Wendy Kopp: The Desire to Make a Difference

But I'll just kind of start with this story and just say that I feel very, very lucky that I somehow landed on this idea a little over 20 years ago when I was a senior at Princeton University. You know, I look back and think, I mean, this seems like sort of a surreal story to me as I even retell it. But what brought me to this was. Was a couple of things coming together. On the one hand, as a public policy major and really, more importantly, just a concerned citizen and college student. I had started, you know, I'd just gotten more informed and more concerned about educational inequity in our country. Just the fact that, you know, this is a country that aspires to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born really determines your educational prospects and in turn, life prospects. That seems like a fundamental, massive injustice given our ideals. And so I was doing things that college students do when they're concerned about issues, including organizing conferences around it and that kind of thing. At the same time, you know, our generation at the time was called the me generation. That was the label. You know, we supposedly just all wanted to go work on Wall street and work for management consulting firms. And I just thought that this wasn't a generational issue. It wasn't about our generation. It was about the fact that those were the only recruiters. And I actually, I think that's great if that's what, you know, you really want to do. It's just that there were so many people I knew, and I was one of them, who were just searching for something else and weren't finding it, who were looking for a way to right out of college, assume a significant responsibility that would make a real difference in the world? And one day, all of that came together into this idea. Why aren't we recruiting all these talented graduating seniors as aggressively to commit two years to teach in our highest poverty communities? As we were being recruited at the time to commit two years to work on Wall Street, I needed a thesis topic, decided to propose this in the thesis, and just became all the more obsessed as I went through that process about the potential power of the idea, you know, in the short run to channel all of this talent and energy into classrooms in our hardest to staff schools in remote rural areas and inner city, urban areas. I thought that would make a significant difference for kids growing up today. And at the same time, I thought, you know, how powerful would it be in the kind of overall consciousness and priorities of our country to have our future leaders have their first experience be teaching in low income communities instead of working on Wall Street. So it was just clearly an idea whose time had come.