Personal Statements
by Irena Smithin 🎭️ Culture
Personal Statements
About the Substack
Digressive, thinly substantiated weekly takes on refrigerator turf wars, petty grudge-holding, ADHD, nostalgia, eavesdropping, 1980s television, the tangled threads that connect families, plus metaphorical sausage-making (aka a memoir-in-progress).
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About Irena Smith
Soviet emigre->high school underachiever->comparative literature PhD-> Stanford admissions officer-> college counselor->writer. Author of THE GOLDEN TICKET: A LIFE IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS ESSAYS (a memoir, not a how-to).
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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.