About Riley

Riley graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025 with a degree in Public Policy and Global Studies and a minor in English, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

Riley's experience working with high school-aged students includes five summers as a counselor at Camp Seafarer, two summers as a Trip Leader with Moondance Adventures in Thailand, and a semester as Faculty at the Island School in the Bahamas, where they mentored a small cohort of students and led multi-day wilderness expeditions. This experience is grounded in a broader career built around listening closely and asking the right questions: as an Analyst for NCGrowth at UNC's Kenan Institute, Riley conducted stakeholder interviews and policy research to support Hurricane Helene recovery efforts, and as an Advocate with the Community Empowerment Fund, she spent three years providing relationship-based support to individuals navigating housing and financial insecurity — work that depends on helping someone identify what matters most to them and turn it into a clear plan.

Together, this background — a strong writing foundation, years of direct mentorship with teenagers, and professional experience built on empathetic listening and research — shapes Riley's approach to essay coaching: drawing out a student's authentic story and helping them articulate it with clarity and confidence.

Why me?

I still remember the exact moment I finished my Common App essay — the mix of relief and "wait, does this actually sound like me?" That question is the heart of what I do now.

I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in Spring 2025 with a degree in Public Policy and Global Studies and a minor in English, because I've always cared as much about how something is said as what's being said. My creative writing has been published in Walter magazine, and words — finding the right ones, cutting the wrong ones — have been a constant thread through everything I've done.

But before I was a writer, I was someone who spent a lot of time with teenagers figuring out who they are. Five summers at Camp Seafarer, two summers at Moondance Adventures, and a semester at the Island School taught me how to sit with a 16- or 17-year-old and ask the kind of questions that get past the rehearsed answer — the ones that surface what actually matters to them. This skill turned out to be exactly what a great college essay requires: not clever writing, but honest self-knowledge, put into words.

I also know this process from the inside. I applied for and interviewed for the Morehead-Cain Scholarship at UNC, the Park Scholarship at NC State, and the Belk Scholarship at Davidson College. I know what it feels like to sit across from someone whose job is to figure out who you really are in twenty minutes — and I know how much a well-articulated sense of self can carry you through that.

I love this work because every student has a genuinely great story in them — it's just often buried under what they think they're supposed to say. I get to help dig it out. My favorite part is the moment a student stops writing what they think sounds impressive and starts writing what's true — you can feel the difference on the page. That's not just a better essay. That’s the essay that gets you in — not because it's clever or curated, but because it's real.