Helping college students realize their dream, ESSAY CURE at your service
Christine Gacharnà is executive director and creator of ESSAY CURE
Updated 6/22/2023 5:30 PM, 10:30 PM
Note to subscribers: We started this month with a drawing for two items donated by our primary sponsor, Cook Solutions Group. We are now adding a third drawing for one spot in ESSAY CURE’s July 8 on-line workshop at a cost of $49 (regular price: $1,199). To be entered in this drawing, you must be subscribed to my email list. All entries must be received by midnight on June 30, 2023.
(To make it easy for you to buy Christine’s book if you are interested, I have embedded links to buying it on bookshop.org and amazon.com. I do get a commission from these two websites if you use the links in this post.)
“Pay it forward” may be a cliche, but there is no better description for Christine Gacharnà’s current calling.
From humble beginnings, Gacharnà’s life path has taken her to “ESSAY CURE,” a company designed to help students hone their technical writing skills.
Gacharnà works with students — mostly high school seniors, but also with college transfer and graduate students — who are writing their college application essays.
The Lakeview, Ore., native, Oregon State graduate and Leesburg, Va., resident is gearing up for a series of on-line summer workshops, the first scheduled for July 8. Periodic workshops will run through Labor Day.
Included in the course is a book written by Gacharnà titled “Right My College Application Essay” — the play on words intended — that serves as the course’s primer.
“My students know how to w-r-i-t-e — they wouldn’t be in front of me if they couldn’t,” she says. “But they don’t understand academic writing at the university level. I spent six years teaching that. That’s when I realized the students think that writing is pulling the great American novel out of the depths of their soul, and it’s not. Especially academic writing, which is a formula and a technical skill, and really easy to learn. It’s like they have a bad golf swing, and I’m trying to get them to break that muscle memory before it is so ingrained.”
So the process is not so much about the writing, but getting the application essay right?
“Exactly,” Gacharnà says. “For most students, it’s their first foray into selling themselves and that can feel very uncomfortable for some.
“These days, I see myself as that person in my students’ lives, the one who helps to push them over the finish line. I’m a unique person for them because I’m part parent, telling them the same things their parents tell them. I’m also their instructor, teaching them about undergraduate writing, and a coach who works with them on their life strategy.”
During the summer workshop, “Right My College Application Essay” serves as the course primer.
“The book is also intended to be a resource for any student who can’t get in front of me,” she says. “If students are self-motivated and determined, it’s possible to work their way through it and accomplish what they need. I want to help all students. It’s not possible for me to do what I do with every student; there’s just not enough of me or enough time. As ESSAY CURE grows, that will change.”
Christine tells me when she was just out of college and working as a newspaper news reporter, “I turned to Sports Illustrated. Sportswriters are the best in the business, I think. I don’t understand all of what they write about — I only pretend to understand when the refs throw a flag on the field. But it doesn’t matter; the technical skills and formulas that sportswriters use taught me all I needed to know.”
I don’t think Christine was saying this just to butter me up.
Today, she is executive director and creator of ESSAY CURE. She knows plenty about helping kids get into college and becoming successful in life’s endeavors after that. Gacharnà recently received word that ESSAY CURE has been nominated for the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce’s 2023 Small Business Award in Virginia.
In this article, you’ll read about how being a first-generation college student helped shape her life and fortified her desire to help young people avoid the pitfalls she encountered along the way.
Thank you, Christine, for becoming the latest sponsor for kerryeggers.com. It’s a pleasure to tell your story and the ultimate decision to pay it forward.
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Christine Verges Gacharnà is the youngest of three children. She was born in Ouray, Colo., where her parents owned and operated a restaurant. They soon sold the restaurant and moved to Lakeview, a town of about 2,500 in Lake County in rural southeastern Oregon. They established a restaurant there called “the Plush West.”
When Christine was in kindergarten, her father left the family. Eleanor Verges was left to raise three children by herself.
Christine Gacharnà and her mother, Eleanor Verges, who died in 2021
“As you can imagine, life was stressful,” she says. “ We had no money. Mom was trying to figure out what to do. Fortunately, she was able to get a job with the Lakeview School District working in the superintendent’s office. She worked there at least 20 years, long enough to get retirement benefits in Oregon.”
By the time Christine was in fifth grade, her siblings — eight and nine years older — were in college.
“We went from a family of five at home to just me and my mom,” she says. “Everything was about getting (her older siblings) through school.”
Dr. Bernard Daly, whose scholarship fund has more than 2,000 students attend college
A long-gone benefactor came to the rescue. Bernard Daly was a Lakeview resident who was a doctor, banker and rancher and served as a state senator and Lake County judge. Dr. Daly also was a regent at Oregon Agricultural College from 1898 to 1906. After he died in 1920 at age 62, the bulk of his estate established the Bernard Daly Educational Fund for Lake County youths.
“It started with an endowment of about $1 million in 1921, a substantial figure in those days,” says Sam Stern, a retired Oregon State professor who wrote a book about Daly and the fund titled “Bernard Daly’s Promise.” It was published by the OSU Press in 2022.
“Sam wrote the book I wanted to write, but couldn’t,” Christine says. “It was a book that needed to be written.”
Stern interviewed more than 100 people for the book.
“Fewer than two percent of people went to college at the time, and the number was smaller from Lake County,” Stern says. “When it started, the vision was to provide a scholarship for any kid who went through high school in the county. Before World War II, that was mostly young women.”
At the time, many of the men were either working on farms or going into the service.
Christine’s siblings were recipients of Daly scholarships, which helped pay for their education at Oregon State. Later, Christine would also be a recipient.
“It paid about one-third of my total expenses (at Oregon State),” she says. “It covered tuition, but also living expenses.”
Today, more than a century later, the Daly Fund still exists. It is the longest-running “place-based” scholarship program in the country. Students must attend college or technical school in the state of Oregon.
“More than 2,000 students have received scholarships,” Stern says. “They are now awarding up to 30 (scholarships) a year. The endowment has been added to greatly by several multi-million-dollar gifts from people who received the scholarship and in their estate, left money for the fund.”
With assets of about $6.8 million, the Daly Fund is one of the largest scholarship funds in Oregon.
“Each scholarship is for four years and is worth about $10,000 a year,” Stern says. “Kids are getting most of the cost of their education, including room and board. It’s a remarkable story.”
The Daly Fund was a lifesaver for the Verges family.
“My mother was always so grateful for that fund,” Christine says. “She would never have been able to pay for our college herself.”
Christine was grateful, too, for the opportunity to pursue a better life.
“I had watched Mom struggle to raise three kids, put braces on our teeth and get us all through college without the benefit of a college degree herself,” she says. “I saw college as my only way out. As long as I could hold onto that scholarship, I could escape the life I knew as a child from becoming my adult life.”
Minus a father in her life, Christine was fortunate to have a couple of men step up for her, including John Chambers.
“He taught me how to pitch a softball, and he taught his daughter how to catch it,” she says.
When Christine was 15, Eleanor remarried, joining in matrimony with Jim Lynch, a long-time Lakeview native who had been named a Daly Fund scholarship recipient himself.
“He didn’t accept (the funding), because his family had the means to put him through school,” Christine says.
Lynch would go on to serve as student body president at the University of Oregon and graduated from the U of O Law School. He enjoyed a long career as an attorney in Lakeview and served for many years as a member of the board of trustees for the Daly Fund.
“We had a great relationship,” Christine says. “He turned my life around. We started having dinner together, the three of us. I had this place to land in the evening. I wasn’t flailing around as much.”
On every Memorial Day from 1979 until she died in 2021, Eleanor Verges had a routine.
Bernard Daly’s grave, tended to by Eleanor Verges for many years in appreciation for his scholarship fund
“She would visit Dr. Daly’s grave to pull weeds, rake and arrange fresh silk flowers in gratitude for what he did for our family,” Christine says. “As time went on, she extended the caretaking to (the graves of) numerous friends and family members.”
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When Christine Verges graduated from Lakeview High in 1988, she had a list of three things she wanted to do in her life.
“Learn to use my camera in manual mode, learn Spanish, and travel,” she says.
Christine didn’t take long to get started.
“My freshman year at Oregon State, I took a photography course in the art department, thinking that would help me learn how to use my camera,” she says.
The instructor’s name was Harrison Branch.
“His critiques of my images were brutal,” Christine says. “He berated me every class. My photos were all technically correct, which is saying something back in the days of shooting film and developing in the dark room. I got a C in the class, a big hit to my GPA that I had to maintain for the Daly Fund. He told me I should stick to writing and go back to the English department. The worst of it was I believed him. I hung my head and did exactly what he told me.
“Looking back, that’s one of many hits I took for being a first-generation college student. I didn’t realize that professors were just people and their opinions where their own, not mine, and certainly didn’t have the power to define me.”
Christine lived in the Kappa Kappa Gamma house for three years at Oregon State. She learned from sorority sisters such as Wendy and Molly Comer.
“As a first-generation college student, I was looking around at people like Wendy, who understood what the college game was all about,” Christine says.
Christine was making a number of adjustments in Corvallis. Part of it was living and taking classes on a campus of more than 20,000 students, a far cry from tiny Lakeview. The Willamette Valley climate was a factor, too.
“I was used to 300 days of sunshine a year,” she says. “The rain affected me. It was really hard.”
Especially during her freshman year, she leaned on brother Jeff, who had gone through it years earlier.
“I talked to him on the phone just about every day, which was a big deal back then because we had to pay long-distance rates,” Christine says. “There were many times when I was floundering around, trying to find my way when things felt so pointless. He pushed me over the finish line.”
Fortunately, she had great mentors at OSU. One was Dr. Franz Haun, the school’s director of new student programs. He was in charge of overseeing the Daly Fund recipients. His office was in the Administration Building, where Lakeview graduates would stop in to pick up their scholarship checks to pay tuition.
“Dr. Haun looked out for all new students,” Christine says, “but he had a soft spot for the Lakeview kids and, of course, he was aware of the Daly Fund. He put together a lot of programs to help us. He was the main person on the OSU campus looking out for me. What he was doing was setting the stage for today’s programs for first-generation college students. He was ahead of his time.”
Another was professor Philip Mangelsdorf, “who shattered all my undergraduate notions of who and what professors were,” she says. “He was extraordinary.”
Christine transferred to Oregon in 1991, transferred back to OSU and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1993. She took a job as a reporter for a small newspaper in Arizona, the Havasu City Herald, “just to get out of Oregon and dry out,” she says. She spent a year there, winning a first-place award from the Arizona Press Club for news reporting. Then she moved to Tucson to pursue a Masters degree at the University of Arizona. While there, she met her husband, Carlos Gacharna. They married in 1996. And she served as editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, “The Wildcat.”
“I’m proud of the legacy I left at ‘The Wildcat,’ and I’m hopeful that one day, I can leave the same legacy behind in the way writing instruction is taught and/or learned,” she says. “Just like learning the technical skills of f-stops and shutter speeds, writing is a technical skill. I’m an instructor whose aim is to produce good writers.”
At Arizona, she decided she wanted to be a broadcast journalist. She took a photography class, and her professor, Jacqueline Sharkey, made an impact on her.
“She taught me what the buttons on my camera did and how each contributes to the whole,” Christine says. “She gave me the big picture that I needed. I didn’t get the sense she particularly liked me, but she graded my assignments fairly and taught me so much.
“I loved her class. It was intoxicating to finally be learning what I wanted to know. She wrote high praises on a critique of one of my images. I have carried around that piece of paper for 29 years, through nine moves. I made up my mind right then and there to be an instructor like Sharkey — to be secure enough in myself to teach my students everything I know.”
A week before Gacharna graduated with a Masters degree in journalism, her new husband got an assignment in Tokyo. (He is now a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.) They were there for three years. Christine kept busy by teaching English to private Japanese students.
Once they returned to the States, the Gacharnas moved to Tacoma, Wash., then to Altus, Okla., where Christine established a photography business. She was a wedding and portrait photographer for 10 years and did some free-lance writing. Once Carlos retired from the Air Force, they moved to New Orleans. Christine, who had burned out on the photography business, spent the next six years working for the University of Phoenix.
“I taught undergrad writing courses, and I streamlined the evaluation and assessment of student writing for my faculty peers there,” she says. “I was at the Baton Rouge and New Orleans campuses. I traveled.
“My students started doing so well, I got promoted to lead faculty. My faculty peers were grateful. They wanted to grade the students based on their material, not essays. I had to get everybody on the same page. That’s when the whole thing came together for me. It was like, ‘I’ve really got something here.’ ”
The Gacharnas moved to Virginia in 2017, where Christine started “ESSAY CURE.” In 2018, she got her first client. The next year, with children Jonathan and Lexi out of the household, Christine started doing it full-time as a business.
“With college applications, it’s story-telling,” she says. “I’m helping people tell their stories. These are 17-year-olds who are sometimes uncomfortable with selling themselves. The challenge is getting that out of them and helping them get it onto the page.”
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Gacharna’s 127-page book, which can be purchased via Barnes & Noble, Amazon, bookshop.org, and Apple Books, has gotten good reviews.
Kirkus Reviews calls it “a straightforward guide that makes use of the author’s extensive experience.”
Also from Kirkus: “Gacharna … presents a hands-on workbook on how to write an effective essay for a college application.”
Among the chapter titles:
• The Steps in the Righting Process
• The Five Most Common Mistakes Students Make
• You Don’t Sit Down to Write a Rough Draft
• Putting it All Together to Tell Your Story
An author himself, Sam Stern gives the book a positive review.
“Her program is outstanding, and the book will help kids everywhere,” says Stern, who served as dean for 10 years of his 35 years in the College of Education at Oregon State. “A couple of things impress me. One is that Christine gets to build on the wealth of experience she has in working with kids. Not all kids are the same. The diversity of her experience brings a lot to it. The other thing, she has the approach of helping all of the kids find their own voice. She is not giving them a cookie-cutter template. It’s about helping these young people tell their own story.
“Christine is hard-working and creative. It has been a pleasure getting to know her, just as I got to know her mom and stepdad.”
Mark Woodhams was director of student media at Arizona for 23 years. He was advisor to “The Wildcat” when Gacharna was editor.
“She was the driving force behind developing the on-line Wildcat,” says Woodhams, now retired and living in Tucson. “We had a rudimentary text-only website, and she was the motivator and leader to bring us to a more graphical on-line presence.”
Woodhams owns a copy of Christine’s book and is familiar with her work with ESSAY CURE.
“The book is detailed and has some real potential to help students,” he says. “She approached it from a parents’ point of view. She is going to need dedicated students and parents to follow through, but a lot of her advice is solid. It has apparently worked, according to the testimonials.”
Woodhams has kept in touch with Gacharna since she left Arizona.
“Christine is great,” he says. “I’ve long thought she brings a lot of intellect and charm to her relationships. She continues to strive for finding cool things to do. This is someone who doesn’t let a lot of grass grow beneath her feet.”
Taylor Dorr is a Wilsonville High grad who graduated from Oregon State in 2021. She will enter Columbia in the fall to work on her Masters degree in social work, thanks in no small part to Gacharna and ESSAY CURE.
Christine helped Dorr with applying to three schools — Columbia and Hunter College in New York City and Smith College in Northampton, Mass.
“I got accepted by all three, which was really exciting,” Taylor says. “I don’t think I’d have gotten into any of them without Christine’s help. I had good ideas what I wanted to write about, but she helped me refine it and write it in a language people are able to understand.”
Gacharna encouraged Taylor to include Columbia in her application process.
“It was a dream, but I said, ‘I don’t know if I can actually get in,’ ” Taylor says. “She said, ‘What do you have to lose?’ She gave me the best feedback of my writing and helped make it way better. She is really good at reorganizing. It turned out amazing.”
Taylor’s mother Julie Dorr — a sorority sister of Christine’s at Oregon State — offers her endorsement:
“Christine looked at Taylor’s drafts and ideas and helped her express her thoughts in a more productive way. She gave her tips on what they were looking for in her college essay and what was unique about Taylor and how to portray that in an essay. It was extremely supportive — an emotional support for Taylor — and helped build her confidence. Taylor is not a great writer by any means, but she feels way more confident about her ability to write an essay and writing in general now that she has worked with Christine.”
Julie Dorr is such an advocate, she bought 15 of Gacharna’s books to deliver to high schools with students in need of assistance with the college application process.
Taylor is living in Manhattan this summer. She is working as a nanny for a family and also working in behavioral health with youths in the Bronx for an agency partnered with the New York State Department of Health while she prepares to enroll at Columbia.
“Before working with Christine, I did not know how to write a good application or essay,” she says. “I would totally recommend someone taking her program, especially for people going to grad school.”
Like Christine, Elizabeth Lopez is a Lakeview High graduate from humble beginnings. When the two met to discuss Lopez’s college application essay, Christine was moved.
“I had this special kinship with Elizabeth,” Christine says. “What I saw was, this was me.”
Did Lopez feel the same way?
“I very much did,” she says. “I was a Latina in Lakeview, hard to find community and to establish relationships with others. Oddly enough, Christine and I had similarities. We both came from low-income families and weren’t sure if we would be able to make college financially, but also emotionally. So after talking with Christine, I was like, ‘She’s just like me. I can do this.’ ”
Gacharna and Lopez met at the Lakeview library and went to work on her application to Oregon State.
“She helped me with my introduction and made it more personal,” Elizabeth says. “Later on, she helped me figure out what I wanted to write about, what was near and dear to myself. I expressed myself on paper and she helped clean it up. She was perfect for what I needed.”
Lopez, a recipient of the Collins-McDonald scholarship in Lakeview, was accepted at Oregon State. Now a junior in botany plant pathology and sustainability at OSU, she has made the most of her opportunities.
In April, she presented research at the Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences (MANRRS) annual conference in Atlanta. In July, she is being sponsored by MANRRS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to go to Mexico City for two weeks to build a curriculum on agriculture for grades K through 12. Lopez will spend the rest of the summer in Wenatchee, Wash., doing an internship with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Lopez says she would recommend ESSAY CURE to budding college students.
“In her program, it is more of a mentorship between Christina and students,” she says. “My writing got much better when I understood what needs to be put down on paper when introducing yourself, or writing about yourself. That is an important skill to have with resumes, personal statements and scholarship applications. I’ll use this for the rest of my life.”
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Christine Gacharna has ideas for her future. She is considering pursuit of a Ph. D. She would like to connect with a university — especially a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) based school — to revamp its writing instruction program.
And she will continue to build on her ESSAY CURE program. It’s a business, sure. But more than that, it is a way for a small-town kid who got some help along the way to pay it forward.
For more information, go to the home page of essaycure.com.
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