Amy Stoker is an English teacher here at FHN. She can be found in room 133.  She helps students write essays for college admissions and scholarships. Whether or not the school has an admissions essay, they have scholarship essays. Stoker helps with things like grammar, creativity, and to help keep students on track and following the prompt if there is one.

“I want to see them get into their dream school and whether or not a lot of schools have an admissions essay, they have a scholarship essay,” Stoker said. “The early bird gets the worm, every school has a certain bucket of money that they can give out for scholarships and once the money’s gone it’s gone”.

Senior Daphne Hickman is one of the students that Stoker has helped throughout the school year. She has been going back and forth with her essays. Stoker believes that students should write multiple drafts per essay. 

“I always knew it’s always been one of my goals,” Hickman said. “I think I want to go into something science and the field of study that I really want to do right now is food science”

In order to get started with getting help with Stoker, a student writes a draft or two themselves and then asks her to look over them and then she will come back with comments, corrections, pointers, etc. Students go back and forth with the process of edits until they are satisfied with their paper. 

“Think about your audience which is college admissions,” Stoker said. “They read hundreds of essays and you want them to read about something that is different about you and what might make them want you on their campus” 

When writing essays for college it is important that you give yourself room for creativity. Students should show not only the technical side of things but who they are as a person. They should open up to learning new things about themselves. Teachers can learn things about students that they have had for years but were not aware of.

“It does take more than one draft,” Hickman said. “I was hoping it would be simple but it’s not a one and done thing”.