Personal Statements
by Irena Smithin 🎭️ Culture
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Personal Statements
About the Substack
"And that's what made me who I am today" is the worst kind of cliché and also what I write about. The "that" includes Soviet immigrant parents, TV, books, marriage, motherhood, and free-floating nostalgia. Striving to be low-key cool, with mixed results.
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- Occasional public posts
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About Irena Smith
High school underachiever, logophile, (former) Stanford admissions officer, (former) college counselor, writer. Author of The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays (a memoir).
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Exploring what exists in the middle - of parenting, of health, of life. Fourteen years into raising a child with severe epilepsy, I am always looking for the both-ness: the many ways we end up a sum of our best luck and worst experiences.
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