Is it possible to get work with a legitimate essay company without a degree?

Hello all!

I am an undergraduate student pursuing my bachelor's degree. Due to life, work, and whatnot, my educational track hasn't exactly been smooth. I've had to take time off from school, change universities, etc. I'm sure many of you can relate. The result of all this is I've been writing essays and research papers for over 7 years. ("Lots of people go to school for 7 years!" "Yeah, they're called doctors." - Tommy Boy) I consistently receive top marks for my work, so it occurred to me that (during my current hiatus) I could make some extra money writing for one of these services.

So far, all the applications I've seen request that you scan a copy of your "qualifications." I'm pretty sure they aren't looking for "perpetual student" here (harhar). I know many of these companies are scams and I fear that percentage may be a bit higher here in the U.S. than elsewhere. Which brings me to my original query: can I find work based on samples of my writing? I have a number of different fields that I am proficient in writing for plus access to an online library, all of which I hope would add to my attractiveness as a candidate.

I just found this site today while researching and it looks like a great resource. I've searched the forums in search of a similar thread and did not find one. I hope I haven't repeated anything here. Thanks in advance!

I think you can find work with the legit companies even without a degree because you'd still be able to write at some level. Secondly, getting work in scam companies is not a problem. My experience tells me that you don't even need a degree with them! However, I'd suggest that you should start working as a freelance writer because individual clients want original work more than anything else.

One of annoying peddlers here has bachelor (undergraduate) degree and he pretend he can write graduate papers. So its all possible if you trick client to think you are qualified to do job.

And who is that?

That's pretty much what I'm afraid of: that any company that hires me without a degree is doing so because they just don't care (or some other scummy reason).

Freelance writing would be ideal, I think. How does one even get started with that, though? Advertise for clients? How, when, where, etc. Also, isn't it possible that my lack of a degree would hinder me more in the "private sector?" I mean, these companies have people on staff to read sample work (I assume), whereas most individuals might feel a degree is an easy guarantee of validity.

I'm not really interested in trying to fake anyone out. I am able to write at an undergraduate level quite proficiently, but I wouldn't presume to take on graduate work just yet.

Thanks for the prompt response!

MeoKhan-

I saw another post where you answered a similar question about the "how-to" of getting clients for freelancing, so I'll check out EssayChat. Any other freelancers out there have tips for getting started?

Thanks!

EssayChat is really good. I personally know people who got business from there to kick-start their career as writers.

"The True Cost of Obtaining an Academic Degree"

Is a college education worth the effort and cost?

The value of a college education in the United States has become a matter of opinion for most. The effort one must put forth to obtain a degree will vary vastly from institution, major, and of course, individual. The cost paid will also vary just as vastly. One can attend an Ivy League institution, yet be ousted on a promotion by another who attended a less notable university. So, is a college education really worth all the effort and cost?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the average cost of attendance, including, tuition, room, board, and fees for a public institution, for a four year degree, in academic year 2012-2013 was $14,101.00. The National Association of Colleges and Employers, reports the average income of the new college graduate, with a Bachelor's degree, in 2013 was $45,327.00. Compared to the high school graduate average earnings in 2013 was $30,000. The confounding difference is supported over time, while the college graduate salary steadily increases, the high school graduate's salary often stays stagnant. Additionally, the nature of work performed by the high school only graduate is centered on blue collar positions, often resulting in chronic medical aliments, such as low back and hip pain. Over the course of a lifetime, we will say, thirty years, these factors, coupled with quality of life are something to be considered.

Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains I was the first in my family to attend college, the first to become an officer in the United States Army, and the first to obtain not one, but two graduate degrees. The motivating factors behind my decision to invest in higher education and life-long learning came from observing the struggles my parents endured to ensure food and shelter, just the basics, were provided. My father, an Army Veteran, and my mother, a high school drop-out worked blue collar jobs, including coal mining and factory work. The hours were long, the pay very little. Forty hour work weeks were seldom the normal, and despite the overtime pay, their combined yearly earnings never topped $40,000. My family never took a vacation, we never went to the movies, and seldom enjoyed a meal out. We had food at home, one channel to watch on TV, and my escape proved to be the books I devoured that were checked out from our public library every two weeks.

A college education is worth the effort and costs when considering the quality of life factors that accompany this decision. Further, the obtainment of a four year degree can be the ticket to so many additional opportunities within a lifetime. While we all can't earn a six figure salary, having a college education certainly puts us closer. The median individual income for Americans reported by The United States Census Bureau was $28,155. Compare that to the above statistics of the new college graduate income of over $45,000. The decision is clear. Investing the effort and money into higher education is a smart step to ensuring a comfortable lifestyle for not only the working years, but affords the ability to retire at a reasonable age.

Resources

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). "Digest of education statistics."
The National Association of Colleges & Employers (NACE). "Starting salaries of graduates."

@charyoutree did you eventually find yourself employed at a writing company? I am wondering if you still pursued this avenue employment since you did not add any information after your first post. I realize it is late in the game but I would like to share my thoughts on the matter with you. I am not here to judge, just offer an opinion.

A majority of the writing companies will ask you to upload your credentials for consideration during the application process. Submitting a copy of your diploma is often required so that might pose a problem for you. Most of these companies ask for completed undergraduate studies, a masters, or a PhD certification. So it may be difficult for you to become a company affiliated academic writer. If applying proves to be too difficult for you, don't lose heart. You can still become an academic writer, you just have to break out on your own as an independent writer.

As an independent writer, you will be able to come clean with the clients and tell them upfront that you are an undergraduate with accomplished research writing skills. You can offer to submit a portion of your research work as evidence to the client. Be sure to watermark the sample though so the client can't use it for his personal means. First things first though, you will need to set up either a website or blog page in order to introduce yourself to potential clients.

You will have to think about how to do self promotion and possibly, engage the help of your friends in the process. While it will be difficult for you to get started in the business, nobody ever said that you can't at least try to make a go of it as a career. Who knows, with enough perseverance and hard work, you just might be able to turn this into a full time career as well.

If a writer wants to get paid and build himself/herself as an academic writer who is an undergraduate then it would be better to work as a freelance writer and undertake orders that come under his/her level of qualification. The first and foremost thing that should be remembered when looking to get work as an academic writer, is that a person's career, future and a lot of money is at stake. So, until and unless one is capable of doing justice to the level of work needed, one should never accept any orders. Since, the work of an academic writer is not just about making money or getting oneself employed, but about doing justice to your client and to the promise you make to them.

Ok, but the ultimate question is, how do you find customers? Completing orders is one thing, but finding students willing to pay is another (usually more difficult unless you are a born marketer).

Exactly my point. Which is why I believe that if you can't get into an academic writing company due to a lack of credentials, one will have to find a way to promote the writing talents he possesses. Since my excellent reputation as an academic writer eventually preceded me as a company writer, it was far easier for me to convince direct clients (at the time) to take a chance on me because most of them already knew me from their experience working with me at the company / companies. It is a totally different case for an independent writer in this scenario.

If I were this person, I would start with my immediate circle of relatives, friends, and classmates. My relatives would have children in high school or early college. My classmates, are an existing pool of potential users just waiting to be tapped. These are the people who would most likely already know of my interest in writing and the kind of academic grades my own papers produced. So selling them on my services should be easy enough to accomplish. Do a good job with their children's papers (in the case of relatives and friends) then ask them to offer your services as a referral to their co-parents , who may be on the lookout for a "ghostwriter" for their kids (for high school based students) or, ask the student / classmate / dorm mate to make direct referrals if they know of classmates who need writing help. Either way would suit my needs as a start-up writer. I wouldn't hesitate to offer discounts to first time clients just to get them to try my service. I can impose regular rates once they come back for more services.

Aside from those methods, blogging would work if one has the money to pay for advertising, an FB advertisement can also help with self promotion if one ties together his blog and FB profile within his "writer account". It will take some creative thinking in terms of promotion and advertising but, if a talented undergraduate independent writer really sets his mind do it, this should turn out to be something achievable over the long term.

No essay-writing company ever asked me to upload any documentation of my degrees; then again, the last time that ever I applied to one of them for work was back in 2002 or 2003; and they started me off at their highest pay rate just based on the law degree and my writing samples, while making clear that the high pay rate (and continued employment) depended on my work meeting the high standards they expected of me. Another company recruited me right from this forum around 2009 and started me out at their highest pay rate after asking me for nothing besides my ID and payment information. They might have called the Alumni Affairs office to check my claims, but that's the most they could possibly have done.

In my opinion, having a degree isn't a very strong determinant of whether or not you can do this for a living successfully. The primary determinant is simply being a good writer and that's something that's more often dependent on a natural talent than a learned skill. Most undergraduates typically don't really learn much about how to write in the process of pursuing their degrees. In fact, much more often than not, even relatively good students view the handful of substantial written assignments they have to do in college as dreaded chores they have to get through, and from which they don't really learn all that much about writing, even when the professor purposely structures those assignment in steps designed to facilitate that learning process. Most students just slog through their essays, get little benefit from them, and are thrilled when they're done. Even the guy who literally wrote the book about his experiences as an academic-essay-company ghostwriter described earning $66,000 a year (and this was roughly 10 years ago) without ever having earned his own undergraduate degree from Rutgers. I strongly suspect that if you were to approach an essay company that says its writers require degrees and you offered to complete a sample project for them at no cost, you could probably get hired by them even after honestly disclosing that you don't actually have a degree as long as you can prove your ability through that sample project (or a few of them).

If you think about it another way, very few of even the most successful of us have degrees in more than one or two fields. If the proposition were true that a degree is necessary to do this work, we wouldn't really be qualified to handle projects that lie outside of our specific degree areas, especially, given what I just explained about how little most students who do earn degrees actually learn about writing from slogging through the 5 or 10 assigned major essays they had to do in college. I was always just a naturally good writer and I learned how to become better and much faster at this through the process of doing it, and all of that progress came long after I received my last degree from law school and after being hired as a writer by the best company in this business. As a college student, I dreaded having to write long essays, exactly the way my clients do, today. Even once I started doing this quite well (in terms of the quality of my work), I was still very skeptical about being able to write fast enough and at a sufficiently high quality and to sustain a large enough volume on a regular basis to actually make a fulltime living doing just this; and that would have been impossible if I'd limited myself to law, history, and psychology. I never took a single Nursing or Education course as a student, but as a freelance writer (and company writer), I've produced as many as 1,000 projects in just those two academic fields alone, including hundreds of them at the graduate level and more than 100 at the postgraduate levels for clients who were happy enough with their results to use me for the rest of their academic careers, including those who started with me as freshmen undergraduates and retained me through their post-graduate and even into their post-education actual work in their respective fields.

FLW is absolutely right, but if you get enough education and professional experience under your belt (and read enough), you can gain an appreciation for what's important in different fields of study. In other words, if you can read about it enough, you can write about it reflectively and even position yourself in your clients' position with fresh insights. Over the years, I've been a black female activist, a communist,* a gay rights advocate and even a left-wing sympathizer. This level doesn't come easy -- it is the product of years of work in this field and for that we charge extra.

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* I don't like communists....

A college degree is the bare minimum requirement for any academic writer seeking to work with a legitimate essay company. The degree will help the company assess the usefulness of the writers within the system. What sort of papers can he write? What did he major in? Do I need additional writers in that field? These are some of the questions that the owner of the company, along with the QAD and HR consider when reviewing the applicants to the company. If one is a college undergraduate, then he is no more than a glorified High School drop out. He doesn't know much about anything, no matter how much he has read or written for others. When it comes to the most important aspects of writing an academic paper, the literal under-graduate will fold without a formal educational foundation to base his work upon.

Legitimate companies prefer writers with a Masters or higher. Some (very few) will take on writers with a Bachelor's if they have proven experience. However, having no degree other than a high school diploma or even having an Associates is not sufficient to get in with legitimate companies. If that is your situation, I recommend writing other things for a while to build a strong portfolio.

"Other things" can include articles and stories for legitimate publications (both online and print). You could also start a blog that will illustrate your writing skills, but you will want to be sure what you write about focuses on substantial topics and that the quality is not general "blogging." Otherwise, it won't help. For example, if you have a background in healthcare (i.e. an associate's in healthcare administration or your work experience is in healthcare), you could blog about current healthcare issues. Remember, though, that the topics you present should be timely and of the highest quality. If blogging, write as it you were submitting the piece to a major healthcare publication. Skimping at all will show and you'll be wasting your time.

This has to be emphasized more. I'd argue that your core values as a writer and a researcher would help you in the long-run. However, having a degree would definitively solidify (at least) your grounding for potential employers/contractors.

True, but mainly because potential employers over-value degrees. I've certainly benefited from their inferences about my degrees, but I've known plenty of people with identical (or very similar) educational backgrounds who can barely compose an articulate and error-free email, let alone write a thesis or dissertation, even without the time pressure associated with those projects by the time degree candidates typically decide to order them from me.

This makes a lot of sense. Having a degree does not necessarily mean that you are competent in the field. It only means that you were able to attain the bare minimum in order to gather the certification. Having/testing out the skills would still be a necessary step to ensure that a person is truly capable in the field.

If a company is located in the third world and it hires writers from the same location, then having a college degree may not be too much of a problem. Those people will hire just about anybody just to keep the seat filled. However, that does not mean that you would be in the position to get high priced papers. Instead, you will be limited to the simple papers. Normally grade school and high school essays. Nothing too difficult because the company will only be giving you orders from students who don't care so much about the grade they receive, as long as there is a paper to submit. Personally, I would not hire a writer to work for me if he cannot prove he is a college graduate. He just won't be useful to me in this business.

I've worked for a few essay-writing companies (and even own one myself). I have not heard of any reputable company hiring someone who doesn't have a degree. You'd probably have to be a VERY exceptional writer to get hired by a good company if you don't have at least a Bachelor's degree.