Description

This comprehensive coaching package provides personalized, end-to-end support for the Princeton in Africa Fellowship application. From developing your overarching application strategy to refining each of your four core essays, we’ll work together to build a cohesive application that demonstrates your motivation, professional contribution, community orientation, adaptability, and capacity for learning. 1. Initial Consultation & Application Strategy — 1 Hour Application Walkthrough: We’ll review the Princeton in Africa application and selection process, identifying what each component is designed to assess and how the different pieces should work together. Background Deep Dive: We’ll examine your academic, professional, community, international, and cross-cultural experiences to identify the strongest evidence supporting your candidacy. Candidate Positioning: We’ll establish the central narrative connecting your past experiences, motivation for PiAf, potential contribution to a host organization, and personal and professional growth you hope to gain from the fellowship. Story Selection & Application Architecture: Before drafting, we’ll determine which experiences are best suited to each essay so that your responses complement rather than repeat one another. 2. Four Core Essays — 4 Hours We’ll develop and refine each of Princeton in Africa’s four required essays, using the dedicated review time flexibly across your responses based on where the greatest development is needed. Motivation & Growth: Build a compelling explanation of why you are pursuing Princeton in Africa, why the fellowship makes sense at this stage of your trajectory, and how the experience will contribute to your personal and professional development. Community & Engagement: Identify an experience that demonstrates how you build relationships, contribute to communities, and engage thoughtfully with people whose backgrounds and experiences may differ from your own. Adaptability & Self-Awareness: Develop a story that demonstrates how you respond to unfamiliarity, ambiguity, or discomfort, with particular attention to how you adapted and what you learned from the experience. Africa & Learning Orientation: Articulate a grounded interest in and connection to the African continent while demonstrating intellectual humility about what you hope to learn, question, or unlearn through immersion in your host community. Developmental Review: Feedback will focus first on story selection, depth of reflection, specificity, evidence, and responsiveness to each prompt before progressing to structure and sentence-level writing. Iterative Refinement: We’ll use the dedicated essay-review time flexibly across all four responses, devoting greater attention to essays requiring more development rather than prescribing a fixed number of revisions. Application-Wide Coherence: As your essays develop, we’ll assess them collectively to minimize repetition and ensure that they provide distinct evidence of your motivation, contribution, community orientation, adaptability, and learning mindset. Final Polish: Later-stage feedback will focus on clarity, concision, transitions, word choice, and maximizing the impact of each response within the application’s tight character limits. 3. CV, Professional Bio & Short-Form Responses — 45 Minutes CV Optimization: We’ll strengthen your CV around the capabilities most relevant to potential host organizations, emphasizing transferable professional skills, ownership, execution, cross-cultural experience, community engagement, and measurable impact. Professional Bio: We’ll develop and refine your third-person professional biography to effectively communicate your education, professional trajectory, leadership, service, and relevant accomplishments to prospective fellowship organizations. Short-Form Responses: We’ll optimize the highly constrained application sections covering experience in Africa, significant international travel, and experience in rural or lower-resource settings. Innovation Fellowship: If applicable, we’ll review your Innovation Fellowship response to establish a clear connection between your skills, experiences, career aspirations, and interest in innovation on the African continent. 4. Placement & Recommendation Strategy — 15 Minutes Placement Fit: We’ll identify the sectors, organizational environments, functions, and challenges where your existing experiences and capabilities position you to contribute meaningfully, while maintaining appropriate flexibility for Princeton in Africa’s placement process. Recommendation Strategy: We’ll identify the recommender best positioned to provide compelling evidence of your capabilities and character and determine how their perspective can complement rather than duplicate the rest of your application. 5. Check-In Meetings — Variable Amount of live coaching -Suited to Client Preference: Depending on your style/needs, you may want to have live conversations to discuss application progress, clarify questions on the feedback you've received on written documents, or just check-in to get some extra motivation if you are feeling daunted by the entire process. I have designed the package to be as cost-efficient as possible, meaning most of our interactions will occur asynchronously to optimize for what I have observed to be the minimal amount of time required to put together a stellar application. However, I am more than happy to meet as frequently as you would like, keeping in mind that any time/cost overrun would necessitate adding more hours of coaching time.