Uncommon Schools operates outstanding urban public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare students from low-income communities to graduate from college. As an Education Pioneers Summer Fellow at Uncommon, I worked on three key projects:

First, I conducted a landscape analysis of student recruitment efforts at CMOs and charter schools across NYC. Changing demographics in NYC, as well as increased school competition, has put new pressure on all types of schools to recruit and retain K-12 students. I met with representatives from seven different NYC-based charter networks to understand their a) challenges in student recruitment, b) best practices for student recruitment, and c) their human capital (org design) structure for student recruitment. I then created a summary and recommendations deck that I shared with both Uncommon and the other participating schools.

Second, I revised the system that Uncommon uses to track student attendance for the first days of school (August-September). This system is critically important because it ensures that Uncommon staff are following up with any student who misses school in the initial weeks—a key indicator of a student potentially disenrolling. In order to revise this system, I met with multiple internal stakeholders and then created a new tracker for all 23 schools to use in Google Sheets.

Finally, I worked alongside the Uncommon regional School Support team to design and rollout a new training for student recruitment efforts. The CMO is working to improve the recruitment workflow between school-based teams and the regional teams, so we brought together both groups of stakeholders and worked together to create unique strategic plans for summer-fall 2019.

One of the best lessons I learned during my time at CBS was how to make assumptions to drive decision-making. There’s no such thing as perfect information, so it’s important to be able to use whatever information we have to make the best recommendation possible. My courses at CBS gave me the confidence to state my opinion in any scenario, even though I know I’ll never have knowledge of all the factors at play.

In addition, my experiences at CBS—internships, case studies, and schoolwork—gave me the ability to quickly distill a lot of information. In any consulting project, there is so much information and data that can be considered. CBS taught me how to say “Yes, this is relevant” or “No, this is not relevant” and feel confident in my decisions moving forward.

Having worked in education non-profits for seven years before business school, I felt like there were a lot of places where I could provide value add during my internship. Basically, I wanted to get involved in everything! Outside of student recruitment, there were interesting conversations around student academics, school growth, teacher hiring, and more. I found all of it fascinating—but I kept needing to pull myself back and re-focus on the specific projects I was brought on to do.

Being back in the education non-profit landscape really confirmed for me that I want to work in K-12 education consulting down the road. I felt so at home at Uncommon! As I head into my full-time role at Deloitte Consulting this fall, I want to commit myself to finding opportunities to continue to work for kids and families in NYC. I’m really passionate about the work that Uncommon is doing for my city and I am looking forward to being a part of it long-term.