Irena Smith is a college admissions expert and the author of The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, a blend of memoir and sharp social commentary about her work in college admissions. She was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Moscow in the waning days of the Brezhnev regime; when she was nine, her family emigrated from the USSR and sought asylum in the United States as political refugees. In spite of tearfully vowing that she would never, not ever, learn English, she went on to receive a PhD in comparative literature from UCLA and taught humanities and composition at Stanford before transitioning to college admissions work and writing. She an inveterate advocate of reading as many books as possible, chocolate-covered espresso beans, and the Oxford comma. For more information, visit irenasmith.com and follow her on Twitter at @irenawrites.

Palo Alto, California, is home to stratospheric real estate prices and equally high expectations, a place where everyone has to be good at something and where success is often defined by the name of a prestigious college on the back of a late-model luxury car. It’s also the place where Irena Smith—Soviet émigré, PhD in comparative literature, former Stanford admission reader—works as a private college counselor to some of the country’s most ambitious and tightly wound students . . . even as, at home, her own children unravel.

Narrated as a series of responses to college application essay prompts, The Golden Ticket combines sharp social commentary, family history, and the lessons of great (and not so great) literature to offer a broader, more generous vision of what it means to succeed.