This article describes a writing workshop that took place with 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students who received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. As a result, students improved the quality of their college admission essays and demonstrated greater confidence with this writing task. This workshop suggests the need to expand the language arts writing curriculum to include more real-world and authentic writing tasks and to demystify gatekeeping genres, such as the college admission essay, so ethnically diverse, underserved students can develop necessary writing skills to gain admission to colleges and universities. (Contains 2 figures.)