The Power of Education — Stan Hou
This summer, through a fellowship with Education Pioneers (EP), I spent ten weeks working at Bright Star Schools in Los Angeles. Bright Star is a charter school management organization that operates seven schools serving over 2,500 students in some of L.A.’s lowest-income communities. Their schools have well-established track records of being among the highest-performing schools in L.A. and delivering truly impressive results for their students, families, and communities.
Working directly with Bright Star’s Executive Director and other members of the central leadership team, I spent ten weeks focused on two strategic projects:
- Identifying and evaluating Bright Star’s various options — both traditional and non-traditional — for continued growth.
- Assessing Bright Star’s current program offerings for their most at-risk (and often gang-embedded) students in order to identify more holistic approaches to serve that sub-population of students.
My two projects were vastly different, which not only kept things interesting, but also allowed me to get to know and work with many of Bright Star’s incredibly talented and dedicated teachers, principals, and administrators across their school network. Performing research for my second project even took me to neighborhoods in South L.A., where I accompanied one of Bright Star’s amazing deans as we spent most of the day speaking with intervention officers. We learned about the history and current state of the Bloods-Crips rivalry, and gained a deeper understanding of the day-to-day life and mindsets of gang-embedded students.
In addition to my placement with Bright Star, Education Pioneers conducted various in-person workshops over the course of the summer to educate the members of my summer cohort and I on key issues of public education in the United States. A large component of the workshops focused on discussing underlying social issues such as the opportunity gap and racial inequality in the United States. I found those discussions, which were intense, tough, and sometimes deeply personal, to be some of the most valuable experiences of my summer.
My management consulting background and some of my experiences during my first year at Haas really prepared me to positively impact both Bright Star and my Education Pioneers cohort. I was able to apply many of the concepts I had learned in classes such as Strategy, Operations, and International Business Development (for which my team had worked on an education-related project) to help Bright Star carefully consider their options for organizational growth. Although I had essentially no experience in the education sector prior to this summer, I was surprised to learn how much I already knew about charter schools and various education-related issues just from my exposure at Haas through clubs and my classmates who came from education. The culture at Haas, with its “Beyond Yourself” social-mindedness and its emphasis on having authentic, meaningful conversations, really prepared me to actively engage in my EP cohort’s discussions on social and racial inequality. I couldn’t have asked for a more enjoyable and productive summer.
Coming into my MBA, I had hoped to use my summer internship to explore career opportunities in education. The Haas Social Impact Fund (HSIF) really facilitated my decision to pursue that path. Education Pioneers’ stipend is probably in the bottom 5% of typical MBA internship salaries, so the additional financial support made a huge difference in allowing me to pursue my top choice of industries. I’m looking forward to my second year at Haas, as I’m already thinking of ways I can apply my summer experiences to my upcoming classes and hopefully serve as an example of someone who pursued a social impact-related internship.
Stan’s collaboration with Education Pioneers and Bright Star Schools was made possible through the funding of HSIF. To find out more about how to get involved, visit the Haas Social Impact Fund page.
