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.
Since childhood, Claire Nottman has always been captivated by problem solving, from word games to jigsaw puzzles. As she grew up, she found her favorite types of puzzles to solve were those she encountered in her math and science classes. This passion led her to pursue a path in Biomedical Engineering. As a junior at Columbia University’s Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Claire gets to combine her love of creative problem solving with her admiration of elegant scientific solutions as she works towards innovation with a meaningful impact: improved global health.
A beloved NYC Stand-up comic by night and established computer science practitioner by day, Betsy Carroll has the unique ability to be a ray of sunshine on even the most intimidating and confidence-shattering topics in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).
Cara Hill is a seasoned educator, with over twenty years of classroom experience in public and private schools in New York City. She has taught at the Packer Collegiate Institute, the Berkeley Carroll School, School of the Future, M.S. 51, and the high school academic outreach program Upward Bound at Columbia University. Throughout her teaching career, Cara has tutored, relishing the chance to work on a one-to-one basis with students across age groups and disciplines. In addition, she has mentored and trained many teachers at the middle and high school level, giving her a strong understanding of a wide array of teachers, students, and schools.
Alyssa Loh is a writer, filmmaker, and educator. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Princeton with a degree in English, and holds a dual MBA (business) / MFA (film) from NYU, where she graduated with Distinction (top 10%). Due to her excellent academic record at the business school, she was consistently hired as a Teaching Fellow across the undergraduate, MBA, and executive MBA programs for core quantitative classes like statistics. In that role, she held office hours on behalf of professors, graded exams, ran in-class exercises, and helped business students with problem sets. She has years of experience