. For homework, students will select three of the given prompts for potential further exploration and write a brief discussion about why they chose each of them. 

 In this week of class, students will discuss the overall goals of their essay and will spend a few minutes discussing why they selected specific prompts. Students will learn some of the "do's and don't's" to make their application stand out and work through a few exercises on using professional, formal language. The main goal of the class is to develop an outline for two of the essay prompts they selected and work through their ideas. 

 To begin the third week of the workshop, students will discuss their outlines and we will discuss what might be the best prompt for their essay moving forward. Most college applications have a limited word count requirement, so this class will focus on why that is and how to discuss your ideas in a brief, yet engaging manner. Students will work through exercises on wordiness and word choice. The goal for this week is to write the first draft of the essay. 

 In the final week of the workshop, students will come to class with their rough draft and work through self-editing techniques while we are in the session--including evaluating for spelling and grammatical errors, wordiness, and strong language. I will provide feedback on their drafts as well. Students will have to opportunity to revise their rough draft and submit to me for one last round of feedback after our final session.