When Adrienne was seven years old, she published her first book, "The Pretty Girl Who Was Smart and the Beautiful Girl Who Was Stupid," and she hasn't stopped writing since.  Adrienne attended Princeton, majoring in English and creative writing; she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa...

Alexa is a medical anthropologist and writer. She is Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. She holds an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in Anthropology and Folklore and an M.A. from the St. John’s College Great Books Program. She did her undergraduate work at The Evergreen...

Alison grew up in Concord, MA, known for its literary and revolutionary history (local authors like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired the name of her first dog, Walden). From a young age, Alison has loved reading, writing, and finding quiet or unexpected places to do both,...

Amy first became interested in studying law when she took a constitutional law class in high school.  She attended Brown University, where she graduated with a B.A. with Honors in “Law and Society.”  Amy received a J.D. from NYU School of Law and spent a year clerking for a federal district...

Andrew recently earned an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, majoring in Marketing and Operations, and an M.A. in International Studies from the Lauder Institute.  At Wharton, Andrew published an article on Russian grocery chains, served as Lauder Student Advisory Board...

Andy grew up around punk music and alternative theatre in the Great American West.  After graduating from Arizona School for the Arts, he attended Harvard College, where he studied American History and Literature, wrote and produced six plays, recorded and performed original music, lived in a...

Anna grew up right outside of Boston, where she spent the better part of her childhood obsessed with learning foreign languages. She continued to develop her passion for language while attending Harvard College, and graduated magna cum laude with an BA in linguistics. Anna is currently pursuing...

Ben hails from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and bleeds Tar Heel blue accordingly. He left sweet tea and barbecue behind to attend Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he took the notion of a liberal arts education to heart and declared majors in eight subjects during his four years,...

Until recently, Ben has been a Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, where he earned a PhD in English with a concentration on Shakespearean drama and economic history. In more than five years as an instructor at Columbia, Ben was repeatedly honored for teaching and mentorship. Not only does he...

Brian is a native of Long Island and began tutoring in high school. He worked with high school juniors studying calculus, second and third graders with special needs on their homework, and with a range of students and subjects in between. At Dartmouth, Brian worked as an assistant teacher (“...

Cait was born and raised in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. After attending events on Penn's campus and at the Kelly Writers House throughout her childhood, her dream of receiving a Penn education became a reality when she studied for and received her Bachelor's degree in Biological...

Born in Scotland and raised in France, Callum is now a very happy resident of NYC. He graduated summa cum laude with a double major in Philosophy and Political science from the University of Exeter, where he was top of his philosophy class and made the deans' honors list. He recently completed...

Cassie is originally from Honolulu, Hawaii. She attended Yale for college, and although this is her sixth year living on the east coast, she is still not used to the frigid winters. Cassie earned a double major in history and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. Her studies focused on...

A Connecticut native, Chelsea spent her first two years of college in California as a Neuroscience major at the University of Southern California before transferring to Yale College during her junior year (a decision that baffled many a sun-deprived Yalie). She graduated from Yale in 2015 Phi...

Chris grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, where he developed an appreciation for the finer things in life, especially the music of Bruce Springsteen, the invaluable service of gas station attendants, and mozzarella cheese (pronounced “mootz-ah-rell,” or simply “muhtz”), though he has since...

After teaching with Teach For America in the South Bronx, Christophe co-founded Rise Academy, a high-performing Newark charter school featured in The Economist, ABC News, and other media outlets. Recently signed as a screenwriter by Management 360, a leading Hollywood literary talent agency, he...

Born and raised in South Texas, Colin was set free to explore the garden that is New Jersey at 18. He wound up at Princeton University, where he graduated with honors in shapes, colors and feelings (Anthropology) and learned a lot of languages (French, Greek, Arabic, and Chinese), many of which...

Courtney is a Ph.D. candidate and Dean’s Fellow in Art History at Columbia University, where she studies twentieth-century art. Since 2013, she has taught in Columbia’s undergraduate curriculum, leading discussion courses in modern and Western art. Each semester, she works with her students to...

After growing up on a farm in Iowa, Danielle moved to Massachusetts, where she studied English with a citation (minor) in Spanish at Harvard University. At Harvard, Danielle was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated summa cum laude a year later. She spent most of her free time in...

Austin, TX is Devin’s hometown: when he was young, his family moved there from Orlando, FL because they realized they had finally finished seeing every part of Disney World. He got his BA in philosophy at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and won 1st prize in the Yale Public Speaking...

Duncan is an Affiliated Fellow of the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College and holds a D.Phil in English from the University of Oxford, an MA from University College London and BA from Cambridge University. He moved to the United States in the summer of 2012 after a decade...

Elizabeth was born in the boonies of Appalachia. She attended the University of North Carolina, double-majoring in dramatic art and English and graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She was awarded the Joseph Adler Award in Dramatic Art and the Whitfield Award for her work in...

A Midwest transplant, before coming to Cambridge, Emily attended Carleton College where she spent many hours exploring the college’s arboretum and majored in French and Francophone Studies. She graduated Summa Cum Laude and with distinction in her major and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Having...

Emily was born in Louisiana, and raised in Mississippi and Pennsylvania. She attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where she triple-majored in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics, and double-minored in English and French. In her senior year, Emily served as president of her college's...

Emma hails from rural Minnesota, where she frequented her local library to the point that her parents were forced to threaten returning her literary spoils as a form of disciplinary leverage. After graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2014...

Eric is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Planning program at Columbia University.  Growing up in New York and commuting to high school and Mets games on the subway shaped his research interest in transportation networks and urban form.  Prior to enrolling at Columbia, he earned a Master’s...

Eric spent the first eighteen years of his life in Cleveland, but since then has lived in five different countries.  He went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied History & Political Science and studied abroad his junior year at Sciences Po in Paris.  Eric then...

Erin Bartnett received her Masters in modern & contemporary literature from the University of Virginia, a certificate in publishing from NYU, and her Bachelors in English Literature with a concentration in Women's Literature from Rutgers University, summa cum laude, high honors.  She has...

Determined to fully appreciate the experience of being a Roman soldier stationed at the edge of the world, Glenn once hiked the length of Hadrian’s Wall during a hurricane. Glenn earned his undergraduate degree in history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he discovered his love...

Hana Goldstone was born and raised in Southern California. She attended Foothill Technology High School, where she graduated as class salutatorian. She moved to New York City to attend Columbia University and has lived there ever since. As an undergraduate at Columbia, Hana double majored in...

Hannah is a recent graduate of the Wharton School, where she completed an MBA and an MA in International Studies from the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. As a student at Wharton, Hannah spent her extracurricular time as an admissions reader for the MBA program and was able...

Helena was born in New York City and then raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised by parents who are both teachers (at the high school she attended, no less), she has been engaged with reading, writing, and education quite literally since she can remember. She studied at Columbia University...

Jacob is the only student ever to have graduated Columbia University with a double Major in Playwriting and Astrophysics. In high school, Jacob was a science nerd, taking college classes in multivariable calculus and quantum mechanics as well as scoring a 5 on 10 different AP tests. At Columbia...

James is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in classical philosophy in the Harvard Department of the Classics. He graduated from Emory University (B.A.’s in classics and in philosophy) summa cum laude and with a perfect GPA. At Emory, he directed the college’s departmental philosophy club for three...

Jeb grew up on a beautiful, bucolic island near Seattle. Long commutes into the city to attend school gave him ample time to read and write, and he became a lover of books and developed an interest in English grammar and language at an early age. He received his B.A. in international relations...

Jennifer Crystal is a writer and educator who comes to the Boston area by way of Vermont, Connecticut, Paris, and Colorado. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she was a Dean’s Fellow, and her B.A. in English and French from Middlebury College, where she was a...

Joani is a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University reading for her MSt in English Literature (1830-1914). In 2017, Joani graduated from Princeton University Summa Cum Laude with an A.B. in English Literature and minors in Humanistic and European Cultural Studies. She plans to return to the US to...

Up until first being introduced to Donne in senior year of high school, John was firmly a science kid. In college, he began splitting his time between premed science and poetry classes at Amherst, and ended up graduating with a double major in Chemistry and English. His research focused on the...

Since starring as “Congressional Delegate #4” in his high school’s production of 1776, Jon has been passionate about all things American history. After hiding in the library for four years to avoid Montreal winters, Jon graduated with a First-Class Honors Degree in History from McGill University...

Joseph may be the biggest Ethiopian you will ever meet, but don’t let that intimidate you. He is fun, enthusiastic, and is excited about teaching! He started out as a young class clown but has now evolved into a science enthusiast.  Serendipity proved to be Joe’s strongest ally at UC Berkeley as...

Julia grew up in New York City and attended Princeton University, where she gradated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude in 2008. After college, she completed a premedical post-baccalaureate at NYU and worked in Sub-Saharan Africa to improve access to healthcare in rural communities. She went on...

Julia grew up in Northern Virginia, and attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD (the ‘great books’ school), where she fell in love with classical languages. After spending a year baking bread in Antarctica, she went back to school for historical linguistics, and is now pursuing a PhD in the...

Julie Zeilinger is originally from Pepper Pike, OH (yes, that’s a real place), and graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University in 2015. Julie is the founder and editor of the FBomb, a feminist writing platform for teens and young adults that partnered with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda’s...

Born and raised in England, Karen went globe-trotting in her late teens through her early twenties, working at a variety of jobs (chambermaid, waitress, camp site assistant, flight attendant, van driver) in settings as far afield as Wales, Italy, Israel, Spain, Greece, and the United States. ...

Katherine obtained her undergraduate degree in Classics and Molecular Biology, Summa cum Laude, from Harvard University. Awarded a Harvard Knox Fellowship to study in the United Kingdom for one year, she earned a Master’s degree in Classical Art and Archaeology with Distinction (equivalent of...

When she was ten years old, Katherine’s dad took her to her first poetry reading, where she read a poem about a pine tree and another poem about a bully at school. She has been writing ever since, and she still enjoys giving poetry readings.

Katherine studied English at Macalester College...

Kevin went to high school in a midwestern cornfield far from the nearest SAT administration, but managed to score 800s on his SAT Verbal, SAT Writing, and U.S. History tests, buttressing his self-esteem sufficiently to withstand a 690 SAT Math score. At Stanford University he took a BA with...

Manoah was born in the Bay Area and raised in New Jersey’s endless suburbs. At the University of Chicago, Manoah earned two honors Bachelor’s degrees in English and French language and literature. He was admitted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated in 2007. He then went on to earn an...

Mark grew up in Southern California and felt the weather was just too nice. So he moved to New York. He graduated from Yale University in 2012 with a BA in American Studies and a deep love for the performing arts. At school, he won the 2011 Elmer A. Willets Prize for Fiction and the 2010 Francis...

Megan is a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University where she has worked with more than 200 students in history and history of science courses and has advised senior honors thesis students working on advanced topics in the history of science, technology and medicine. In...

Nadia is a mixed product of northern New Jersey, upstate New York, and Moscow, Russia. She graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University, where she double-majored in English and Psychology. She eventually received her PhD in Developmental Psychology, also from Cornell. Her work has received...

Nell is a born and bred New Yorker who spent her formative years in Prospect Park. She attended Wesleyan University where she double-majored in Art History and English (Creative Writing), graduating with honors from the English Department for her creative writing thesis “Finding lost things,” a...

Nick was raised in a sleepy suburb of Boston and went to Concord Academy, where he ran around Walden Pond with the cross-country team, but never read Thoreau. He stayed close to home for college, migrating East on Route 2 to attend Harvard. After encountering scary words like “deconstructionism...

Noam grew up in Israel, Baltimore, and Nebraska, and she has since continued to explore new places. She attended the University of Chicago, where she majored in Philosophy and graduated both with honors and Phi Beta Kappa. She then completed Bryn Mawr College’s Postbaccalaureate Premedical...

Pat grew up on Long Island, New York and dreamed of living in a city. She went to college at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and majored in biology and English and then worked as a paralegal in Washington, D.C. while she decided whether to go to law school or graduate school in...

Paul attended Yale, where he majored in History and Russian and East European Studies and graduated with honors. His thesis and work relating to the revolution in Ukraine was selected to be presented at a policy conference. After Yale, he moved to Samara, Russia for one year as the recipient of...

At the beginning of his undergraduate education at the Eastman School of Music, Peter would spend hours in the practice room working on excerpts of Richard Wagner’s operas and other pieces in the German canon. While this was certainly musically rewarding, he found himself increasingly interested...

Although she hails from North Carolina, Rachel is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada. (Ask her about Anne of Green Gables.) Her status as a Commonwealther is her excuse for her lifelong Anglophilia. Rachel studied English literature at Duke, where her senior thesis on judgment in the novels...

When Rani was twelve years old she decided that she had lived enough life to write her first memoir. She has secretly wanted to be a nonfiction writer ever since. She got her PhD in Ethnic Studies and Film from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focused on the intersection of...

Rex is originally from northeastern Nebraska—indeed a Husker football fan—but spent years abroad in Europe, including one year at Ruprecht-Karls Universität in Heidelberg, Germany. Upon returning to North America, he completed his undergraduate degree in political philosophy at Concordia...

A true Manhattanite from head to toe, Sam attended Horace Mann High School before emigrating, in a fit of wanderlust and questionable judgment, to Ireland to enroll in the English Department of Trinity College Dublin. At Trinity, he earned honors and had his poetry and prose published in a...

Sam trained as an architect at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and was a Fulbright Fellow in Central Asia before completing his M.A. at University College London. He is a PhD Candidate at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where his research focuses on the...

Sammie grew up in the endearingly eccentric city of Austin, Texas. She fell in love with the land of the pines as an Angier B. Duke Scholar at Duke University. Her studies took her to the UK, Chile, and Uganda, where she explored bioethics, traditional medicine, and maternal and child health...

Sarah has spent much of her adult life as a professional English teacher both overseas and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she considers her home. After completing her BA in liberal arts at St. John's College in Annapolis, she went on to pursue a masters degree in English and Comparative...

Sarah grew up in Peoria, Illinois and spent her days climbing trees and reading books. She headed to Boston when she was 16 to attend Harvard, where she wrote for The Harvard Crimson newspaper, did research in a tissue engineering lab synthesizing nanoparticles as a PRISE fellow, and volunteered...

Growing up in sleepy Northern Illinois, Siva quickly realized that boredom was his main enemy and that books of all kinds were his best weapons. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he majored in Social Studies with an emphasis in medical anthropology and South Asian history. Seeking variety, he also...

Sophie was born in France and moved to New York City in elementary school. After graduating from St. Ann’s School, she pursued a degree in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, graduating with honors. She also received a Master’s in Public Administration at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School...

Susan Chambers is from the South, but she now lives in Hackney, London. She went to high school in Florida, earning the I.B. diploma and graduating first in her class.  She then studied English at Rice, in Texas, graduating summa cum laude and picking up the nickname Lady Geddes for winning the...

    Tarek is originally from Beirut, Lebanon and spent most of his formative years in his hometown. He completed his degree in Political Studies, with an emphasis on International Relations and a minor in History, before moving to Sabancı University (Istanbul) for his Masters degree in Ottoman...

Tim was born and raised in lovely Laguna Beach, California. He graduated summa cum laude, with Highest Honors in Politics, from the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduation, he headed East to study for a PhD in Political Science at Brown University. And though he misses California...

When Will was eleven years old, he heard about the National Geographic Bee, started studying for it, and never looked back. Since then he's traveled to fifteen countries, lived abroad in three, learned three languages, and dabbled in three more. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Will...

Before Zoe was in the first grade she lived in five different states and two different countries, and somehow she still likes to travel. Zoe studied English at Davidson College where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. She was a John Montgomery Belk Scholar and received a Davidson...