People have just disconnected learning from the experience of going to college in general. Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of projects on the site I work for at any given time-there's always work to be done. I come from a nice enough suburb where I've seen people get into Cornell or other Ivy League schools that had no business being there to begin with. There are people who just go there and pay $20,000 a year and don't leave with anything resembling an education. The biggest takeaway I've gleaned from this is that you get out of college what you put into it. The administrator of the site tells us not to go lower than about ten cents a word, but it seems like there are more projects than there are writers to go around, so I get more than that anyway. I average somewhere around $25 a page, and I won't go much lower than that now that it's finals time. I would never in a million years pay the prices that people pay me. There's always room to do more-I probably only work 20 or 25 hours a week, and I still make enough to pay rent and pay for groceries and everything like that.Ībout 95 percent of the time, I give the students their papers and I don't hear back, but I've had projects that I've turned in before, and the teacher's apparently said to the student, "I know you didn't write this." I also have repeat customers who are satisfied, and I have even taken entire classes for people-we work out the price for the semester beforehand. I think the most anyone I know has made in a two-week pay period is around $4,000. A couple months ago I got into a skiing accident and couldn't work, but I was able to get anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a week doing this from home. I've been doing that for six months now, and making enough money to do it full-time. 'I have even taken entire classes for people.' It's not often I get to write about things I'm actually interested in, but once I saw a post pertaining to William Gibson's Neuromancer-a personal favorite of mine-and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to put a bid in even though it needed to be six pages. Others I've done have been personal essays, like, "Write about a time in your life that you've faced challenges." And I'm continually surprised by the fact that people would rather pay someone $100 than write a couple of pages about themselves. One was for a client who had me write something about their family taking in a foreign exchange student from Brazil. They don't require research or citations, so you can just kind of crank those out ad nauseam. I've done from 30 or 40 of those at $50 or $60 a pop and they only take me a half-hour each. You write a great admissions essay, someone reads it, and that person is probably never gonna associate it to a face. It's not like you're writing a paper for a class where the person's gonna see it and identify someone as the person who wrote it. I'll just write about people going on mission trips or things like that just to kind of demonstrate some sort of cross-cultural awareness. I've had students who will commission an essay for Harvard, and I can tell just from talking to them that they aren't going to get into a school like Harvard. I've done some college admissions essays, too, and you basically have to make something up. 'People would rather pay someone $100 than write a couple of pages about themselves.'
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