Our Team
We are a boutique educational consulting company dedicated to providing comprehensive and personalized services to clients.
Founder | Head Coach
In the early 2000s, while working as a presentations specialist for an investment bank, LYNEA DIAZ-HAGAN serendipitously became a writing coach when a handful of colleagues and friends asked her to consult on their graduate school application essays. After successfully supporting applications to Kellogg School of Management, Columbia Business School, and Weill Cornell Medicine, Lynea realized she had a knack for helping people turn their academic and professional experiences into stories that stood out from the crowd.
In 2005, while pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting at UCLA, Lynea began her teaching and freelance writing career. As an SAT instructor for Compass Education Group, she discovered that while many students were receiving excellent coaching for standardized tests, they weren’t receiving the critical thinking and writing instruction that would best position them for college success. She observed a similar problem among her business clients: although many were well-versed in writing and public speaking clichés, they struggled to communicate their professional missions and ideas in powerful and distinctive ways. Eager to remedy these problems, Lynea launched Windhorse Writing.
Over fifteen years later, Lynea continues to be is passionate about helping clients find authentic and powerful ways to express themselves. Through Windhorse Writing—now Windhorse I/O—she has helped scores of students gain admission to top undergraduate programs across the country, including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, and Duke. Her graduate applicants have had similar successes, including admissions to Yale Law School, London School of Economics, and graduate programs at University of Oxford, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA.
In addition to her educational consulting services, Lynea has worked as a communications consultant for multiple tech startups and continues to support founding teams as a pitch consultant, public speaking coach, and meeting facilitator. Since 2012, she has been a consulting instructor for the National University of Singapore's entrepreneurship programs in Silicon Valley, New York, and Toronto. Through business case writing workshops, she has helped hundreds of young entrepreneurs write about business with insight, clarity, and narrative power.
With this diverse background, Lynea is skilled at working with clients across majors and professional disciplines. Gifted at asking the right questions, she empowers people to understand and articulate the unique value of what they offer and the integrity of who they are.
Lynea holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Yale University, an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA's School of Theatre, Film & TV, and an MA in Jazz Studies/Vocal Performance from San Jose State University and is very active artistically. She is the Co-Founder of the ORO Arts Lab and, as a playwright-director, has received grants from Theatre Bay Area, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and a Literary Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Associate Coach | QA Editor
TOM PRADO has supported Windhorse clients as an Essay Coach and QA Editor for application essays, research papers, and professional letters of recommendations since 2015. He comes to this work with a background as both a writer and as an experienced social services advocate skilled at empowering clients to move towards their goals with increased confidence, direction, and hope.
His subject-matter specialties including literature, philosophy, environmental sciences, and social justice. With his professional experience as a client advocate and personal experience as a non-traditional student and community college to four-year university transfer, Tom is highly skilled at motivational interviewing and mentoring clients through academic and career transitions.
Tom graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Environmental Humanities from Northern Arizona University and was named Outstanding Graduating Senior for NAU's Department of Humanities, Arts, and Religion. As a fiction writer, Tom was selected for the SF Writers Grotto's highly competitive LitCamp and has completed a semester of coursework in the MFA Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. He is currently revising his first novel and writing his second.