Stephanie S

Counselor

Stephanie partners with her students to bring their stories alive in the personal statement, guiding them to craft creative, compelling, and polished narratives that reflect their strengths, academic goals, and career aspirations, ultimately positioning them for successful admission to their top-choice programs.

Location:
Amherst, Massachusetts

Education:
MFA, Creative Writing, University of Massachusetts Amherst
MA, English Literature, Seton Hall University
BA, Creative Writing and English Literature, Seton Hall University

Bio:
An academic mentor and essay coach with Moon Prep, Stephanie partners with her students to bring their stories alive in the personal statement, making them highly competitive for top-choice programs through well-written and compelling narratives that reflect their strengths, academic goals, and career aspirations. As a coach and current university writing instructor, Stephanie enjoys guiding her students as they begin, develop, and finalize outstanding personal statements for both traditional four-year undergraduate and graduate programs. She is passionate about drawing on her creative writing experiences to help aspiring college students realize themselves as brilliant writers with stories to tell.

Alongside her mentoring at Moon Prep, Stephanie is currently a Writing Program Teaching Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches eleven writing courses, designs course syllabi in alignment with curriculum goals, and regularly refines her teaching philosophy from pedagogical seminars. In this role, she focuses on essay and creative writing topics in courses like Writing and Reading Imaginative Literature, English Writing, and Core English. With a few years of university-level English instruction and assistance with MFA program admissions, Stephanie is eager to share her invaluable insights with students looking to distill their personal journeys into powerful narratives for college admissions.

Previously, Stephanie was a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Seton Hall University. She taught four first-year writing courses, designed syllabi, created assignments, and drafted lesson plans per university curriculum goals. Stephanie also has editorial experience from an internship with One Story, where she read over 50 short fiction submissions every week, assisted with educational programming, proofed stories from publication, and helped with the social media pipeline. In 2018, Stephanie was nominated for the New York Summer Writers Institute Scholarship, and in 2017 she won the South Wind Thesis Prize in Creative Writing.