I felt squeamish but ready to share my startup idea for the first time last weekend. Picture (or scroll to see for yourself) an intimate workspace inside the NYU Brooklyn campus, facing a couple dozen live participants and 45 minutes of pitching and getting feedback.
It was at the NYU Unconference, an edtech conference entering year number three of bringing together students, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts to talk about industry trends.
I signed up for the open call to pitch a little over a week before the event. Grateful to get squeezed in, I got to work on my presentation right away. I knew exactly what I wanted to get feedback on from the audience. For the better half of 2024, I've been thinking through a startup idea...it just hadn't left the building yet.
This post walks through what the idea is and how the pitch went. And you won't want to miss the resources at the end of the post.
Background on the edtech idea
I knew exactly what I wanted to get feedback on from the audience. For the better half of 2024, I've been thinking through a startup idea...it just hadn't left the building yet.
My bottom line: Helping students explore careers through their homework.
Enter, career-connected tutoring, an idea-stage instructional model that combines two practices:
Here's why I want to mesh career-connected learning with tutoring. We have career and technical education (CTE) curriculum and extracurricular experiences and separately, tutoring options available.
But these experiences don't always talk to each other. A student could have a blast learning about accounting in a program for a finite number of weeks. But the homework school sends them home with doesn't always match up. That's a problem.
The work students must do once the school day ends is a consistent part of their life until graduation. And this homework notoriously leaves students frustrated and disengaged.
School is good at teaching theory. It's less good at helping students gain motivation to connect to what happens after graduation. If we want to stop students from having ChatGPT do their homework, we better get busy giving students something to hold onto that helps them find purpose and interest in doing it themselves.
And now, for the pitch!
The hook: Finding your career spark through Pixar's Soul
My venture is to help kids find their career spark through their homework; a moment or series of them that's personal, special.
The Pixar movie Soul does a beautiful job of this. Through mentorship and exploration, a soul is able to help another find their calling.
I kicked off my pitch session by playing the clip above because it quickly summarizes the intensity—frustration and joy—that you feel on the journey to finding and maintaining something you love to do.
Life is full of possibilities. You just need to know where to look.
—Joe Gardner, Pixar's Soul
(Pixar's Soul came out during the height of the pandemic in 2020, but I hadn't seen the movie until a few weeks before the pitch. That TikTok edit sealed the deal for me.)
After showing the group the clip, I introduced myself a little bit by sharing how I found my career spark, highlighting 4 main events:
Creating a summer/ pandemic study initiative
Reading about an education major in The Nanny Diaries
Changing my college major to study edtech and entrepreneurship
The series of internships that led me closer to a career path that inspired me
This journey of growth and learning, fueled by what felt like a once in a lifetime pandemic, helped me see what I wanted to do for a living. As lucky as I feel, all these experiences felt like a luxury. Hard work was involved, but so was luck and being in the right place at the right time.
Finding a career path a student will succeed in means finding where their skills, interests, just-right rigor and path to growth meet.
Skills: Writing, team work, asking critical questions
Interests: Business, sports, journalism, consumer tech
Just-right rigor: A healthy amount of challenge to pursue more
Path to growth: Belief in a way forward to learn and create impact
Introducing career-connected tutoring
Sierra is a 10th grader who needs support to succeed in her writing class. She writes a lot of essays, is bored by her assignments, and thinks the whole class feels irrelevant to her life and interests. She's uninspired, and needs a spark.
Now imagine if Sierra knew the writing homework she completed today was helping her hone skills to become a marketer, startup CEO, think tank analyst, and hard-hitting journalist? All are high-growth careers that rely on dexterous writing skills.
To help her get through 10th grade writing, she needs to rethink the purpose behind what she's doing today:
Students write for their teachers and sell them ideas.
Marketers craft messages for their customers and sell them solutions.
See the translation we can make between today and tomorrow's skills? I think it'll take three efforts from semester to semester.
Help a student identify a career path to explore
Student meets weekly with a tutor to troubleshoot homework
Between sessions, student independently explore how their current class(es) lead to work in that career, Duolingo pathway-style.
Mentimeter results
Between the showing of the Pixar Soul movie clip to the tutoring model pitch, I had attendees answer the following sprinkling of poll questions, by scanning the QR code on Mentimeter:
Where did your career spark come from?
Do you think it's a luxury to find your career spark in college?
Which of the following impacts student motivation the least?
Connects to skills
Taps into their interests
Offers just-right rigor
Makes a career path visible
Feedback to keep building
I felt so grateful to ask for on-the-spot feedback from attendees, including the Vice Dean of MBA and Graduate Programs at NYU. Here's a roundup of what I heard:
You can't offer connections to every career, right away. Pick a domain that crushes it and build out from there.
Think about how to help kids make the tradeoff between what they want to do today and how to plan for the future.
Partner with business leaders at companies to be spokespeople for student to career connections
Show students the work life of different levels of company-men
Takeaways from the edtech conference
We need to get in the business of inspiring students, and keeping this as our top priority.
So grateful for the chance to share what I'm working on in such a beautiful space. (I wish I came across the ECT program at NYU during undergrad!)
Resources
Pixar Movie, Soul
National Career Clusters
Core Standards
Duolingo Instructional Pathway