Lizzy Steiner

Lizzy Steiner has a BA in English from Wesleyan and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia — and those credentials are not decorative. She spent years teaching writing at Hunter College, working as a magazine journalist, and learning how to tell a real story in a way that holds a reader. Now she brings that same eye to college admissions, where the difference between an essay that lands and one that doesn’t often comes down to whether the student found something true to say — and whether the writing let them say it.

Lizzy has been consulting with the firm since 2021 and has built a reputation internally as someone other consultants trust with their own clients’ work. She serves as a second reviewer across the roster, providing editorial and strategic feedback on applications targeting Harvard, Brown, Cornell, the UCs, and Barnard. She leads the firm’s AdCom Simulator program, running mock admissions-committee exercises that give students a visceral sense of how their application reads from the other side of the table. She also tutors the ACT, with a track record of helping students reach top scores. Her clients have been admitted to Wesleyan, UVA, Emory, Oxford, and UCSD, with waitlists at UCLA, Berkeley, and Cornell.

Lizzy works especially well with students who are stronger thinkers than they are writers — STEM applicants who need help translating technical achievement into narrative, humanities students who overthink every sentence, and anyone whose first draft reads like it was written for a teacher rather than an admissions reader. She is comfortable with international families, pre-med students navigating the essay process for the first time, and parents who want to understand what is happening and why.

Lizzy writes the way she coaches: clear, warm, and precise. Every round sharpens the draft. She is not the consultant who will overhaul your voice — she is the one who will help you find it and then get out of the way.