Irena Smith was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Moscow in the waning days of the Brezhnev regime; in 1977, her family emigrated from the USSR and sought asylum in the United States as political refugees. She has been published in HIAS@130: 1+30: The Best of myStory, Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, Literary Mama and Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis. She has a PhD in comparative literature from UCLA and lives in Palo Alto, California.

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.