Meet Hanah

Hanah Lim is a former high school English teacher and essay specialist who is passionate about helping demystify the college admission process for young people and their families. Before teaching English at the high school she attended growing up, she worked as a college consultant for students in Bangkok, Thailand, directed SAT prep centers in Irvine, California and worked with non-profit groups and as an AVID counselor to help close the achievement gap. She has helped students in the college admissions process from different backgrounds from all over the world and has worked with over 5,000 students in her career. She has helped her students, many of them first generation, get admitted into top universities like Harvard, Yale, Duke, Georgetown, UChicago, Harvard Law, Yale Law, and dozens of other great institutions. In addition to helping seniors write their college essays, Hanah has also trained teachers district-wide on how to take seniors through the college essay process. She graduated from California State University, Long Beach with a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Education and is a credentialed single subject teacher. Hanah also oversees College Essay Guy's essay and application workshop team and organizes speaking events and college application and essay workshops for students at schools and organizations in the US and around the world.

Meet Lyn

Lyn Fairchild Hawks is an experienced essay coach with her own business, Success Story, and loves helping students tell cinematic stories. Her students earn merit scholarships and hear good news from schools such as Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, Cal Poly, and Cornell. She is a graduate of Stanford University with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Education and holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of young adult novels, short stories, and books for educators, including lessons for teaching Shakespeare. As someone juggling critiques from agents and editors, she understands what it’s like to wrestle with feedback and make deep revisions.

For 15 years Lyn designed and ran online programs for gifted youth at Duke University and loves personalizing writing activities for students as well as training teachers. She lives in Chapel Hill, NC with her partner, Greg Hawks, an Americana singer-songwriter, and Sonny the orange tabby, the namesake of bluegrass, jazz, and blues musicians. Her stepson, a proud graduate of DePaul, now mixes sound in an L.A. film studio and still forgives his stepmom for making him rewrite all his essays. She loves drawing, cooking, dancing to ‘80s music, and Wordle.

Meet Ethan

Ethan Sawyer is a nationally recognized college essay expert, sought-after speaker, and author of the Amazon bestsellers College Essay Essentials and College Admission Essentials.

Each year he helps thousands of students and counselors through his online courses, workshops, articles, products, and books, and works privately with a small number of students.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Ethan holds an MFA from UC Irvine, two counseling certificates, is certified in Myers-Briggs and hypnotherapy. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife and daughter.