New York City Metro Area

Jane Rosalyn is a Columbia graduate dedicated to inspiring, developing, and supporting her students’ confidence and eloquence in writing. Before college, Jane was fascinated by neuroscience and thought she might enter this academic path if it weren’t for her growing passion for music and the arts. Her internship at Brain Balance, a holistic after-school center centered on brain training exercises and activities, fostered a care and curiosity for children’s learning and development. This continued in community service with Circle of Friends, an organization pairing children and young adults with special needs with friends who support, encourage, and uplift them, fulfilling the social and intellectual needs of the growing people in the special needs community. In keeping with this learning and development path, Jane had begun teaching piano at age 13 and still does to this day, helping all ages learn a new aural/visual music language and develop the fine motor skills of technique, gross motor skills of rhythm, and kinesthetic awareness to read, internalize, and execute musical ideas.

Towards the end of high school, however, Jane’s trumpet playing began inciting more and more music commitments and she began envisioning a life of music ahead of her. Greatly inspired by her classical piano upbringing and jazz trumpet adolescence, she started at Columbia knowing she was to concentrate in jazz studies and some writing-focused major for the purpose of songwriting.

At Columbia, Jane studied jazz composition and performance, shifting back to a piano focus and composing for large groups with multiple players. She also began songwriting and working on her solo music. At the same time, she began taking classes at Columbia’s acclaimed history department. She became fascinated by the specialization of Intellectual History, which broadly meant a survey of religious and philosophical history. It was the history of human thought, and it quickly took on a very psychological framework for Jane. To complete the major and graduate with a rigorous history, philosophy, and literature humanities education,she became well-versed in essay writing. The process of working with dense reading materials, distilling ideas, forming an argument, and explicating the argument forcefully and concisely felt natural and exciting. It quickly turned to tutoring in the subject and helping others reach their admissions goals through college essay writing.

Jane believes in kind and supportive insight coupled with the rigor and motivation to concentrate one’s ideas with language. Her background in songwriting supports this ethos as well, developing more writing insight into author’s purpose, diction, and working with form. It also helps to encourage authenticity and drive to write something students are genuinely proud of. Her psychological interests also encourage the genuine benefits of authentic writing, which tends to help the admissions process and overall writing success, simultaneously benefitting the authors themselves.

Coming from a matrilineage of public school teachers, Jane understands the reciprocal relationship of inspiring and receiving inspiration from her students. She has had creative nonfiction and poetry writing published to literary magazines and works with labels to distribute her solo music. She graduated early to pursue music full-time; when she is not teaching or tutoring she is touring as a keyboardist/synthesist, at some working on music, or reading about psychology and psychoanalysis.