Writing and Essay Coaching Archives

Georgia Good

October 29, 2024

Georgia Good is a graduate student at NYU, earning an MA in Environmental Conservation Education. As an NYU Steinhardt Scholar and Sustainability Leaders Fellow, she’s building a career in climate communication and engagement, and she is excited to tutor alongside her studies.

Georgia grew up in Cambridge, UK. She has a BA in English from University College London (UCL), where she achieved the top first-class degree in her graduating class, from one of the world’s top-ranked English departments. As a private tutor, she can support students with their own college applications, for both the UCAS and North American systems. A creative writer in her free time, she understands what stands out in an essay, and how to write clearly, powerfully and imaginatively.

Growing up in the British education system, Georgia was awarded A*s in all of her IGCSEs and A-Levels (English, History, and a Pre-U in Philosophy and Theology). She can work with students also taking (I)GCSEs, A-Levels and Pre-U exams, as well as those in the American system. She understands the pressures that many students face, and can help them improve their organizational skills to reduce stress and develop more efficient, manageable, and enjoyable ways of working.

Professionally, Georgia has worked in communications and engagement in the arts, education and increasingly in the environmental sector. As an undergraduate, she was Co-Editor of UCL’s prestigious arts journal, and has worked in communications and climate policy in the London art world and at the University of Cambridge. Most recently, she’s worked as a climate writer, editor and digital communicator for the international nonprofits Mercy Corps and Climate Arc.

Having worked collaboratively and supported others in many of these roles, Georgia is eager to help students improve their writing and editing skills. As a tutor, her focus is on writing coaching, essay coaching and reading comprehension support, for middle schoolers and high schoolers. Her subject focuses are English, history, geography and the study of religion. Though new to tutoring, she’s excited to work with students, and to approach these partnerships with empathy, positivity and a commitment to each student’s individual needs and goals.

In her free time, Georgia loves reading, writing, and finding ways to get outside and be in nature, even in New York – from kayaking on the Hudson River to birding in Prospect Park!

Megan Foley

October 3, 2024

Megan Foley has worked in communications for 20 years as a published author, editor, teacher and creative strategist. For the past decade she has worked in news media, most recently at Axios, and she is excited to return to what she loves best: working with students. She believes that empathy and encouragement are the keys to successful teaching relationships, and she enjoys getting to know each of her students and finding ways to work with their innate strengths and interests to help them achieve their goals.

Megan specializes in essay writing, including admissions essays, research papers, English composition, reading reports, and even cover letters. She helps students organize their thoughts and learn to express themselves with clarity, concision and force. She is also skilled in test preparation for verbal sections on standardized tests; she earned a 99th percentile ranking on the Verbal section of the GRE and teaches test-taking strategies to maximize scores. Megan holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University’s Graduate Writing Program. During her tenure at Columbia, she served as Managing Editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and was named a 2012-2013 Teaching Fellow, which gave her the opportunity to teach undergraduates.

Before attending Columbia, Megan earned a B.A. with Honors in English Literature and Creative Writing from The George Washington University. She also completed certificate programs in Copy Editing and long-form journalism from NYU and the CUNY Graduate Center, respectively. Her writing has appeared in Business Insider, The Village Voice, The Rumpus, Time-Out New York, Women’s Entertainment, Metro New York, Poet Lore, and many others. Megan has taught a wide array of students: from elementary-aged children struggling with reading skills, to high-achieving high schoolers preparing for college, to English-as-a-Second – Language (ESL) PhD candidates. She has found that all students have promise and can succeed when their needs are understood and met with sensitivity and discipline. She is excited to continue her work as a private tutor with My Learning Springboard. In 2013 Megan moved from NYC back to the Washington, DC area, where she grew up. She now resides in Silver Spring, MD with her husband, 3-year-old daughter, twin 12-year-old stepdaughters and their enormous rescue dog.

Brielle Corinne Babiar

September 29, 2024

Brielle Corinne Babiar gives her students intellectual space, measured structure, and the confidence to trust their own thinking.

With over a decade of experience, she works with students from middle school to graduate school on the writing process, including admissions essays and research methods, as well as Executive Function Coaching.

During the pandemic, and in response to the limitations of traditional test preparation programs, she developed a comprehensive curriculum to guide students through standardized test preparation and the application season. Rather than treating the admissions process as daunting, she approaches it as one of self-discovery, an opportunity for students to forage through their academic strengths and passions. Over the past ten years, many have gone on to secure spots at top independent schools and universities in addition to receiving significant scholarships. She values the long arc of this work and finds joy celebrating where students land, just as well as the work that brings them there.

Brielle sees English education as an architecture, one in which each skill must be sound enough to support what comes next. She diagnoses which underlying skills need to be strengthened so that the entire structure will hold. In response to the speed and expectations of our academic culture, she returns to a more deliberate understanding of learning: In her sessions, rather than rushing toward answers, she slows the process of thinking itself to build durable habits of sustained attention. She prompts students to pause, engage further with texts, track and parse arguments, hold multiple perspectives in mind, tolerate ambiguity, and revise as they encounter new or contradictory evidence.

This kind of instruction inevitably attends to the often-invisible skills that make this work possible, including organizational planning, task initiation, follow-through, and flexible thinking. Her practice has naturally expanded into executive function coaching where she balances the demands of building systems and strategies with warmth and a direct, honest approach. EF coaching has supported students’ confidence and independence not only in academic life and transitional periods, but also social contexts. Finding this work incredibly rewarding, she completed a course in coaching foundations at New York University, with plans to continue training in counseling.

She also holds an MA in English Literature from Montclair State University and an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College, where she had the privilege of working with mentors such as Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Haslett, National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez, and Booker Prize-winning novelist Peter Carey. There she completed her first novel and began her second—both works of literary fiction rooted in historical settings. She was also the recipient of the Hertog Fellowship. Her current academic research spans topics such as obscene modernism, rejection, and women’s studies, with a particular interest in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

In her current role as an adjunct professor at Hunter College, she teaches composition, literary studies, and creative writing. She is also an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), where she teaches courses on business communication, arts and design writing, rhetoric, and research methodologies. While at the University of Rhode Island, she taught communication courses.

When she is not with her students, Brielle is working on a third novel. She enjoys unhurried mornings with her dog and a cappuccino at Riverside Park, time in her watercolor practice, and the steady, ongoing pursuit of the perfect loaf of sourdough.

Jane Rosalyn

May 23, 2024

Jane Rosalyn is a Columbia graduate dedicated to inspiring, developing, and supporting her students’ confidence and eloquence in writing. Before college, Jane was fascinated by neuroscience and thought she might enter this academic path if it weren’t for her growing passion for music and the arts. Her internship at Brain Balance, a holistic after-school center centered on brain training exercises and activities, fostered a care and curiosity for children’s learning and development. This continued in community service with Circle of Friends, an organization pairing children and young adults with special needs with friends who support, encourage, and uplift them, fulfilling the social and intellectual needs of the growing people in the special needs community. In keeping with this learning and development path, Jane had begun teaching piano at age 13 and still does to this day, helping all ages learn a new aural/visual music language and develop the fine motor skills of technique, gross motor skills of rhythm, and kinesthetic awareness to read, internalize, and execute musical ideas.

Towards the end of high school, however, Jane’s trumpet playing began inciting more and more music commitments and she began envisioning a life of music ahead of her. Greatly inspired by her classical piano upbringing and jazz trumpet adolescence, she started at Columbia knowing she was to concentrate in jazz studies and some writing-focused major for the purpose of songwriting.

At Columbia, Jane studied jazz composition and performance, shifting back to a piano focus and composing for large groups with multiple players. She also began songwriting and working on her solo music. At the same time, she began taking classes at Columbia’s acclaimed history department. She became fascinated by the specialization of Intellectual History, which broadly meant a survey of religious and philosophical history. It was the history of human thought, and it quickly took on a very psychological framework for Jane. To complete the major and graduate with a rigorous history, philosophy, and literature humanities education,she became well-versed in essay writing. The process of working with dense reading materials, distilling ideas, forming an argument, and explicating the argument forcefully and concisely felt natural and exciting. It quickly turned to tutoring in the subject and helping others reach their admissions goals through college essay writing.

Jane believes in kind and supportive insight coupled with the rigor and motivation to concentrate one’s ideas with language. Her background in songwriting supports this ethos as well, developing more writing insight into author’s purpose, diction, and working with form. It also helps to encourage authenticity and drive to write something students are genuinely proud of. Her psychological interests also encourage the genuine benefits of authentic writing, which tends to help the admissions process and overall writing success, simultaneously benefitting the authors themselves.

Coming from a matrilineage of public school teachers, Jane understands the reciprocal relationship of inspiring and receiving inspiration from her students. She has had creative nonfiction and poetry writing published to literary magazines and works with labels to distribute her solo music. She graduated early to pursue music full-time; when she is not teaching or tutoring she is touring as a keyboardist/synthesist, at some working on music, or reading about psychology and psychoanalysis.

Cara Hill

February 12, 2024

Cara Hill is a seasoned educator, with over twenty years of classroom experience in public and private schools in New York City. She has taught at the Packer Collegiate Institute, the Berkeley Carroll School, School of the Future, M.S. 51, and the high school academic outreach program Upward Bound at Columbia University. Throughout her teaching career, Cara has tutored, relishing the chance to work on a one-to-one basis with students across age groups and disciplines. In addition, she has mentored and trained many teachers at the middle and high school level, giving her a strong understanding of a wide array of teachers, students, and schools.

Much of Cara’s work with students is focused on reading, writing, history, and the social sciences. She also has considerable expertise with neurodiversity, having worked closely with school counselors and learning specialists over the years to keep abreast of the latest pedagogy and technology in learning support. She has guided families on educational testing, Individual Education Plans (IEPs), and Learning Plans, through both the testing process and academic accommodations. Over the years, Cara has developed many executive functioning and test-taking strategies. She has prepared students for many standardized tests, including: the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT): English Language Arts section; the ACT: English, Reading, Optional Writing, and Science sections; the SAT: Evidenced-based Reading & Writing section; the AP English Literature and Composition exam; and, the English Language and Composition exam. In addition, Cara has worked as a college essay mentor, both at Packer and as a private tutor, the latter work extending beyond the United States, supporting students applying to schools via the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) for the United Kingdom.

Cara Hill is invested in diversity—not only in neurodiversity, but in thinking across cultures and disciplines. For the STEM kid, literary analysis might best be translated into an algebraic order of operations, a way to remember how to unpack sections of text in sequence. Relating to aspects of one’s culture and history also can help connect students more deeply to a concept or approach. Cara believes that recognizing and even appreciating individual learning styles and temperaments can be valuable tools when developing strategies to achieve not only academic success but genuine investment in school.

I love witnessing that “Aha” moment, that instance when inspiration and belief come together for a student. Often such moments come when there is trust between the educator and student, not just in ability but in appreciating how a student’s mind works.

Cara Hill has a degree in English and African-American Studies from Princeton University. She is an active alumna, serving on various committees, including the high school award for the Princeton Prize for Race Relations. She has a Masters of Arts in English Education from New York University as well as New York State Public School Certification in English Education, grades 7-12. She is a member of the Academy for Teachers, a nominated group of master educators from both public and private schools in New York City. Outside of education, Cara works in film and television as a script consultant, advising on and editing screenplays. She recently completed an intensive film workshop via the Academy for Teachers with actor and director John Turturro. She is also a writer, currently working on a stage play after studying with Slave Play creator Jeremy O. Harris. This combination of the artistic and the academic informs her work as a tutor, enabling her to offer diverse strategies to unlock student capacity. She has done numerous independent studies with students, both creative and academic, including intensive studies in film writing and production.

One of the many blessings of working as an educator is the strong bonds formed with not only students but families. Students praise Cara for her ability to empathize and strategize as she empowers them to realize their best work. Families appreciate her knowledge of schools, not just as an educator but as a parent. She raised a child in the New York City school system, navigating public and private school admissions, an IEP, and a successful transition from high school to university.

Cara brings a wealth of personal and professional expertise to her work as a tutor, and she relishes the chance to have a role in helping young people realize their full potential.

Georgia Good

Megan Foley

Brielle Corinne Babiar

Jane Rosalyn

Cara Hill

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