Our Mission

To support first-generation, low-income and other underrepresented students by providing academic advising, admissions planning, and financial guidance with a focus on personal growth and development.
About us

Meet our team

Yan Yan Mao
Co-Founder, President
          Yan Yan has extensive experience providing academic consulting services, with a focus on test preparation and college applications. She has worked for education consulting companies in Boston, Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Shanghai, as well as advising high-achieving students all over the world.
          Yan Yan received a Masters of Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Prior to CCA, Yan Yan graduated from Harvard cum laude with a B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies while completing the Harvard pre-medical curriculum and learning two languages.
          At 18, Yan Yan received her high school diploma from Hillsdale High School as the valedictorian, the same week she received an Associate in Arts degree with high honors as the youngest graduating member from College of San Mateo.
          Yan Yan and her family emigrated from Shanghai to San Francisco when she was 8.
Helen Gong
Co-Founder
          Helen grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts as the oldest of 5 kids, which sparked her lifelong commitment to mentorship. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University with a dual degree in International/Global Studies and French/Francophone Studies, as well as a minor in East Asian Studies. After graduating, she moved to Shanghai where she worked in education for 5 years, and then obtained her Masters of Education in Human Development and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
          Helen has considerable experience with students of all different ages, backgrounds, and cultures. Most extensively, she mentored middle and high school students in Shanghai, where she coached students 1-on-1 in topics of wellness, life skills, executive functions, academic goals, and career development, in addition to teaching group classes and workshops. She is currently mentoring adolescents in areas of personal development, goal setting, time management, and organization, among others.
Sam Jeong
Co-Founder
          Sam is an educator who believes in the power of the personal story. As someone who spent his formative years in both South Korea and the United States, Sam is always pushing students to think about how their past experiences speak to and shape their stories.
          Sam started his career working for Dartmouth College’s admissions office as an Assistant Director of Admissions, then transitioned to being an inaugural University Counselor at the United World College (UWC) in Changshu, China, where he helped build the counseling department from the ground up. He most recently served as a University Counselor at Saigon South International School in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he also resides.
          Sam received his B.A. degree in sociology and Chinese from Williams College and his M.A degree in private school leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. Sam speaks Korean, English, Mandarin, Japanese, and just a bit of Vietnamese. 
ChanChan Mao
Social Media and Marketing Manager
          ChanChan Mao recently graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in computer science, but discovered that software engineering was no longer her passion. She turned towards learning about strategies behind social media and became interested in how it can build and support relationships between organizations and their communities.
Currently, she works as a community and developer advocate at a tech company in Silicon Valley. 
          As a first-generation student and child of immigrant parents, ChanChan 
has first-hand experience in feeling lost and confused about her future during high school because her parents did not experience the American educational system. If it was not for her older sister's experience and academic guidance throughout middle school, high school, and college, she would not have been able to have a clear vision of her future and have the resources to achieve success. 

Our Philosophy

We are grateful for the teachers, mentors and opportunities that enabled us to acquire postsecondary degrees. In turn, we have a burning desire to support the next generation of scholars in pursuing their college dreams. Collectively we represent first-generation college graduates, low-income, international, immigrant, US-born, and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education) prepared populations, among other backgrounds.

Our education careers include working with middle and high school students as well as college, transfer, university, international, and graduate students. As children of immigrants and first-gen, low-income students, we were missing information and skills needed to navigate college and career success planning since our parents did not go through the American higher education system. Hence we have a desire to help remove barriers and provide tools for your college and career success.

We are equally passionate about the other part of our mission: helping students to grow not only academically, but also personally. We believe in resilient growth (the R and G of CHRG) as a characteristic that helps students to continually thrive. Therefore we will also provide video classes on topics that will enable students to cultivate essential qualities for academics, careers, and life in general, such as communication, leadership and organizational skills, mentorship, and more.

We collectively hope (the C and H of CHRG) that through our nonprofit, we can support students to successfully fulfill their academic goals, no matter their background.

Collective Hope and Resilient Growth may be unfamiliar names for familiar concepts that you have already experienced. Through believing in yourself, receiving support from others, and in turn encouraging others, you have already acted in ways that nurture resilience, foster community, and inspire hope. We are enthusiastic about supporting your growth and development, which in turn promotes much-needed equity and opportunity within education.

We also want to make available, in a database form, a variety of college and career planning resources specifically to help first-gen, low-income and other underrepresented students, such as fee waivers, scholarships, mentoring and career preparation programs, and more.
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