Life Design & College Admissions Coaching. Your Teen’s Path to Success.

An Award-Winning Former Teacher of College, Career, Technology & Personal Finance

As a high school teacher in San Francisco, Neil taught 12th grade Probability & Statistics and a new 9th grade course on College, Career, Technology & Personal Finance. The course covered a wide array of skills to equip students for real-world success, like developing personal goals, researching careers, mastering creating a budget in MS Excel, creating digital recordings, and planning a hypothetical life after college.

Neil was later asked to partner with the Pearson Foundation to build a district-wide curriculum that served over 2000 students across 19 schools. This work won him the Symantec Award for Innovation in Education, a national teaching award given to five teachers. Today, Master Plan Academy’s programs build on Neil’s experience, covering the skills teens need to create their ideal life in 2024.

A core piece of a design approach to creating your life is connecting the dots between your talents, purpose and passion, and market demand. This overlap is what the Japanese call “Ikigai.”  At MPA, teens 1) explore their talents, purpose, and passion, 2) test out different interests using experiments, and 3) build a foundation for potential careers.

In guiding teens to explore, it helps for a coach himself to have experience from which to draw. Neil has held roles in three broad industries: 1) strategy consulting, 2) government, and 3) teaching. Neil was a strategy and operations consultant to Kaiser Permanente, where he led the process of goal-setting for Northern California hospitals and helped executives track performance. Neil also served as a Michael Dukakis Governor’s Fellow, advising Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s team on policy issues. Later, he managed the citywide tech portfolio for the City of San Francisco.

Neil has practiced meditation for over 20 years, and started studying these Eastern arts while at UC Berkeley. While he was a teacher, Neil spent three years facilitating teens in meditation as part of the Quiet Time program, which was funded by the David Lynch Foundation, at his high school. He saw firsthand the enormous benefits for teens in terms of their concentration and focus.

That’s no surprise- if meditation can help championship athletes like Serena Williams and LeBron James to center and enter the flow state, why can’t it help teens to conquer monumental goals as well?

As Neil began to approach the challenge of helping teens pursue their biggest goals with Master Plan Academy, he saw that mindfulness meditation should be an essential part of this journey. He decided to bring in a professional Mindfulness Meditation curriculum developed by Sean Fargo, the founder of MindfulnessExercises.com, who trained as a Buddhist monk and has taught mindfulness at Google, Kaiser Permanence, and other organizations. Neil is also enrolled in Sean’s Mindfulness Teaching Certification program.

At MPA, we take a different approach from traditional college admissions consultants. While these organizations sometimes have knowledgeable former admissions officers, most of the information on what makes a great admissions profile and strategy is already out there. We incorporate these insights in our curriculum, including:

• Building a balanced and impressive profile across academics and extracurriculars

• Developing distinct talents and insights that colleges value

• Creating a powerful story that reflects leadership, self-discovery, and impact

But, our programs help students design a path to their target schools, while also A) Staying balanced and navigating stress, B) Being authentic and building achievements that reflect your uniqueness, and C) Moving towards your purpose and the right school and major(s) for you (as opposed to just following the pack). To do this, it is invaluable to be coached by someone who has walked the walk. Neil has been admitted to a variety of America’s top universities, including

• All schools in the UC system

• Harvard University

• University of Chicago

• University of Pennsylvania

• Multiple Ivy League universities

Through that experience, he has developed a wealth of strategy and insight on how students can transform themselves into the ideal candidates for their target schools.