Overview
College Application Essay Mentor Jobs in Hanoi Capital Region at AMERICAN STUDY
Title: College Application Essay Mentor
Company: AMERICAN STUDY
Location: Hanoi Capital Region
Essay Mentor — College Writing Coach and Holistic Application Storyteller
American Study · americanstudy.edu.vn
Location: Hanoi · In-person (open to Hybrid) Reports to: Director of Admission
About us
American Study helps Vietnamese students pursue undergraduate (and graduate) study at the most selective universities in the United States, the UK, and beyond. Over the past decade our students have earned offers from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and dozens of other top-ranked institutions
What gets them there isn't a formula. It's the discipline of turning one teenager's (young researcher’s) messy, specific life into a story an admissions officer can't put down. That discipline is a craft, and we're looking for someone who loves it.
The role
We're hiring Essay Mentors to lead students through the most personal part of the application: the writing. You'll work the Common App personal statement, supplemental essays, "Why this school" pieces, and scholarship essays from the first blank page to the final polish. You’ll also work with students in exciting yet challenging writing competitions and tasks where you provide insightful and fair coaching for them to compete.
You'll sit alongside our counselors in a deliberate division of labor. They help mapping the profile, the activities list, the academic narrative; you help shaping the prose. Both sides matter in supporting our excellent and talented students as they pilot their application through a maze, and our best results come from real collaboration among the trio.
This is not a proofreading job. It's a coaching job. You'll ask better questions than the student is asking themselves, push back when a draft is too safe, and know when the seventeen-year-old in front of you has stumbled onto something quietly extraordinary.
What you'll do
- Run 1:1 coaching sessions across the full drafting arc — brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising, polishing
- Help students surface the stories they actually have but haven't thought to tell — family, small moments, obsessions, contradictions
- Align essays with each student's broader application narrative in close partnership with the counseling team
- Lead small-group workshops on specific topics — Why School essays, short-answer craft, writing about identity, handling a non-linear GPA, etc.
- Contribute to the student’s journey and readiness for various types of writing-intensive competitions around the world.
What you bring
- A bachelor's degree from a top-50 U.S. institution (U.S. News ranking or international equivalent — Oxbridge, LSE, UofT, etc. also welcome)
- Genuine creative writing chops. Published work, a personal newsletter, fiction in a drawer, literary magazine editing, a thesis someone still asks about, etc.
- A counselor's instincts: the patience to draw out a student who doesn't yet know what they think, and the honesty to tell them when a story isn't the one worth telling
- A sharp editorial eye for voice, pacing, and structure in short nonfiction
- Some exposure to U.S. college admissions but not necessarily comprehensive. We provide further Columbia University-certified training on this matter for our staff.
- Besides working with bilingual and native English-speaking students, you should also be comfortable working with Vietnamese students in English; Vietnamese language ability is a plus but not required
- Positive creative energy. Teenagers write better essays for mentors who seem genuinely excited to read them. The best essay coaches we've worked with laugh easily, read widely, and still get a small thrill when a student lands a sentence
The vibe
Your colleagues will be mentors who've studied at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Penn, Duke, Northwestern, Brown, UC Berkeley, Barnard, Johns Hopkins, and others. At AS, our people take the craft seriously and enjoy the company of others who do the same. Our students are sharp, ambitious, and often surprisingly funny once they trust you.
If you believe the college essay is one of the few genres where a teenager can actually tell the truth about who they are, and if you'd consider it a good day's work to help them do exactly that, we'd love to hear from you.
