Spotlight on Blue Star Admissions Counseling

Tutorpedia partners with several rockstar counselors to give our students additional support with navigating the college admissions process. This month's feature is Blue Star Admissions Consulting's Amy Morgenstern, Ph.D, also known as "Dr. M."

We like Dr. M because she has great organizational skills to keep students on schedule, she is a phenomenal writing coach, she is an expert at helping students with school-selection, and she has a superior track record with impressive results for her students and glowing recommendations from families.

During this past year, Dr. M donated her services to one of Tutorpedia Foundation's scholars, Bianca. With Dr. M's help, Bianca successfully navigated the college application process and recently enrolled at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY.  Congratulations Bianca!

We asked Dr. M to tell us more about her experience working with Bianca. Here's what she had to share:

"Assisting some of the Bay Area’s most competitive students with admission to top universities most certainly provides an educational consultant with a great sense of accomplishment. Helping an under-resourced, urban high schooler get into college when he or she would not otherwise have the chance: that brings great inner joy. Just last week, Bianca, to whom I donated my services, enrolled at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY, just north of NYC, to pursue her dream to be a social worker so that, in her own words, she can “help people and make them happy.” And she means it.

An avid community volunteer (she even got herself to a remote village in Costa Rica  last summer and built a concrete floor for the church kitchen) who both laments and loves her far-less-than-ideal neighborhood, Bianca brought a unique, honest voice and strength of character to the process that translated brilliantly into an admissions profile so much more capacious than her academic profile could convey on its own.

Exciting! Yet as fulfilling as it was, the work was also hard. Each of us clear-eyed, we combed every potential target school for an undergraduate social work program, narrowed the list down to 10 schools, and over a period of five months met weekly to tackle the bureaucracy and essay writing for each.

During our sessions, I became acquainted with the struggles of Bianca’s daily reality––exposure to violence, gang activity, sexism, poverty, city and landlord neglect––while she learned a thing or two about good writing and reflective thinking, gaining steady support along the way.

Now that we have completed the process and gotten Bianca through this first hurdle, we are thrilled and a little nervous. New challenges loom: acclimating herself to an unfamiliar region of the country, getting used to a more competitive academic climate, missing her family and neighborhood, and negotiating the cultural difference she will invariably encounter in Dobbs Ferry. Challenges notwithstanding, Bianca’s world has opened up; the way is hers to take, or pave, and for that, let us feel joy."

The entire Tutorpedia team is proud of Bianca's incredible resolve and remarkable accomplishments during this journey. We wish her the best of luck at Mercy College and beyond.

Get Outdoors! - Exploring Local Summer Camps

Summer is an amazing opportunity for students of all ages to dig deeper into their interests, and learning doesn't just occur in the classroom. We're big fans of camps, as many of us (tutors, teachers, and directors) were campers and then counselors ourselves. 

Emma Bundy, Tutorpedia's Director of Tutoring (third from right), with counselors and campers at Camp Trinity on the Bar 717 Ranch.

Here are a few of our favorite camps in and around the Bay Area. Please share widely with students, parents, and friends and remember: get outside!

• uCamps - The uCamps mission is to bring happiness to campers, grades 2-12, by providing fun, educational, performing arts enrichment programs.
• Camp Newman: URJ Camp Newman is a Reform Jewish summer camp in Santa Rosa, CA for children entering grades 3 to 12. Newman inspires campers to apply the Jewish values learned to their daily lives, bettering themselves, their communities and the world.
• Bar 717 Ranch: Camp Trinity on the Bar 717 Ranch is the oldest accredited co-educational summer camp in California. Since 1930, the Gates family has welcomed boys and girls ages 8 to 16 to live, work, and play on 450 acres of pristine wilderness as part our large ranch family.
• Camp Galileo: Galileo’s audacious mission—to nurture and inspire a daring new generation of fearless innovators. Grades K-8. 

What are your favorite camps? What were your favorite camp experiences and traditions? Sound off in the comments!

Teacher Spotlight: Kyle Beckham shares his tips for staying sharp over summer

Kyle Beckham has spent the last ten years as a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializing in alternative education. He has worked for the last nine years as teacher at Downtown Continuation High School, a project-based high school in San Francisco that helps traditionally under-served and marginalized students move towards obtaining a high school diploma. He specializes in Hip-Hop Education, People’s History, Digital Arts and Media Production. He has done educational and community work in South Africa and Haiti, helping connect his students to global educational, cultural and political issues. A historian by training, Kyle received his B.A. from Yale University and a Master of Arts in Teaching Social Studies (M.A.T.) from Brown University. Kyle will be attending Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education in the fall, pursuing his Ph.D. in the Race, Inequality and Language in Education (R.I.L.E.) program.  

We asked Tutorpedia advisory board member and SFUSD teacher Kyle Beckham what students could do to stay engaged over the summer. 

"The most important thing is to continue reading and writing about things, but this time the choice is up to the student. Students, think of the summer as a time when you get to study and examine whatever interests you, without the pressure of papers or projects or punitive deadlines."

Kyle's top tips for summer scholars:

• Commit to reading at least one piece of fiction and one piece of non-fiction that interests them (don't pick something because you might think it's useful and skip something that jumps out at you) Buy copies of the books, write in them copiously and, if possible, do it with a friend and meet up to talk about the books (a book club of sorts). Parents can do this with their kids too and have family check-ins about books. GoodReads is a great website to discover new titles and share with friends.

• Do something creative/artistic. This can be either going to museums on youth days (which means that there is no admission) or as simple as learning how to draw on youtube or taking a series of tutorials on garageband or photoshop. These things are always easier to do if friends are involved and create a time when they are shared with others. FunCheapSF keeps a running list of low-no cost events in the area.

• Keep a daily journal, or even better, make an altered journal/book. Make a blog or Tumblr. 

• Get lost in Wikipedia. Pick a topic and just read about it, click on as many links as you like, for at least an hour every day. Write about what you read. Share it with your family/friends. 

• Learn how to fix something. iFixit is a great website that teaches you how to repair all kinds of things. 

• Leverage sites like Khan Academy: start with one thing you're interested in and want to build mastery towards (animation) and one thing that you know you will need to work on (for me it would be mathematics).

Please share Kyle's top tips for summer scholars with any students in your life.

Do you have any other tips for students to help them take advantage of summer break? Have you used any of the techniques, tools, or websites mentioned in this blog? Let us know in the comments!