YouSaid · the spoken record

Ana Rowena Mallari

lines on the record: 23
first: 2024-05-30
most recent: 2024-05-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Inside your own company to be able to do it across multiple companies or whatever that works. But I do think that's a really important piece of retention and of enabling people to feel seen and valued for who they are as a whole.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say, how do you listen for that? What happens is in the university, for example, they feel a little bit different and not everybody understands them. But when they go home, that's actually also true because they came from a place that their families aren't always going to be able to relate as much as they might love them and want them to be happy. So similarly, it translates to the workplace or to the lab or wherever it is that you are. In fact, I just talked to two wonderful UCLA PhD students in neuroscience and that they happen to be sitting next to each other in the lab and they're both Quest scholars. And knowing that one another is a quest scholar is pretty great because they're like, oh, I can tell you how this lab, my experience here is completely different than anything I ever grew up with. And you understand me in a different way, right? So being able to create spaces where those connections can be made, even if it's not in”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think learning how to listen to diverse experiences. I read a story just the other day of one of our graduates who went to USC as an undergrad and then got three degrees from Harvard. He's getting his medical degree, but he also has, I think, a master's in public policy and a third one. He experienced homelessness when he was an immigrant to the U.S. with his family. How do you talk to a student, a person like that, and understand how did those experiences translate to what they can bring to your workplace? There's something about how they are able to address and handle uncertainty, questions, fast-evolving circumstances, and adapt to those that are so valuable, and that is so incredibly worth something in the workforce.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't need to be in the middle of making connections. Those connections are happening on their own. And at that conference, for example, I've heard a number of folks say, I met somebody there that led me to my next job, or I found a mentor and somebody inspired me to pivot in my career or whatever, the power of being a part of this and then enabling it to become self-sustaining is really one of my dreams.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the same time, I became very interested in what can we learn from them? What do they have to teach us as society around how to navigate all that they have in life? And so I started to explore the question of resilience and thriving and what makes these unique students who they are. As you know, Reid, you were a wonderful keynote for our conference back in 2019 when we had 1,300 scholars and alums there. And your conversation with them and a number of other experiences we've had has illuminated for us just how much they would like us to be involved with their next step in life. So that's career, that's grad school, that's being an independent adult outside of the college community and experience. And so we're doing a lot around career partnerships as well as graduate partnerships. We now are starting those two areas in earnest and really excited about those directions, a very sort of natural adjacent step. How can we empower this community to serve itself in many ways?”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ability for a four year investment in a school like the schools we work with is one of the most effective uses of time to change your family's social mobility. And we see often that our students are buying their family their first home ever. One of my students said the other day, their opening salary of their job was higher than their parents ending salary when they retired. It's just a shift for these communities. So we often say while we've connected and supported these 30,000 or so individuals, there's a much bigger impact on the communities, on the families, on the schools. To your question, I started to see that that actually Thriving in life is having connection to incredible people, networks. So I realized then that we needed to really leverage the power of this larger community.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think of it as like the student experience through Questbridge. We consciously intentionally designed our process for the deadline to be early in the fall so that if they didn't get in through Questbridge, they still had multiple other shots on goal. We wanted it to be possible for them to have other options, so that's why our application is due so early. And because it's so intense, the Westbridge application is so long, it's so demanding, a lot of times our applicants will say, I was so ready for the rest of the college application season because in completing the Questbridge one, I was pretty far along my process, even if I had to go through another application process afterwards, the experience of being an applicant, I think it does open people's eyes to the possibilities, even if they don't end up going to Questbridge schools. And we hear that all the time, that they just feel grateful that Questbridge's messaging.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So originally, those questions were not really intended for the college application itself. And part of it was we realized we wanted them to have space to actually tell their authentic stories and these colleges realized those questions are actually really helpful in seeing more of the person, right? Over the course of time, what happened was the colleges realized they're getting more information through the application to Questbridge and the students are spending so much time putting together these things that they actually didn't need additional information from them to apply or application is really the main instrument that they use to evaluate candidates now. We never expected that to happen.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We asked questions like, What are your favorite books? What do you like to listen to? How do you rejuvenate your spirit? And we ask those because we thought we were going to be living with these kids over the summer. And so we wanted to make sure that we could have a really good community.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The board or to the president to get approval to offer this type of financial aid and this type of guarantee. That was really important. But I think because the students were so compelling and are so compelling, the schools are willing to do that.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got a lot of no's in the beginning. A lot of folks were like, nope, we can't do that. Sorry, we aren't going to do it. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Try someone else. Try that school down there. Nope. Forget it. Never going to happen. And I think it's because it was unconventional to say this has to be what you offer them or they're not going to apply and they're not going to go. We also had real examples of incredible applicants that we could say look, this is a real applicant that could go to your school if you just offered them this type of aid. There were a few early adopters who were like willing to listen to us. One dean in particular took like four or five of our applications, brought it to his board of trustees, and he said, look, do you want students like this on this on this campus? And they said, yes. And he said, I can get them, but we need to offer these things. And many times they had to go up to that level.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The vast majority of our students 70 to 80 percent in any given year are in the first generation to college, so their families are not familiar with the college process. We had to say to the schools, please, we need you to offer a full financial aid offer. That includes not just, in many cases, not just tuition and room and board, but also additional expenses, maybe some plane tickets for the family to come or the student to come. Maybe it's if they want to do other activities like art or photography, you know, they don't have this sort of discretionary funding to just pay for whatever equipment they might need for their activities. And the schools actually have been very generous in this regard for our match students. Schools really do offer a guaranteed full four-year scholarship. But in the beginning, we had to convince them of the importance of that.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am deeply inspired and energized when I think about our students and who they are and how amazing they are. It's not hard to convince the schools just how much they Early days, we had to translate in some sense for the schools the importance of making the financial aid offer simple enough and clear enough and sort of categorical enough for a family to take a risk, to send their student to a school like one of these schools.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Schools would never let them use the logo if it wasn't a real opportunity, right? So that's one is just like literally the signaling that actually this is legitimate and this is real. The other one that is really important that we continue to employ because it's so effective is this near peer effect. In other words, to say, look, here are 10 students who really did go through the same experience that we're trying to tell you is available to you. And their voices are very important.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. A few things were really interesting. One of them was, this is like something I wouldn't have expected. But we used paper mail quite a bit. And we actually surprisingly still do. And it's interesting because to your point, even to this day, many people say there's no way this could be true. This is a scam. Stanford University giving me a complete full ride. Are you kidding? I'm from this kind of background and everybody around me says this is impossible. And if you look at the sticker price online, it looks like to attend in many cases more than their family income for a year. So the barriers are really profound. Even if you can convince them that as a student, they are qualified and would be attractive. The paying for it part is really challenging. So one of the things that we did was on the paper mail. We always made sure to use the logos of our schools because the logic was this.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back of the envelope calculation, which we just literally did on the back of an envelope, was like, wait, there's not just 3,000 students. There's actually more like 30,000 students out there, much more opportunity, much more talent out there across the country.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In very compelling way, that actually we could do much more If we just stepped back a little bit and allowed our energies to go towards a larger number of students at one time. Because at any given moment, you can pour a lot of time into one or two, and then suddenly you don't have enough time for, you know, the larger questions. He was absolutely right. And I feel so grateful for his wisdom, then and now.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I consider that a pivot point for the organization because he had come from Yahoo. And innovation, and he was plugged into technology. But he also brought a very rigorous management and leadership style. He was questioning everything we had done before, but he brought this clarity around what we shouldn't worry about and what we should worry about. And this was so revolutionary for us because as founders and people who cared about every little piece, he was like, you know what? I understand you care about that, but we've got to focus over here. I always remember he kept on saying, we need this to be sustainable and we need to have interchangeable parts. Everything we did had to be scalable. And so it felt sort of counterintuitive to all of us who had felt like this essence of this program is that personal touch. I was like, wait, you're telling me I can't, you know, call the student and talk to her mom, you know, or whatever it is. He was able to convince us.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two campuses in different places. It was just very high touch program and really hard to scale. And at this time, we had something like 3,000 applicants for 20 spots. And so we ended up having to sunset the summer program, which was heartbreaking. People would say the program doesn't exist without this thing. But we realized and we knew from our lessons trying to scale that actually we couldn't scale if we insisted on holding on tightly to this particular model.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After five or six years of doing this small residential program, we realized that, in fact, these students were extremely attractive to institutions, and not only were they highly successful in the admissions process, but they were also highly successful as undergraduates. At that time, we were supported by a number of private individuals and foundations in the area, all of whom, when they came to visit, they said something really special is going on here. It's got to be more than just 20 students a year. You've got to scale this thing. And so we ended up exploring multiple models of scale. One of them was actually just replicating this little program that we had at different campuses. We tried that on one campus on the East Coast, which was extremely successful in terms of the outcomes of the students, but also an incredibly hard lesson learned that scaling that way was not going to work. I was traveling eight times a year back and forth and just trying to manage.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we saw what happened when they applied to college, which we helped and supported them in the process. All of them were extremely appealing and attractive candidates and like 90% of them went to Stanford over years of time. Then actually, I will say that very first summer program, when they first walked in and I just saw their faces and their spirits in many ways, I was like, I could do this for a lifetime. I didn't know That I would be here today”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a very small residential summer program on the Stanford campus. We had twenty students from all over the country. They were high achieving students from low income backgrounds and they were high school juniors and we lived with them for almost six weeks in a summer program. They had classes with Stanford professors. We went on field trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Hopkins Marine Station. We went to symphonies and we had picnics in the park. all the sorts of wonderful educational opportunities that Stanford and the Bay Area offer. And we realized very quickly that these amazing students were just as bright as any other student we ever encountered and were totally impressive because of what they had experienced prior to coming to this summer program. I mean, they were extremely hardworking. They were very compelling human.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to a public high school. We were within 20 minutes' drive of the university Stanford And the amazing resources that university had were so enriching and empowering to the students who attended, but Realized that the students I went to high school with that I had classes with that I played on sports teams with from all over the surrounding communities East Palo Alto, East Redwood City. Many of them were never going to be able to access those kinds of opportunities without being able to attend a Stanford or a similar institution.”
2024-05-30 · Masters of Scale · QuestBridge: Scaling College Access with Ana Rowena Mallari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT