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Until now, I've mostly tried to use my talent for good, not evil. But with three growing kids who eat more with each passing month and college essay season upon us, I might have to take a walk on the dark side -- a walk that until now I've studiously avoided, despite the temptation.
College essay tutoring, part of the college application industrial complex, is a big business. It's also a sordid affair, where the rich get a leg up on the rest of us by doling out hundreds of dollars an hour to have a professional individually tutor their children.
Did I mention my temptation?
To date, I have offered college essay tutoring, but only to local charitable auctions. Sure enough: people pony up.
And now? Well, I don't have to be convinced that you can make money from work that is not necessarily noble. For God's sake, I once worked on Wall Street.
But what about work you find downright repulsive, a task with few, if any, redeeming qualities?Did I mention that phone consultation package with a top college essay tutor runs $2,500 for 5 one-hour sessions? That's even more than a Westchester litigator makes, my standard for good pay for questionable work.
I took an informal poll of friends, neighbors and strangers. Ninety percent of them said they would do anything legal that paid well. In other words, they all but said I had a current of madness running through my head for even hesitating. They're probably right: with seemingly intractable unemployment rate, an economy that is bad and appears to be getting worse, pride and piousness seem misplaced at best, a grave error at worst.
Besides, from my work already, I can tell that there are some satisfying elements involved. A kid comes in with an idea to write 800 of the world's most familiar words, about how they climbed up mountain with their family and through the ordeal learned about perseverance, which, they imply, will help them forge through their sophomore year Organic Chemistry requirement. After hints and goading and arm-twisting and perhaps even bribery and extortion, you get them to focus on a less predictable thread of thought about something else they've done.
Except that a lot of Connecticut and Westchester kids are sent overseas today on "charity" trips, which cost thousands and involve digging a well for a village with your own hands for about five minutes, then hitting the local beaches. They want to write about those five minutes, weaving it into tales of their beneficence and how they are on the fast track to canonization. It's hard to convince them otherwise and their parents, in the hole for so much money for the trips, want them to write about the trips too.
Where's the harm? After all, on Wall Street, I had a sales manager who used to say: "If the man wants a blue suit, you have to sell him a blue suit." Why not just play along? And yet---from the concept of rigging the application process in favor of the wealthy to those awful self-aggrandizing essays about the expensive vacation trips -- the work sceeves me like little else in life.
Is there a point, even in this day and age, when the money just isn't worth the doubt? I've gotten great feedback from you in this spaceimpassioned, informed and well-framed.
So what sayest thou?
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Marek Fuchs is the author of "A Cold-Blooded Business," the true story of a murderer, from Westchester, who almost got away with it. His upcoming book on volunteer firefighting across America, Local Heroes, is due out in 2012. He wrote The New York Times' "County Lines" column about life in Westchester for six years and teaches non-fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville. He also serves as a volunteer firefighter. You can contact Marek through his website: www.marekfuchs.com or on Twitter: @MarekFuchs.
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