I read first-year applications for a selective liberal arts college for four seasons. I want to be honest about something that shapes this entire course: the first read of your personal statement takes between two and four minutes. Not because anyone is careless — because there are twelve thousand of them and a committee date.

That single fact should change how you write. It means the opening sentence has to earn the second one. It means an abstract claim about growth is invisible and a concrete detail is not. And it means the safest essay in the pile — competent, well-organised, about a soccer injury — is the one nobody remembers by dinner.

How the ten weeks run

1. Weeks 1–2: material. Structured exercises to find what you actually have, before any drafting

2. Weeks 3–4: a fast, bad, complete first draft. Deliberately bad. You cannot revise a blank page

3. Weeks 5–6: structure. Choosing a shape and rebuilding into it

4. Weeks 7–8: cutting and voice. The hardest fortnight and the one that changes the essay

5. Weeks 9–10: supplements and finishing — the 'why us' essays, activity descriptions, final proofs

The workshop

Groups of eight. Each week two essays are read by everyone in advance and discussed live for twenty minutes each. Over ten weeks you will be workshopped twice and will have read sixteen other people's drafts closely, which teaches more than being critiqued does.

Seats are capped at forty across five groups, and the cap is not marketing. I read and comment on every draft personally — no readers, no assistants — and forty is the number at which that stays true.

What you get back

• Line-level written feedback from me on four drafts of the personal statement

• Feedback on up to five supplemental essays

• Two twenty-minute live workshops on your own writing

• A recorded read-through where I talk through your draft as an admissions reader would

• The annotated example library — sixty real essays, used with permission, with margin notes on what works

What this is not

It is not an admissions consultancy. I will not tell you where to apply, review your list, or predict your chances — those are different jobs and there are people who do them well. This course does one thing: it gets you an essay that sounds like you and that survives a three-minute read.

I also will not write any part of it, or let anyone else. An essay that is not yours fails at exactly the moment it matters, and readers are far better at spotting it than applicants think.

The bad-draft week broke something loose. I had been trying to write the perfect first sentence for a month. Hannah made us write 900 terrible words in one sitting and my actual essay was hiding in paragraph six of it.

Theo M., grade 12, Oregon

Enrolment closes on 28 August, before the first session on 1 September. It does not reopen mid-course — the workshop groups are fixed in week one and a late arrival would break them.