We waited a few years before we started thinking about college essays.
340 Words About Me
The college essay problem is the same problem I've been working on my whole career: how does a student show who they are to a system that wasn't designed to see them?
I started my career as a classroom teacher in Oakland, CA with Teach For America. I then traveled around the world to teach third and fourth grade at the American School of Antananarivo in Madagascar.
I went on to co-found Urban Montessori Charter School in Oakland — the nation's first public school integrating Montessori pedagogy, Design Thinking, and Arts Integration. Our founding team built the school around a radically simple premise: equity and excellence are the same goal.
Simultaneously, I co-founded BrainQuake, an ed tech company built on the insight that standard mathematical notation disproportionately oppresses specific student groups. That barrier led to re-designing aspects of math's interface. Seven patents and three U.S. Department of Education SBIR grants followed, as well as research partnerships with Stanford, CUNY, and WestEd to validate our impact.
I have a Master of Arts in Education from Stanford and a BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Middlebury. I've co-authored a book on educator social-emotional learning, written for peer-reviewed journals and industry publications, and spoken on podcasts about education, leadership, and what it actually takes to build things that last.
I'm also a parent. Our daughter applied to college a year and a half ago. Living that process up close, from the inside, taught me things about what families actually experience and confirmed just about all of the worst fears we'd had about the process. We invested, starting well before high school, in the understanding that college admissions does not define a human.
Importantly, I've also been a customer. We spent too much money on a college counseling service that fundamentally failed to ask insightful questions designed to prompt new insights about oneself.
I don’t have all the answers to the college applications riddle. But, I will have the questions and curiosity to help your student uniquely and authentically express themselves in their applications.
Assign Me Some Homework
I’d gladly provide a free review of a sample of your student’s writing. Ideally, you’d have something on hand — this is supposed to be my homework, not your student’s — that’s comparable to a college essay (not a lab report or a research paper). Let me know who, if anyone, supported your student to produce the piece.
You can also share a possible dream school, if your student has one.
I'll read your student’s piece and I'll produce an initial assessment of what your student can already do, what their writing may not do yet, and three specific things we'd work on first. I’ll provide concrete examples of what that growth looks like.
We can review the assessment, as well as the process I’d use with your student, in a free one-hour consultation.