Agora

🏛 Qodiriy Community is open 🏛

Last time we named our group after Oscar Wilde. This time we stayed in Tashkent.

Abdulla Qodiriy wrote the first Uzbek novel. There was no book like it in Uzbek before, so he had nothing to copy. He wrote something nobody had written before, and people still read it a hundred years later.

That's what we want for your essay.

What it is
An 8-week writing program, online.
- 16 sessions, two a week
- 8 hours one-on-one with the special mentor
- Peer reviews from Agora alumni and more

How it works
The first month is about your writing itself. We cut what's vague, fix your structure, and help you find your own voice.
The second month is your personal statement and supplements, built from your own ideas.

You write every word. We push you to revise until it sounds like you.

What you've been asking us

"My English isn't good enough."
If you can follow an SAT class, you can follow ours. The first month exists for exactly this.

"I don't have an interesting story."
Almost everyone says that in week one. Said came in with a list of activities and no story connecting them. He's at KAIST now.

"Can't I just use ChatGPT?"
So can every other applicant. We teach you to write the essay it can't, because it comes from your life.

"Will this get me in?"

Nobody honest can promise that. Our students are at Kyoto, KAIST, CUHK and Franklin & Marshall, and they wrote their own essays.

Who it's for
- ED2 and Regular Decision applicants
- 10th–11th graders who want to start early

If your deadline is November 1, write to us first. We'll tell you honestly whether it's too late.

Price

$500 for the full program.
$400 for SATashkent students.
You can pay in parts.

Dates
15 seats only.
Applications close 18th October at 23:59 Tashkent time.

How to join
Apply here: agorawriting.com/qodiriy
Or write QODIRIY to @agoraaid.

@agora_writing

🏛🏛Should my PS be related to my major?

Yes, but it doesn’t have to name your major. It has to point toward it.

When an admissions officer reads your file, they need one clear sentence about you, like: “This student uses philosophy to understand power and history.” If your essay is only philosophy and your application is politics/history, the reader has to guess how they connect. Don’t make them guess.

The good news is that philosophy and politics are neighbors. Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke all wrote philosophy about politics. So keep your philosophical idea, and add a bridge to the real world.

Example:

• Philosophy only: "The Ship of Theseus asks: if you replace every plank of a ship, is it still the same ship?”
• With a bridge: “Since 1991, Uzbekistan has replaced many planks. A new alphabet, new street names, new constitutions. But it kept one. Our national anthem uses the same melody as the Soviet one, only with new words. I want to study how countries decide what to keep from their past and what to throw away.”

Put this bridge in your last paragraph. One or two sentences are enough. But don’t force it. If the link feels fake, find the political question already hiding inside your philosophical idea. It’s almost always there.

🏛How do you write about a common topic in an uncommon way?

French printers once had a shortcut for pages they expected to print again and again.

Instead of setting the type letter by letter, they cast the whole page as one solid metal plate.

They called it a cliché, possibly after the click of the mold striking the metal.

A cliché was a sentence nobody had to think about anymore.

That is the trouble with a topic that resonates.

The grandmother, the injury, the move to a new country. These subjects feel enormous to everyone, so the plate has already been cast.

In the 2025–26 cycle, more than four in ten Common App applicants chose the adversity or personal-growth prompt.

The usual advice is to “choose another topic.” But these topics are common for a reason. The Lindy effect says if something has lasted a long time, it will probably last much longer. People have written about family for thousands of years. It matters, so it will stay.

So the real question is how to write good essay on an old topic.

Common: “I hurt my knee, but I learned to never give up.”

Better: “One week after knee surgery, my doctor made me walk on it, and I named my crutches ‘Pain’ and ‘Suffering.’ Wolff’s law says bones grow stronger where they carry weight, and now I ask why some stress builds us and some breaks us.”

Keep your topic.

And follow one rule. Bring an idea, a question, and a true detail about you in an interesting way.

@agora_writing — Keep Learning.

AGORA AID applications are now closed.

Thank you to everyone who applied. We're reading every application in full.

Check your inbox today and tomorrow.

If you missed this round, our other programs are still open at agorawriting.com.

Questions: @agoraaid

🏛AGORA AID applications close tomorrow evening. We dare you to be delusional for one evening. Open the form and write the name of the university you think is out of your reach. Many strong students never apply early to Princeton, MIT or Stanford because…

🎓 AGORA AID: Early Round wave (100% scholarship) We have opened AGORA AID twice this year. This wave is different. It is for one kind of student only, and it runs for three weeks. Who it is for - Class of 2031 (you are applying this fall) - SAT 1500 or higher…

Our upcoming cohort, Wilde Community, starts this Wednesday.

If you want to join the elite Agora Writing Program, you are welcome to join our new cohort.

You can find full information at agorawriting.com.

Requirement: IELTS 7.5 or SAT English 700+

If you have questions or want to learn more, message @agoraaid.

@agora_writing

🏛Her name is Kelly.

For years, Kelly Britt read applications at 😳Stanford, in undergraduate admissions and at the Graduate School of Education. She was the reader. She gave the scores. Thousands of files, every major, plus a few degree combinations you didn't know existed.

She has worked the other side of it too. Enrollment at the California College of the Arts. Advising at the University of San Francisco. Years sitting across the table from one nervous seventeen-year-old at a time.

She joins our Review Team, which means she reads your application before you send it, the same way she read files at 😳Stanford. The activities you chose and the order you listed them in. What your file says about you when you are not in the room to explain it. Where you sound like everyone else, and where you don't.

Then she tells you what is broken while you still have time to fix it.

Most students learn their application was flawed in March, when the decision comes back and nobody explains why. You have chance to learn it now, from the person who used to make that call.

Welcome, Kelly. Our students got lucky.

🏛 http://www.agorawriting.com/apply

We opened application for Homer Community. 🏛

Apply: http://agorawriting.com/programs/agora-writing

🏆 Highlights from the Agora Football Cup!

On July 26th, we organized the first sport event for our Agora Alumni. It was football. And it was free for all.

Kalokagathia is an ancient greek concept about the unity of fitness with intellect. That, mental growth entails physical one too.

And that's the unity our alumni sought as they gathered at 6pm on a Sunday evening.

Football was first. But we'll have more. Tennis. Volleyball. Basketball. Kalokagathia should continue.