Inside Soar’s Writing Hub: A Coach-Led Approach to the College Essay

Webinar Transcript: Inside SOAR's Writing Hub Speakers: Venkates Swaminathan (Swami) and Ruth Louden (Ruth)

Swami: Hi. Hello, everyone, and welcome today to our webinar about the Writing Hub that's inside SOAR. My name's Swami. I'm joined today by my colleague, Ruth Louden. Ruth, welcome.

Ruth: Thank you.

Swami: We'll do introductions in a minute. But thank you to everyone who's here today. I appreciate you all taking the time.

I wanna jump in today by just laying a little groundwork with housekeeping stuff. If you have questions, we'd love you to just put them in the chat. There's a little chat icon to the right of your screen, I think, for most of you. You should see it will say the word chat. And so you can just type in your questions there, and we'll address as many as we can towards the end of the presentation. If there are some questions that are just about clarifications, we might address them as we go, but otherwise, we'll do it when we get to the questions section at the end.

But please do ask questions because a big part of this presentation is about your questions. So if you have questions, please ask, because I think that's a very important part of what we're doing today. So that said, let's jump in. Today's presentation is about the Writing Hub that's inside SOAR.

We've done other presentations about SOAR itself, but I will do a little very quick overview of SOAR for those who aren't familiar with it. But today's approach is about how SOAR really prioritizes a counselor-led approach to the college essay and the way in which we do that.

So let's jump in. What we hope you'll get out of the session — before we do introductions — first, we have two audiences today. Some of you who are watching today are counselors like us, school counselors, independent educational consultants, and so on. And some of you are families or students, parents of students.

And so those are slightly different audiences, but we will try to address both audiences as we go. If you're a family or a student, we hope you will see at the end of this process how this Writing Hub guides the student from the self-reflection process all the way to finished essays, one step at a time. We want to make sure you understand how the work stays the student's own, and how parents can stay informed without reading every draft. And third, see why the real work of writing good essays starts long before the first draft — by figuring out what you wanna say.

If you're a counselor or an IEC, we wanna show you what exercises move students from self-discovery to Common App, UC personal insight questions, the why major essays, and so on. See what SOAR itself provides in terms of the assignments, but also in terms of helping you understand some things that perhaps you might miss otherwise — a student's strengths, some themes that might be relevant for the student to explore, or for you to think about to discuss with the student. And then getting a clear idea as to how this might fit your practice alongside the tools you already use. Many counselors already use some tools, right? Whether that's College Planner Pro, or some other tool — so you know how this fits alongside the tools people already use today.

So all that said, let's go through this. If you have questions, as I said again, please put them in the chat and we will try to answer as many as we can as we go. Before we go much further, I wanna introduce Ruth and myself. So let me take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Swami Venkateswaminathan. I founded LifeLaunchr in 2014, and before that, I had a long career in software and technology and telecommunications. My master's degree was in AI way back when, at the University of Illinois. So I understand this. I've understood this for a long time. I co-lead, along with Vinay Narang, the AI Learning Lab at HECA, and also serve on HECA's committee that's developing guidance for counselors nationwide.

I'm joined today by my colleague at LifeLaunchr, Ruth, who has been working with me on this for a long time — for ten-plus years now, Ruth. And so Ruth, perhaps you wanna introduce yourself?

Ruth: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I might start with the fact that I'm coming to the tail end of a cold, and I'm having a lozenge in my mouth right now, so hopefully I won't spit it out. But it does help me to keep my throat dry. I am someone who's been in the university or education system sector for many years, and my preliminary experience with applications for colleges would've been to apply to a couple of college programs of my own. I did two master's degrees, and I had to write winning essays, if you will. But then throughout my time at the University of Toronto, I spent many years supporting students with their applications for different programs and different levels of degree — from undergraduate to PhD. So, well acquainted with the rigors of writing admission essays, working with Swami now for ten years with students going to colleges in the US and seeing the vast variety of essays that students are required to write and bringing some pretty clear, insightful thinking to the process.

Swami: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ruth. Still delighted you can be here today, because you really have some unique perspectives to share. Let's jump in.

Some of you who are watching this presentation have already heard about SOAR. You know a little bit about it already, and so I don't wanna duplicate material. But some people watching may not know about SOAR that much, so I wanna take just a minute to give people a sense of why it exists. I built SOAR and launched it in April, so it's very new. But it's already getting a lot of great momentum — people signed up, counselors as well as our students, of course, using it. So it's been a really exciting process to launch it and get people excited to start using it.

The idea behind SOAR was to address several challenges in terms of how college and career counseling really works. And so I wanna talk very quickly about the problems that SOAR itself is intended to solve.

First, whether we like it or not, our students are already using ChatGPT or Claude or other AI tools, and we have no idea what they're getting out of it. And so there's that sense that we ask students to do something, and they go off and do it on AI. One of the things that SOAR does is really bring parents, students, and counselors together in one place so that the work that students do and the work that counselors do is informed by what everyone else has done. And so we can all stay on the same page as we guide students through the process.

Second, the second problem is that misinformation spreads faster than we can possibly correct it because students are always hearing things from TikTok videos or from ChatGPT or whatever. And it's very hard to correct all that misinformation as we go through the process because there's so much of it out there.

The third is that work stalls between meetings. You meet with a student, you meet with them again a week later, two weeks later, a month later, whatever. And students don't always make progress on the things you've asked them to make progress on. In part because to many students, the kinds of tools that we ask them to use feel like homework. They feel like homework, and it's not something they're excited to use.

Fourth, you'll ask a student at a meeting, "So what did you think of Purdue? I asked you to research it," or, "What did you think of Carnegie Mellon?" And you often hear this answer from teenagers: "It was fine." And "it was fine" is a very common response from teenagers. Anyone who's parented a teen knows this for a fact. And so that becomes kind of the enemy of good counseling, right?

And finally, college counseling is bigger than just college. When we're helping students apply to college, we are not just helping them apply to college — we are helping them decide what they wanna do with their lives at a much bigger level. So college is a step towards careers and career paths and intended interests and life experiences, and we want to help them explore all of those things.

So there were six design choices that really shaped SOAR. First, students and counselors and parents all connected by design. Second, it will not write essays. You can ask — we tried to trick it ourselves, and so far unsuccessfully. It has very clear instructions that it will not write for you. The principle behind SOAR is that counselors, not AI, teach students how to write. And AI can help counselors a little bit along the way, but counselors, not AI, help students learn how to write.

It's grounded in real data about colleges, scholarships, enrichment programs, and more. We built in a database of college information that incorporates the Common Data Set, iPEDS, College Scorecard. We built in information about nearly 7,000 scholarships, about hundreds of summer enrichment programs so that the information SOAR provides is as authoritative as we can make it.

Fourth, safety and privacy by design. Because SOAR is built the way it is using the API from Claude, any information you provide SOAR doesn't go any further. It will not be used by Anthropic to train their models. A student's privacy is completely protected as they use it.

Fifth, it improves the quality of all the critical steps in the process — whether that's college research, major research, helping a counselor prepare for a meeting, all of that kind of stuff.

And finally, we built deep knowledge about college and career planning. So the kinds of answers and the kinds of process that SOAR follows at every step is based on a knowledge of how the work we do actually works.

Given all that, I wanna just quickly show you what the screen looks like for SOAR itself. I'm gonna share my screen and show you SOAR very quickly. Give me one second.

Ruth: Can I have a question for you, Swami, before you carry on?

Swami: Please. Of course. Please ask.

Ruth: Oh, I thought you were gonna share the SOAR screen first.

Swami: Oh, yes. So here is SOAR. And SOAR — this is the main part of SOAR where you do your research, and you can type in questions about colleges, careers. You can get information about majors, about all kinds of things. And then there are tools, as we've described in other webinars, for college research, meeting preparation, activities list, and resumes, and all of that kind of stuff. So I won't belabor all of those because today's presentation is about the Writing Hub, but you'll see it looks very straightforward to use. It's very easy to figure out how to use it. There are tutorials for people who need it. There's a little tour that will walk you through how to use it. People who wanna use it can easily figure out how to use it.

And now I know you said you had a question, so —

Ruth: Well, I'm just curious, and others may be as well. I mean, w- why would you build a tool that refuses to write essays when it feels like every other tool out there is trying to do that very thing?

Swami: It's a great question, and let's talk about that a little bit. Because colleges are very clear about wanting to hear a student's voice, a student's actual voice in the way that they read essays and applications. And an essay written by AI just looks different than an essay written by an actual student.

And so it's primary to our idea that when we ask SOAR to write an essay, it will just say no. It will guide you in many ways along the way, but it will not actually write any of the words that students use. And I think that's really important because these are college applications, and the essay is one part of the application where a student's authentic voice is really, really critical. And so it's important that we don't write essays for students. Just as we wouldn't write essays for students ourselves, we wouldn't have SOAR do it for them either.

Ruth: Thank you.

Swami: That said, let's talk about essays a little bit. One thing about essays that I wanna start with is this idea that the hardest part of writing essays is not the writing. The hardest part about writing essays is not the writing, and that may seem a little strange thing to say, but I think it is the truth. Because the hardest part is figuring out what it is you want to say.

And so helping students figure out what stories in their life are meaningful, what themes are uncovered by those stories, or what stories reflect the themes they want to communicate — which version of themselves they want to present — that is the hard work. The actual putting words on paper is not the hardest part of the process.

So I'm curious, Ruth — in the years you've done coaching, what do you think is harder for students? How do you weigh the difficulty of those two things — figuring out what to say, or doing the writing itself?

Ruth: One of my favorite expressions with students is: good writing starts with good thinking. You can't write a good piece of writing if you haven't done the proper thinking beforehand. And that thinking is hard — that reflective thinking. That kind of choosing moments in your life that are most relevant to a particular question or prompt, the kind of pulling out of the "so what" details about that experience and why it was particularly insightful or how it helped you to grow, and the concluding.

The concluding from those really good thoughts — okay, so how am I different today than I was two years ago when this thing happened to me? How did it shape me in terms of where I wanna go or what I wanna do with my future? How has it shaped my thinking about the particular academic discipline that I wanna pursue?

So the thinking, reflecting, and concluding that students need to do as part of the writing process just can't be done by AI. And well, sorry, that's maybe not the question you're asking, but it's what makes it hard — that you really have to stop and think about those things and pull out all the rich details associated with it. It doesn't just appear on a page.

Swami: Totally. Yeah, I agree with all of that. So let's talk about how — why we built SOAR's Writing Hub the way we did. First I wanna talk about what the Writing Hub is. And one thing — if you go on SOAR and click the Writing tab on the left of your screen and go to the Writing Hub, you will notice instantly that it looks very different than the rest of SOAR. The rest of SOAR has a light-colored background and dark color text. The Writing Hub has a dark background and light color text. It looks different, and it looks different for a reason — because it works differently.

Where the rest of SOAR allows you to progress students through it in lots of different ways, the Writing Hub is constructed in a structured way so that, as counselors, we make assignments to students, students do the homework, and then we review that, give them feedback, and then we use the collective body of writing they've done to help come up with ideas that they can use to write about. And help them create and go through that revision process, right?

So the idea is: self-reflection, brainstorming, draft, revise, finalize — like that. Go through multiple steps. So it's much more structured than the rest of SOAR, and it is that way for a reason. But it's helpful to give you a sense of what it isn't. It isn't AI-generated — it will not draft the essay. It structures the work from self-discovery to revision, and then helps counselors do their work. It helps counselors assign work to students, read the submissions, make sense of them, provide feedback. It's also not a template. There's not... it's not like there's six templates for Common App essays where you fill in the blanks about your story and submit it — because honestly, that doesn't work. Those templates never work for students. They're not effective ways to write good stories.

And it isn't a solo act. It's always a collaboration between the counselor and the student. So the counselor assigns work, reviews drafts, and gives feedback. SOAR Hub keeps everything organized. Students do the work, submit things, and parents can track progress. So it's a team effort. Everyone has a job to do in the process.

So this idea that counselors assign exercises — if you go to the hub, you'll see one of the key things about SOAR is the idea that counselors will assign exercises to students. The counselors assign exercises to students, and the student writes and submits, the counselors give feedback. In the process of giving that feedback, if counselors want, they can click a button and get observations from SOAR about what the student wrote. And that's only counselors see it. Students never, ever see it. It's meant as a tool for counselors to make sure that we don't miss anything as we go through the process.

To say, "Oh, yeah, what are some interesting things about what the student wrote? What lines might be meaningful? What is the student's writing style like?" And so those observations — maybe you turn around and give some of them to the student, maybe you don't. The entire idea is that counselors exercise their judgment in how they provide this feedback to the student.

Ruth, does that all make sense? Do you have any thoughts or questions as we go through?

Ruth: No. Okay.

Swami: Okay. So it starts with self-discovery. And I wanna talk about that a little bit. So I wanna just show at this point how the Writing Hub works, because I think it's easier to show. Self-discovery is the most important part of the writing process, in my opinion, because I think when students know something about themselves, the essays, the writing come easily and naturally to them.

So I'm gonna share my screen so you can see what this looks like.

So this is our test student. Catherine Williamson is an imaginary student. I won't show you anything about students who are actual students — don't wanna violate anyone's privacy. But counselors make assignments. So one assignment you can give to a student is the personality assessment. We have a personality assessment that uses information from the Penn State Big Five personality assessment that was developed at Penn State a very, very long time ago. And it assesses students on five axes: conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, extroversion, and emotional sensitivity. And along each axis, there are many sub-axes that are measured. And then it will produce an analysis of what that result looks like for the student.

Just so you know, this is — I took this test on behalf of the student, obviously, because the student doesn't exist. So these are really my results, not the student's. But I think it also gives counselors some tools that they can use as they assess how this writing works. So that's the first step — the personality assessment.

I'm gonna stop sharing for a second just 'cause when I go back, it will show somebody else's information. So I wanna make sure that I hide that before I go back. Okay, here we go. I'm gonna go back and share my screen again.

And so the others look like a set of assignments. So we have, you can see, assignments here for self-discovery. Some of them have already been assigned to the student — the Know Yourself, the Values Reflection. We ask a bunch of questions, and we have a big library of questions that, as a counselor using this, you may use all of them, you may use some of them. You don't have to use all of them. They're all very helpful in helping students think through what they wanna write about eventually. And most of these questions we derived out of college applications, out of the kinds of questions that colleges ask, and supplemental questions often.

So it's a helpful tool as we go through that process. You can assign these questions one at a time. You can assign them multiples at a time. These are the self-discovery questions. We also have timed writing questions that allow students to find their voice. So they do a timed free write about what was their morning like, or what does your bedroom look like? And then go through and identify for themselves what phrases really reflect their writing style.

At every step when a student does a writing assignment, what the counselor sees is they see the assignment itself — this is the question, these are the questions, and these are the answers. At the end of it, they can, if they want to, generate a set of observations about what the student wrote from SOAR. SOAR will go through and for each question, we have a very carefully constructed prompt that allows it to generate these observations in a meaningful way. And then at the end of it, the counselor reads this, reads all of it, and decides what they want to say to the student.

And then they can type in and send those notes to the student. What the student sees is always the counselor's feedback, not AI's feedback. So it is always like a sense of they always get their feedback from what the counselor wants to say, and whatever the SOAR observations are meant for the counselor to make sense of — to use, or not use — based on the judgment in what you wanna say to a student.

So that's how the basic architecture of SOAR works. I know we've done this now for a bit. Even before we had SOAR, we've used these kinds of self-reflection exercises, Ruth. And I'm curious — as you think about self-reflection, how do you think these kinds of self-reflection exercises change what the essay conversation looks like with a student when they've gone through this?

Ruth: I think that the reflections that come out of their writing in exercises like this really help you understand if the student is kind of ready for the next step in the essay-writing process, or if they need to further develop their ideas to bring in more details. The...

I'm sorry, Swami. I'm drawing a blank.

Swami: Are you all right?

Ruth: Hey, I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm just... Let me — let me maybe reframe the question because it — Sorry. Can you reframe the question for me?

Swami: For sure, yeah. Like, what is it about self-reflection that helps students figure out what they wanna say in that essay? That's what I'm really trying to figure out. Why is self-reflection important and meaningful?

Ruth: Well, there's self-reflection, and then there's self-reflection activities. And self-reflection isn't something that they often do because they're not encouraged to do it — by other students who are their peers, or their parents. And so when they do these exercises, they start to bring out the details that colleges wanna know about, but they may not be confident in what aspects of those details to actually share. So the kind of back and forth that a tool like SOAR gives you is that you can tease out the details. You can redirect the attention to places that are maybe a little bit more high level or low level. Do we want more broad context? Do we want more detail? But it enables this conversation between the coach and the student to really get at the heart of what is gonna be relevant to an admissions essay that's really gonna reveal something about themself that's important and special and unique.

Swami: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The reason why we emphasize self-reflection so much is for exactly that reason — it's really about helping students figure out what the stories of their life are. And as a counselor, you can make some judgment calls about which questions are most meaningful to which student, because there are so many different kinds of questions that may apply to different students, right? Sometimes they wanna think about challenges they face. Sometimes they think about a tradition they have in their family. Sometimes they think about community, and all of them can be really helpful in thinking about the stories in their life that really then turn into meaningful essays down the road.

So the other kind of exercise are what we call writing practice exercises. These are also similar — we have dozens and dozens of these, and it's really helpful, as counselors, to think of these as a library. You decide which one you want to assign. You don't have to assign every one of them to every student. And it's a lot for a student to do all of them. Some of them love doing it, some of them love these exercises and love writing — some don't. So finding different kinds of exercises and using them in a thoughtful way can be really, really helpful to counselors in helping students tease out the things that make them really interesting people.

A question I can't stop thinking about, a class that surprised me, something I taught myself, the communities that shaped me, my background as an asset — so really helping students think through each thing as they go through the process.

And then, of course, we have modules for the individual essays — the Common App essay, helping them understand what the Common App personal statement is, what it really is, what the point of the Common App essay is, helping them brainstorm ideas, helping them choose a story, helping them understand the difference between a story and a theme, creating a first draft, second draft — like that. It goes in a very structured way, as you can see. At every step you assign, they draft or they write, and you provide feedback — and that's sort of the structure of the entire Writing Hub.

So I'm gonna go back to the presentation for a second. Again, if you have any questions as you are watching this, please ask, because that's really important.

So we talk about self-discovery because it gives students really ideas that they can later use, or it helps them get started thinking — like turns the juices on. It's like the exercises before you play the piano, right? You have to do some exercises so your fingers warm up, but you're also coming up with musical ideas that will eventually show up in what you play.

Based on all of that, the other thing that SOAR does is to review all of it. The other struggle for most of us is that when we assign exercises like this, it can be a little overwhelming, right? I've assigned all these things, the student did all these drafts. What do I do with all these drafts? How do I remember all the things — the activities list, their transcripts, all the other work they've done? And it's a lot to remember, every assignment they've done over many months of work.

But with SOAR, what we did is put together an analysis prompt so that you can actually... I'm gonna show you this again very quickly. So you can view, for this student, here are the top 10 things about this student. And sometimes it will raise questions that are really important because, of course, this material wasn't written by a student — I wrote it pretending to be the student, right? So that created some issues clearly for how this all works. But there are some really beautiful insights that are meaningful. "Would rather lose fairly, belongs everywhere, fully nowhere." And it will find the key phrases that were in the written material that might be the foundation for an essay down the road.

Only counselors see this, I wanna emphasize — only counselors see this. You get to see it and then decide how you want to handle that information, whether you wanna discuss it with the student or not. As a counselor, this becomes a tool for you to make sure you can do your job better.

So — what's the rationale though, Swami, for you to send it to the counselor versus the student? Wouldn't the student benefit as well?

Yeah, that's such a great question — in the sense that really what we're trying to do with that is: if we share it with the student, first of all, AI makes mistakes. So let's start with that. First of all, AI makes mistakes. So sometimes you see some things here and you're like, "That doesn't make any sense at all." But we, as counselors, have judgment enough to know that sometimes AI makes mistakes and it suggests things that just aren't great for an actual college essay.

Second, we know things about the student that the AI doesn't. And so really what we're trying to do is to find that beautiful place where we use AI to make sure we don't forget things — we didn't miss something that was kind of awesome, but we just forgot it because it happened a month ago and we didn't see it in our notes. But we also wanna make sure that our judgment and our wisdom, our knowledge of the college admissions process, our knowledge of the student are always present in the work we do.

And third, of course, we're presenting feedback to students who really need to hear it from a thoughtful mentoring adult who actually understands where the student is in their life at this moment and what's going on with them. So for all of those reasons, it makes sense to only have counselors see this. It's intended as a tool. We use it with judgment. We use it in a way that makes sense for a particular student.

Does that make sense?

Ruth: Mm-hmm. No, for sure. And calibrating the feedback to the student, you know?

Swami: Yeah, absolutely. It also does the same thing for the Common App essay — it finds stories or themes that may really stand out for the student, like things that really highlight who the student is. Likewise for the UC PIQs — you know which UC PIQs might be good fits based on their activities list, based on whatever writing work they've done, based on other things. Based on everything the student does on SOAR, it comes up with ideas. Counselors can feel free to ignore all of this, but I think it helps you really put together a great plan for a student.

And then of course the why major essay — if the student has entered a major or has researched a particular major, we'll go through all of the things that the student has done to help understand what preparation the student has done for this major, how their work leads to this major, what it is colleges look for. And again, really meaningful to make sure that as you go through the process, because it will flag things like major mismatches.

You know, where a student — if you look at a student and all their work points towards, you know, that you might wanna study business and entrepreneurship, but you're saying you wanna study mechanical engineering — somehow we need to have a really high quality explanation as to why you would want to study mechanical engineering, because one would not guess that from the work you've done so far.

So does that make sense?

Ruth: Yeah, I'm just making an observation for the parents out there. You're really getting a bird's eye view of what a challenging yet enriching and growth-oriented experience this is for your students.

Swami: Totally. Yeah. Kids, this is so important for kids to get this kind of information as they're putting their applications together, right? Because these are the things not only the colleges are looking for but that will make a difference in how well they do wherever they go.

Yeah, so hopefully — again, I wanna ask people, if you're on the call and you have questions, please ask. This is your opportunity to really ask any questions. So identifying these things — the top 10 things about the student that you really wanna make sure show up on a college application, the Common App and UC PIQ themes, material for the why major essay — SOAR can surface all of this so that counselors can use that in the work they have to do.

Besides all of that, of course, you can go back to the chat window — which I showed you at the very first — the light background where you can just chat with SOAR. You can also ask questions about essays there. You can simply ask things, and if you ask certain kinds of questions, it won't answer them. If you ask it, "Can you help me write my Common App essay?" it will just say, "Go to the Writing Hub," because that's where that work is done.

If you ask it about some other essay — "I'm applying to the Naval Academy, and I have to send in a nomination form, can you help me write it?" — it will say, "No, I won't write it for you, but I will ask questions that will hopefully help you figure out what you wanna say." And then, of course, you can always ask factual questions about all of it. Does that make sense?

And then the other thing SOAR does — oh, before I do that, I wanna talk a little bit about how this is different than many other tools. There are obviously other tools out there that people can use. Many of them are very good. I will say the big difference is that most of them, when it comes to writing, start at the point of writing itself. In other words, you write a draft and you say, "AI, what do you think of this draft?" And the struggle with that is that the most good writing starts not with the actual draft, but way before that — with the reflection and the thought process that went into it first.

And so, again, Ruth — what does that look like for you when you do that, as you work with students? You have a draft. We talked earlier about how the self-reflection exercises are meaningful. How does the process work of helping the student figure out what story they wanna tell on their Common App essay? What story they wanna tell on their why major essay?

Ruth: I mean, there's a reality that any writing activity is a bit of an iterative process. So you start with a question and maybe three possibilities come out of it. So you explore each of them and then you say, "Well, what path will that take you down?" The...

I'm so sorry, Swami. My brain is not functioning. I apologize.

Swami: No worries. No worries. Will everyone understand—

Ruth: You told me to do this on a day when you're not feeling — Swami, please hit the stop button on this. I am so sorry. My brain is just shut down. No worries. No worries. I get it. You're sick. I'm so sorry to make you do this on a day when you're not feeling well.

Swami: I feel bad. Please — my apologies. Let's just continue. I will — You know, we've both done this. I can kind of push myself. I really have an ability to communicate. Just —

Ruth: You do. I know you do. Not today.

Swami: No worries. No worries. Because this is the thing that makes the process special, right? In other words, this self-reflection — you think you've done all these ideas. Now there are three ideas for a Common App essay. Let's talk through each one of them. Let's explore what the theme of this essay is, what story reflects that theme, and go through that process in a mindful and thoughtful way for students. So that thoughtfulness is really, really important — for how students can think through what they want to communicate about who they are, and how they can really work that through in the way they write. And then figure out what a student's writing voice seems like. Because I think writing voice is so important for people to understand. One of the reasons why colleges don't want to see AI writing is because AI has its own writing voice that really is not at all like what teenagers or even adults write like.

So helping students discover their own voice is really important. And then finally, go through the process — draft, revise, draft, revise — so that we get to a final draft. And then these are all different kinds of writing. I think Stuart has a comment here, which I think is very true: "This is consistent with how I learned the WOW methods for coaching students with essays." I think WOW is an amazing program, and I certainly loved it. I love the work that those guys do, and this does in fact have some similarities to that. And so if you go through the process like that, it's very structured.

That kind of structured process is very, very helpful in thinking through different kinds of things. For the Common App personal statement, it is the critical thing. For the UC personal insight questions, of course, we have to follow a slightly different approach because they are very different. The UCs make a great point of saying it's not an essay. For why college, why major essays — for why college essays, there's the SOAR summaries for every college that summarize all of the research a student does for a college, so that you can get a sense in a snapshot as to why this college is a good fit for the student.

And then, of course, we track all the other essays. So for example, if you go onto SOAR, you can see — I'm gonna share my screen again and very quickly show you — we track every essay for every college. So if you wanna know what essays Carnegie Mellon requires, you'll see all the various supplemental essays. And so the fact that we track all of them is really helpful for a counselor who's trying to figure out, my students are applying to these colleges, what essays might they need to write? And so the fact that we can track all of that in one place is incredibly valuable to counselors and to students, because you have a clear sense of which essays need to be written for what college in order for the application to be complete. And it's all in one place.

So — go back to the presentation really fast. Since I won't go back over the walkthrough because we already walked through it, but if you guys have questions, please ask. The one other thing I wanna share is kind of what parents see, because I think it's such an important part of the process, and that looks very different.

If you're a parent, this is what you see. Parents — one of the design choices we made with SOAR early on was that SOAR connects parents, students, and counselors, and basically everybody sees the same thing in almost everything — except in essays, where we basically show parents only the status of essays, but we don't actually let them see the essays or the drafts themselves.

So parents can see where the student is with all the assignments, what assignments Catherine has received, where she is in terms of completing them, and so on. But they can't actually see the drafts. Even if they click here, they can see all the prompts that Catherine will have to write — but not the actual drafts themselves. We just withhold that information from parents as a deliberate choice.

It is an important part of the process that we basically say to students: "What you write stays between you and your coach. If you want to share it with your parents" — obviously some students want to, and that's fine — "but SOAR will not share it with your parents." And we, at LifeSmartSuite, we don't share that information with a parent. So students can write what they wanna say and feel free to experiment with different ways of saying things, or feel free to write about possibly controversial topics — without the feeling like, "Oh my goodness, Mom's gonna look at it, or Dad's gonna look at it, and I'm gonna have to explain this to them." It's very intense for a kid, and there's always that sense of writing performatively when students write in a way that parents might see.

And so I'm curious, Ruth, about that too — if you have, like, what your thoughts are about that. I know you're not feeling great, and if you feel like you can't answer, that's totally fine —

Ruth: No, I mean, I think there's a bunch of elements here, and certainly one of them — we go back to the reason why colleges ask students to write these essays. They wanna see that they can think, and they can write, and they can discuss complex ideas. And they want students who can be independent.

Part of LifeLaunchr's whole philosophy is enabling students to have a period of independence as they write these college essays so that they're ready for college when they get there. And so if parents were to see the essays, that would short-circuit a little bit of that independence, for sure. It might also make the students, as Swami suggests, a little bit more cautious about what they write and how they write — they might write to please the parents as opposed to really share an interesting, unique aspect about themselves.

And then, I don't know, I think everybody out there has probably heard the expression, "Too many cooks spoil the broth." And certainly we all know situations where we've got a piece of writing and we get a whole bunch of people to feed back to it, and it's that disjointed piece that comes out at the other end of the process, and/or it's a very confused writer in the middle in terms of what it is they write.

So this ensures a nice clean process with the students so that they have the space and the clarity to think about their ideas and who they are and what they wanna write about. And at any point in the process — particularly toward the end, and that's what I often find with students — toward the end they might say, "Okay, I'm really happy with this. Now I'm ready to share it with mom and dad." And they will value their opinion on that.

Swami: Yeah. And sometimes, yeah — but not throughout the process. It can be really confusing. So we made the deliberate choice to basically not have parents be able to see students' writing at all in SOAR. And I think that, I feel very confident that that is the right design choice.

So let's talk about any questions. Ruth, do you know if there are any questions we can go through?

Ruth: Yeah. Let me just flip through this.

So — one question here: "The colleges are screening for AI-written essays. Does SOAR create any of that risk? And even if SOAR doesn't, what's your sense of whether the students might create their own risk outside of SOAR?"

Swami: Yeah. First of all, on Substack I wrote a piece last year — and this will get updated this year. I'll put the link in the chat for anybody who wants to see it — what are all the policies the different colleges have about AI? And it's really important to understand that. So for anyone who wants to see it, you can just click the link and read the Substack. I'm also at the AI Learning Lab, and HECA has its committee. I would say I'm very, very, very confident that what we're doing with SOAR does not do anything that would violate any college's policy about how they want to do things. So the principles we have is human beings coaching human beings how to write. It's just how that's always been done.

And so this does not in any way amount to AI coaching students at all. The idea is human beings coach, counselors co-coach human beings on how to write. Counselors coach students on how to write. So this really stands very clearly on one side of the bright line that colleges have.

And for most colleges, the rule basically says that they don't want to see AI-written writing because AI-written writing isn't authentic. And so this process specifically focuses on that kind of authenticity and the stories that students tell and authentically helping them articulate who they are in their application. So we're very, very clear to stay on the good side of it.

That said, I will say — you asked the other part of your question — there's nothing prevents a student from going to ChatGPT, while SOAR won't write the essay for them, nothing prevents them from going to ChatGPT or Claude or anyone else on their own, Grok, and asking for an essay that they can use. And we then have to deal with an essay that we think was written by AI. And every counselor has their own method for how they deal with that.

We did a partnership with the HECA Essay Learning Lab and talked about that question quite a bit. I think it's very hard to detect for sure whether AI wrote an essay or whether it's just a student who writes in the way that AI sometimes does. So that's just generally true — students can go to AI and get essays written. We can't prevent it, but we don't do anything to really enable it or encourage it.

Ruth: Hmm, like the paid essay writers of the past.

Swami: Yeah, I mean, that's always been a problem. This has always been a problem. Paid essay writers, parents writing kids' essays — there's nothing new about any of it, right? It's just having AI do it instead of your parents. It's the same thing.

Okay. A couple questions from counselors. Can you be honest here — does this in any way replace what I do as an independent educational counselor, or does it extend it?

Absolutely it extends it. I think the idea behind all of this is that this is meant — the principle is that human beings, counselors like you and me, coach students on how to write. And SOAR provides a set of tools that will really create a process that will enable students to produce outstanding work. SOAR provides kind of the process, the infrastructure, some of the tools that counselors use, some of the tools that students use — but it does not replace what counselors do. It is meant for counselors to use.

And how does it fit next to the tools that I already use, like College Planner, SCOIR, Maia?

Yeah, all great questions. So all of those tools — many counselors use College Planner Pro, schools use SCOIR or Naviance or tools like that. These tools all have different things, like part of it — the administrative tools that counselors use in their own practice for invoicing or class assignment or whatever — and those tools, you'll have to continue to use those. The big difference is that students don't use any of those tools. Like, if you ask a student, "Do you like using College Planner Pro?" — it doesn't happen.

And so one of the things that SOAR is designed to do is to work in a way that students actually work, right? 'Cause students work in this way — this method of chatting with something works for them. It's their normal way of operation, and because it's their normal way of operation, they're more likely to do it. The feedback we've gotten from our students who've used it — and now there are hundreds of students using SOAR — feedback has been really overwhelmingly positive, students loving it.

I had a counselor who emailed me the other day whose students were using it, and she's like, "I finally got my students to start writing 'cause on SOAR it's easier," and she was so excited about it. And I think that idea that this sits alongside the other tools you use, but it really is meant for the kinds of work that happens when you and I aren't there sitting with the students. The idea is that it enables students to do the work when we aren't sitting next to them.

Ruth: Mm-hmm. Well, and if I can just build on what you were saying earlier about students not using those other tools — nor do parents — and sort of the engagement of parents in the whole process in a little bit more meaningful way than maybe in the past is also a feature.

Swami: Indeed. Totally. Yeah.

And from a parent's perspective, here's a question: where does my child's writing go? Does it train the AI?

Great question. Awesome question. So there's a challenge for many — let's say you were to go randomly go to ChatGPT and put in something, and you didn't set, you weren't careful about setting your preferences. That's used to train ChatGPT's models. That's their default setting. So when we built SOAR, we used Claude's API, and the API that Anthropic offers — Anthropic is the company that owns Claude. That API guarantees that the information you provide through it will be used only to answer the question you ask. Will not be used to train their systems, will not be used in any other way, will be forgotten immediately after you ask it.

So we can be absolutely certain that the information students are putting in will not be used to train models, does not violate their privacy. Which is why from a school's perspective, it can be used in a way that maintains the legal requirements as well, right? FERPA — the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act — and so on. So the idea is that this allows us to be positive because we use the only method that really assures that, which is the application programming interface that these tools offer.

Okay. We just have another question that came in: was this tested on computers like Chromebooks that students receive from their schools?

A great question. And yes, we do test it on Chromebooks, on tablets like iPads. It works on every kind of device. You can download an app on your mobile phone, you can download an app on your iPad. It works on a Chromebook, it'll work on a Mac, it'll work on a PC. It works on every kind of computer and web browser. And it works that way because it uses the infrastructure that all of these systems use, right? We use high quality SQL database in Postgres on the back end. We use Python for our software, and we use React and all these tools on the front end. So this is modern architecture that works really simply and works fast for people when they use it.

Okay, do we have time for one more?

Ruth: One final question, then we have to finish, yeah.

Swami: Okay. I really love this question, which is: "My child already writes well. Is the self-discovery still worth it?"

Great question, and you may have perspective on this too, Ruth. Because, of course, we work with students at every level of writing — some students who are exceptional writers, some students for whom writing just isn't their thing.

And everyone's capable of an effective essay. Honestly, it isn't really about the quality of writing itself. I loved reading — I mentioned to you, Ruth, earlier that I've been reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, and I love that kind of writing. It's beautiful, ornate, carefully constructed. Most of our students aren't writing like that, but they don't have to write like that to make good college essays. And the fact that they write beautifully isn't helpful without the self-reflection that makes for a great, meaningful story told in a college application — a cohesive story that really captures all the parts of the student's life and their experiences.

So I'm curious what you think as well about that, because you've done this so much.

Ruth: Yes, and good writing is — especially in an academic setting or in a high school — you can get straight As in English language classes for writing well. But it doesn't mean you think deep thoughts about yourself, and you think and plan your future, and you see yourself in the world or in the community around you as a contributor.

And so the self-discovery really encourages the student to take time to think about those bigger questions about themselves that typically their high school isn't going to ask them. Maybe some of you around your dinner table have deep, soulful conversations about who you are and what's important to you. But if you take a look at some of those questions that Swami flashed as he was going through — these are not the stuff of everyday writing. This is truly going to the core of your being.

All the adults out there — how many times do you feel you need to get closer in touch with yourself? You need to do a little bit more self-discovery because you've hit a point in the path where it's like, "Whoa, this isn't working for me. I need to do something different." But it takes time to do that self-reflection. So yeah, you can be a great writer, but a terrible self-discovery person, or be totally disengaged from who you are. So yeah, you need to do the deep thinking.

Swami: Absolutely. And that is such a great answer. And on that note, I wanna thank you, Ruth. I know it's been a difficult day for you, health-wise, and I really, really appreciate you being here today.

Ruth: Oh, it's those out there.

Swami: Thank you to everyone who's been on here. Thank you for the questions. If you guys have questions afterwards, please feel free to reach out. There's also — if you go to the offers on the right, you'll see there's a little "find a time." You can schedule a free consultation if you wanna talk to me. If you have any questions about SOAR or how it works, please feel free to schedule a time or just email me. And we'll follow up after that. Thank you so much, everyone. Thanks, Ruth.

Ruth: Thank you. And hope you feel better soon.

Swami: Thank you so much. Okay, bye now.

Ruth: Bye-bye.