Senior Fellow: Carrie Alexander, Penn '08 & Harvard '15

I am excited to introduce Carrie Alexander, who will be a 2014-15 Senior Fellow and Director of the 2015 Joyce Ivy College Admissions Symposium (JCAS). Carrie is currently a master's degree candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Higher Education program. You can read more about Carrie's bio – along with the rest of the 2014-15 Fellows – here.

I'll let Carrie introduce herself:

Greetings from Carrie!

My name is Carrie Alexander and I am so delighted to be joining the Joyce Ivy Foundation family as a Senior Fellow and your JCAS ’15 Director.  When I am not learning everything there is to know about the JIF, JCAS and the Midwest, I am a full-time student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where I am pursuing a Master's in Higher Education.  In fact, I just moved to Cambridge, MA a few weeks ago and so far, I am having a great time exploring my new home.

Actually, this is my first time living in New England since I left my home, Providence, RI in the summer of 2004 for college.  Growing up in Rhode Island, I attended a wonderful, but fairly homogenous school that was situated between Brown University’s Quad and their athletic facilities.  As you can imagine, I spent a great deal of time at Brown and was exposed to their students who were my math tutors, Hebrew School teachers, lacrosse coaches and babysitters.  Growing up in the heart of Providence, I had a very distinct idea of what a college campus should look like and in my own college search process, I was looking for a place that would feel intimate like Brown seemed to be, but at the same time, expose me to diversity in all senses of the word.

With Brown as my muse, I saw over thirty colleges throughout my sophomore and junior years of high school and nearly every place I saw seemed better than the last—I was just so excited to go to college.  But it was the University of Pennsylvania that really caught my eye. The students I met during my visits to Penn were exactly with whom I wished to surround myself in college—brilliant, engaged, inspiring, innately curious, down-to-earth, friendly and passionate—it was a near perfect match and I was fortunate to be admitted into the Class of 2008.  I studied Film and American History at Penn and as soon as I graduated in May 2008, I moved to New York City to begin working in the film industry, where I eventually became an Agent Trainee at a big talent agency and helped to represent writers and directors for film and TV.

So you are probably wondering right now “who is this girl and why is she remotely qualified to work with the JIF if she is neither from the Midwest, nor experienced with college access and admissions?”  Well, in a powerful series of events, my life was altered in the winter of 2011/2012 when I conducted an interview for a student in NYC who was applying to Penn.  As an alumni interviewer in NYC, I had already conducted dozens of interviews over the years, but on a cold and blistery day in January, I met an amazing young man, who profoundly changed my life.  The interview lasted three hours because he was simply incredible and after racing home to write his recommendation, I immediately sent it off to the Penn Admissions office.  The very next morning, I received an email from the Vice Dean of Admissions who told me that as a result of my glowing recommendation, the student’s initial denial had been overturned and now, this exceptional young man would be admitted!  She explained in her email that Penn had not planned on admitting the student because they found his school recommendations to be grossly hyperbolic, but my recommendation had confirmed his school’s words and as a result, Penn recognized that this young man was the real deal.  As I sat down on my couch in complete and utter disbelief, I was floored by the impact I had made on this young man’s chances.  The way I saw it, my words had completely altered the course of his life and as a result, he could attend Penn and potentially have a transformative experience in Philadelphia, just as I had.

This was the moment when I realized that as much as I loved scouting talent in the film industry, something had been missing—a feeling of truly making a difference in the world and the ability to tangibly affect others.  So I discovered that the way for me to continue scouting talent, but do so “for a better purpose” would be to become a college admissions director. I discovered that in Admissions, the “return on investment” would be the ability to “give the gift of education” and let me tell you folks: there is no better job in the world than giving the gift of education.  So I chose to pursue an entirely new career and I was fortunate to have been hired at Lafayette College as an Admissions Director.  I worked with an incredible team at Lafayette for two years before realizing that because I had not studied education as an undergraduate, I had a lot to learn about my new industry, some of which could not be learned on the job.  So I decided to pursue a graduate degree and the rest is history.

And thus, this slightly indirect yet ultimately exhilarating path has led me to Harvard and the Joyce Ivy Foundation.  I am excited to work with all of you in the upcoming year. Please feel free to be in touch at any point by emailing me at carrie.alexander@joyceivyfoundation.org to talk about college, film, life etc. and I look forward to meeting many of you at JCAS in Ann Arbor this May.