Tutoring a high school student

On Friday I went to Hermitage High School to help a senior with her college application essays. When I got there, the first thing I noticed was that we were wearing the same shoes and I immediately knew we would get along. Ok, I admit, the shoes thing wasn't the ultimate ice breaker, but still we got along well. She hadn't had much of a start on her essays so a lot of what we did was brainstorming. She asked me about whether or not I thought an idea would be a good one to write about and I gave her general tips about what colleges are looking for in the essays. We finally decided that a good topic would be her move from Italy to America when she was younger. I told her the best thing to do was to just start writing and see what comes out. Initially, she took the same approach as I always did in high school, which was to make some very broad statement about the nature of life or love or people or something far too broad to start an essay with. I advised her that she needed to immediately get to what she was trying to say and not waste time talking about things that she would never be able to prove or back up. She decided to start out with it being sort of a story and told about the day she found out she was moving. She wrote her introduction and I read over that and we talked about it and then we talked about how she would structure the rest of the paper. I think we got a pretty good general outline of how it would go. We moved on to a few other supplement essays and really only got to talking about what she would write about and how she would structure it. I also helped her set up a Common Application account online to make it easier to have all her essays in one place. Overall, I think I helped her at least get some direction in the process and it was actually kind of fun for me as well. I told her that if she has any questions or wants me to look over the essay she can definitely email me so hopefully she will take advantage of that, because I feel like I could really help her with this stuff. It was sort of a strange feeling to feel like I could actually make a difference and help her with her essay where other people haven't, and I admit, I liked it.