Story

The teleology of American education never made much sense to me. Elementary school felt like preparation for middle school. Middle school was for high school, then college, then what? A quarter-life crisis? So when I was 16, I decided to drop out. Since then, I've become a self-taught designer, developer, product manager, founder, and nomad. But at heart, I’m just a homeless high school dropout.

Immediately after dropping out, my trajectory wasn't like a rocket ship nor was I slipping through the cracks of society. My first few months consisted of daydreaming and working on small projects. I did creative for small businesses and played around with a few startup ideas. These projects helped me learn the basics of a product skillset. I was learning by doing.

In classrooms, learning by doing is called project-based learning. Project-based learning is a well-proven method of teaching. It increases student motivation, test scores, attendance rates, and teacher satisfaction with their jobs. Despite this, project-based learning is not common in public schools. Given my own experience, I wanted to understand why. So, I visited every private school, using the method, in NYC.

During my visits, I noticed that the average student-teacher ratio was 1:10; a lot lower than the typical 1:27 in public schools. This was because teaching project-based classes is more complex than repeating lectures and quizzes. In project-based environments, teachers have to spend more time planning, providing immediate feedback, and assessing project work.

I believe(d) that learning by doing, or project-based learning, should be possible in every classroom. So I designed and built Be Anything, a platform that simplified the day-to-day of project-based learning. Its project planning, feedback, and assessment features were super easy to use. The product attracted 300+ teachers from different schools in under a month.

Despite students’ and teachers’ enthusiasm, Be Anything was a difficult business to run. In traditional ed-tech, the purchaser is rarely the user. Improving the user's experience doesn't directly convert into profit. So in June of 2021, I decided to stop working on Be Anything and join Sora as their first product designer.

Sora is a live, virtual high school where students focus on interest-based projects and meaningful work experiences. I joined between the Seed and Series A stage. At Sora, I was both an individual contributor and strategist. I was an individual contributor on a few projects including the task, assessment, and competency-based portfolio systems. I also redesigned the navigation and kick-started the design system. There were also a lot of projects I worked on that never shipped. In addition to IC work, I played a large role in improving product operations, hiring, and mentoring fellow designers.

In February of 2022, I moved from Sora to Galileo, a global, student-directed school for kids 8-18. As a Product Manager at Galileo, I contributed to the vision of the school and its core technologies. Though Sora and Galileo are positioned similarly, they’re building schools for different time horizons; Galileo being the more future-focused of the two. Despite avoiding accreditation, Galileo is still a school. Parents still compare it to the industrialized education system. Today’s culture still continues to habituate the 19th-century paradigm of school. Neither Sora or Galileo are immune to today’s culture around schooling.

I believe that culture is the most important design constraint. The 19th-century paradigm of school is antithetical to design. The future of design for learning will not be called school. I don’t know what it will be, but I will be working on it.