Welcome
to the Dream School Project
We help students create an extraordinary life of vision, joy, and purpose.
Here’s the thing.
No one just wakes up one day to suddenly find themselves living a remarkable life accidentally.
Anyone living the life of their dreams have cultivated two fundamental principles:
An Olympic level curiosity
An unshakeable belief in one’s gifts to transform the world
And it’s families who are devoted to this kind of aliveness that we absolutely adore working with.
Families like yours.
Let’s be honest
You’re not about to let your child fade into the background. You know with every fiber of your being that living an intentional, inspired life ripples far, far beyond following the rules and checking off all the right boxes.
It did for you, didn’t it?
And now you’re eager to pass that torch on to your own child.
The tricky part is HOW. Especially now that your child has stepped into their teen years— which brings its own unique challenges, some of which might be completely unexpected.
The happy little kid who used to eat up everything you said? Now they might be the teenager who instinctively rejects those gems of wisdom.
Or maybe you had an outgoing kid who thrived on connecting with friends and getting out into their community . . . and then COVID hit, and now you’ve got a kid who’d rather stay home and play video games.
So how do you find a way to honor this natural pulling away—and still maintain a loving connection that supports them to make powerful, thoughtful choices?
The answer is…
understanding how to help your child amplify their natural curiosity (even if it seems long buried).
It starts with two fundamental questions:
What lights me up?
Where are my unique gifts calling me to serve?
Because once your child has taken the time to reflect on these questions, inevitably they begin to learn who they are. In a way they may never have before.
You may even see your child return to parts of their former self that you haven’t seen in what seems like forever. Like picking up discarded pieces of their childhood to form a new, powerful whole. That is the first step to understanding and claiming their genius.
For these two questions are the very same questions that every successful entrepreneur, iconoclast & revolutionary has asked . . .and then figured out how to answer so they could truly make their mark on the world.
Not some of them. Not most of them.
Every single one of them.
That is how kids transform themselves
from bored, seemingly directionless students to dynamic, empowered innovators. It’s exactly how they begin to thrive . . . not just in the admissions process. But, far more important, in their entire lives.
This is what we stand for:
We believe that every single one of our kids has an extraordinary gift to share with the world.
That the world desperately needs these kids’ gifts.
That in order to experience the greatest joy and sense of purpose, we MUST help our kids cultivate these gifts—at the highest level possible.
But cultivating these gifts demands extraordinary courage. Because the world wants to tell us that we’re not smart enough, that we don’t have the right connections or resources or discipline to do anything other than cram ourselves inside society’s tiny boxes.
We say no. Let us refuse to give any credence to those lies. Instead, together let us stand for TRUTH.
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refined by Elizabeth, has become a community service outreach, a college essay, an excitement about a possible career, and a source of pride for Bayne. All these things have complemented our daughter’s life in a very important way. But we, her parents, learned a lot along the way too. Specifically, the section on mentors. Professionally we have added a mentor to help navigate a competitive ever-changing marketplace. While geared at high schoolers, Elizabeth’s lessons gave us a few ideas, too, on getting better. Our daughter has and it appears will continue to flourish in large part because of Elizabeth’s programs. Thanks for teaching her parents a thing or two also.”
— Steve, Bayne’s father
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We stand for waking kids up to their unique and incalculable value. For raising up all the kids who think they don’t matter.
Who have been taught by our schools to believe that grades are the only way to measure their worth. Who don’t yet have a clue of how brilliant they are. Of how much the world needs their unique gifts.
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We stand for transcending our broken education system that tells kids to sit down, be quiet and follow the damn rules. Because nothing worth fighting for will ever come from memorizing what Google can spit back in .42 seconds. Or from how many AP’s they’ve taken or what the name of the college or university that deigns to accept them will be.
The only thing truly worth measuring is how much JOY our kids are capable of feeling. How much GOODNESS they’re able to create around them, especially for those who need it most.
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We stand for empowering every single student to share their brilliance with the world. For the instinctive creative force that each one of them holds within the pure essence of their beings?
THAT is the solution to the aching need on this planet right now.
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We stand for emboldening our students to think for themselves. To question everything. To see that they are the creators of their—and our—worlds. That every single challenge they face— tedious SAT prep, toxic competition, social media bullying, academic overload—all of it can be transformed into opportunities for immense growth.
Strength training for the soul.
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We stand for DOING, for teaching students how to take their complaints and turn them into solutions, for themselves, for their families, for their communities.
It’s time for the old, outdated way of teaching students to cram their heads with facts and useless, inapplicable knowledge to end. It’s time to leverage the power of these kids’ natural genius to create real solutions for real people.
Anything worth fighting for can ONLY be resolved by mastering the one skill that robots will never be able to access on their own: creativity.
Creativity is the essence of humanity. Imagine what would happen if every single one of our kids saw themselves as channels for this kind of creativity and freedom?
But these are not popular beliefs, are they? Or certainly not the beliefs of the mainstream. So, how did we get here? Why did we choose to become a champion of freedom for our kids?
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It all started when I left the small Christian commune where I’d grown up on Cape Cod. That was where I learned the power of conformity and obedience. The power to silence myself, that is—without ever even realizing it. After all, I’d been pulled out of my senior year of high school and sent to a convent where I remained for the next four years. (I know. How does something like that even happen in this day and age?)
But when I started college, I discovered through my writing that I had a voice. A voice that mattered. When I shared my writing with others, their eyes opened wide. “I want to write like that, too,” they’d tell me, their eyes full of longing. So when I began teaching writing while I was still in college, I wanted to call forth that voice in each one of my students.
And that’s exactly what I began to do. Soon my reputation spread beyond that gorgeous tree-lined college campus to the larger community. By the time I’d finished earning my masters in writing, I had a full roster of private students, tutoring them in SAT prep and coaching them to write their college application essays.
And yet, though I enjoyed my work and loved supporting my students, the kids were showing up glassy-eyed to their sessions, their knees bouncing up and down, unable to look me in the eye. They told me stories of how their parents had pronounced them failures for failing to memorize their SAT vocab that week. That they were going to have to work 5 jobs to pay the bills after college.
My heart broke for them. But they wanted Harvard (or, at least, their parents did), so I figured it was like training for the Olympics: they had to check off a whole bunch of boxes, jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get into the “right” school so that they could ensure the “right” future.
Kind of like living in the convent. Only rather than trying to gain entrance to Harvard, I’d been knocking on the doors of Heaven with a whole other set of boxes and hoops.
A few years later, during one particularly busy application season, I ended up working with 18 different seniors, all applying to the top schools. Their essays were gorgeous (see a sample of them here), and with their impressive grades and test scores and awards, I was sure Harvard was a shoo-in for most of them. Or at least Cornell.
And then two events shattered everything I thought I knew.
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One day, one of my students who was applying to nearly 20 different colleges, whose parents had given her a boy’s name and dressed her in boys’ clothes until she rebelled at age 8, the same parents who, if they couldn’t have a boy, were dead set on Yale or nothing . . . she disappeared.
She wouldn’t answer my emails or calls. In the middle of December, two weeks before all of her applications were due. For weeks, I woke every morning terrified that she’d killed herself. I thought about how I’d urged her to get the highest grades, the highest test scores, the highest number of awards and accolades. Just the way I’d coached all of my students. That was the formula, wasn’t it? Yes, a formula so toxic, it was threatening to end a child’s life.
I was finally able to get in touch with that student, and we finished all her applications in time. But I couldn’t stop agonizing over her. Over all of my students.
What are we doing to these kids?
And then the results from all 18 of my students came out that spring—and all but two ended up waitlisted at their top choice schools.
Wait, what? Hadn’t they done everything everyone said they needed?
Yes, indeed. They’d done EXACTLY what they’d been told. The deep excavation I did with my students to help them find their stories? I’d mistaken it for different. Just the way I’d mistaken different in the convent. Of course it had backfired. Because I had never understood what different truly meant.
But it got me thinking. What about those two students who’d been accepted to Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, MIT? They were on to something. Something truly different. Not something cloaked in the outward appearance of different.
I started looking even more closely at their applications, and I realized that they had both created something of their own, something that showcased their unique interests and served their communities in a truly meaningful way.
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And that’s when it hit me. What every student needed was a way to truly express themselves. To ask themselves the very same questions I was starting to ask about my own work:
1. What lights me up?
2. Where are my unique gifts calling me to serve?
At last, I understood. Different, the truly life-giving kind, didn’t mean living in defiance. It didn’t mean wasting precious energy rebelling against the pressure to show up in a certain way.
It meant discovering my deepest hunger to touch the world. It meant tapping into my authentic desire to make life better, for myself, the people I loved, and the communities around me.
And now I saw what it meant for my students: helping them abandon the old perfection model so they could bridge their deepest joy with their deepest hunger to touch the lives of others.
Not in order to get into the college of their dreams. In order to create the LIFE of their dreams. But of course, no one I knew was teaching something so . . . different. And so, without a clue about how to begin, I I rolled up my sleeves and set out to create a program to help students learn—and create—in a whole new way.
Soon our team grew, and soon we were witnessing our students creating projects that made them utterly glow with pride. We watched their self-confidence grow, their vision for the future they most desired crystalize. We cheered from the rooftops when they got into some of the most highly coveted schools that would have otherwise waitlisted or rejected them.
Along the way, I was featured on CBS, became a regular contributor to the Huffington Post for several years, and gave two different TEDx talks here and here. It was a long, often arduous path out of that convent into this place of freedom. Strength training for the soul, indeed. But out of that journey has come a profound understanding of the power of these two questions:
1. What lights me up?
2. Where are my unique gifts calling me to serve?
Today, we bring to our students our shared vision of an army of mentors across this nation, building up each one of these beautiful minds and hearts, showing them how to find the courage to step into joy. To step into true creativity.
What an honor. Truly.
With love,
Elizabeth
