QuestBridge History

The Quest Scholars Program grew from a few simple ideas, and a lot of help. With roots extending to 1987, Quest has flourished thanks to the nurturing, commitment, and creative effort of hundreds of dedicated people.

The Quest Scholars Program officially started in 1994 as a five-week summer enrichment program on Stanford University’s campus for high school juniors. In 2004, the program launched QuestBridge in an effort to expand the number of high schools students it reached.

Early Beginnings

Quest’s early origins actually also belong to Marc Lawrence, a fellow Stanford undergraduate, who had the idea of starting a local commuter-based outreach effort in 1987. I joined him early in the planning stages. Eight students interested in medicine from East Palo Alto (at the time, one of the poorest communities in the country) journeyed daily to Stanford where they received college lecture and clinical experiences. We called it the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program (SMYSP). The Stanford academic community responded generously with world-class instruction and incredible hands-on experiences, like watching open-heart surgeries or witnessing births.

But the lectures were over the heads of some of our first students. Moreover, at days’ end as we brought them home to East Palo Alto in the afternoon, Marc and I often journeyed past drug dealers and gang activity. We realized that the student’s having to bridge two worlds on a daily undermined our impact. Clearly, our results had been mixed. SMYSP required stronger students than simple local recruiting could produce, and we needed to create an educational environment without distraction.

The transformation to a residence-based program solved both of these problems. We could draw from a wider and stronger pool of bright, hungry, low-income students beyond commuting distance. At the same time, we could immerse the participants in the Stanford environment and give them a more fertile soil from which to grow. The efforts exponentially increased as we took on twenty students for the first residence program in 1988; I was 21 at the time.

The Beginnings of a Residence Base

Co-Founder Marc left for medical school before the residence-based program began, but with the help of Marilyn Winkleby, SMYSP’s academic advisor, and six undergraduates, we embarked on the larger residence-based program, which I directed for the next two years until graduating from Stanford. On a shoestring budget, the staff all volunteered their time (we took turns preparing meals). But it worked, and it worked well. SMYSP grew quickly.

I spent the next year institutionalizing SMYSP program, which operates successfully to this day under the guidance of Marilyn Winkleby who began as our academic advisor, but has since gone on to become the heart and soul of SMYSP.

Conceptualizing, Then Launching Quest

Between graduation and starting medical school, I spent a year at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. Ana Mallari, then-girlfriend now wife, joined me at Oxford. Our time at there allowed us to reflect on our experience at SMYSP and conceptualized a new program that took full advantage of the potential that a residence base provided. That new program was Quest.

We believed that Quest could teach leadership and outreach as well as science. Moreover, if we could get more Quest graduates into Stanford, then we could improve continuity, and even create a culture of support at Stanford. We could also teach public service. Most importantly, we could try to reflect the noble potential in each student, and create a mutually reinforcing culture where ideas and growth could flourish.

Ana returned from Oxford to complete her degree at Stanford, and I began medical school at the University of California in San Francisco. Ana and I spent two years building our model, taking the best of SMYSP and adding our new ideas. Midway through medical school, in 1994, we launched Quest – then called the Stanford Youth Environmental Science Program (SYESP). Quest’s environmental theme had an advantage over the SMYSP model of recruiting students with wide ranging interests other than medicine.

Switching from a medical to an environmental theme allowed Quest to accept motivated low-income students with nearly any professional interest: medicine, law, engineering, policy, science, and nearly every other academic area somehow impact the environment. Approaching one subject from so many different areas also introduces Quest students to the complexity of intellectual thought and public issues.

Shortly after beginning Quest, we realized that the communities from which our students were drawn sorely lacked leadership in environmental and other important issues. We wanted to develop public service entrepreneurs who were concerned about local and national issues affecting their communities. By the third year, our recruiting pool was large enough to allow us to screen applicants for their dedication to public service. By the year 2000 we had 2,800 applicants applying for 44 spots at Harvard and Stanford.

The enthusiasm, sincerity, intellect, and raw hunger of our students began attracting many of the best professors at Stanford to our program from the former Stanford President Don Kennedy to former Secretary of State George Shultz. Several Nobel Laureates, eight Rhodes Scholars, two MacArthur fellows and thirty other Stanford faculty signed on. Working for Quest also became one of the most popular student jobs at Stanford. Five Quest staff went on to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars.

The Quest students responded enthusiastically to this collection of energy. Most of our alumni worked for Quest at some point during college career, including several that decided to take a semester or two off to help grow Quest. The strength of the Quest model carried us through some difficult times as Ana began law school at Stanford, and I began my residency in emergency medicine at Stanford. On multiple occasions, Ana and I were both encouraged to focus exclusively on our careers in law school and my emergency medicine residency rather than running the Quest program.

While Ana and I both continued full-time work, we also kept growing Quest. During this time Quest entered ‘email mode’ as Ana and I managed Quest with between 1:00 and 3:00 AM, after emergency medicine shifts in the pockets of time in my emergency medicine residency. I returned phone calls between running traumas in the evenings during months on trauma surgery, in Ana’s case between law school classes.

Surprisingly, despite our busy law school and emergency medicine residency schedules, Quest not only survived, it flourished as former Quest graduates began pitching in as staff. Quest’s acceptance rates to Stanford and Ivy League colleges collectively passed 90%. Simultaneously, Quest began to take “higher risk” applicants, still obtaining similar results. We have 48 Quest graduates currently enrolled at Stanford and a growing presence at Harvard. Over half of Quest graduates have eventually worked for Quest, ensuring continuity.

Just before completing my emergency medicine residency, I met Dari Shalon who was visiting his father, Yehuda, in the Stanford hospital. Dari, Ana and I decided to create a new Quest chapter at Harvard. This was made possible by hiring two 1995 Quest graduates, Dana Gavrieli and Brian Anderson, who served as directors of Harvard’s Quest chapter.

Our biggest question was whether Quest’s culture of altruism and warm-hearted inclusion could be transplanted to Harvard. It was, thanks in large part to Stanford Quest graduates who worked at Harvard. (Half of the Harvard chapter’s staff was former Quest graduates. The other half interned for a week at the Stanford chapter in advance of the Harvard opening.) Still, it wasn’t easy. And the transplantation of the Quest culture became the rate-limiting step of Quest’s growth. In 2002, we opted to return to focusing our efforts at Stanford and brainstorming a more effective expansion plan to bring Quest to scale. Sarah Chandler, who worked for Quest for eight years, took over direction of the summer program in 2002 as Executive Director while Ana and I continued our search for a model which would allow Quest to survive over the long-term.

The Creation of a Strong Culture

Quest operates under the assumption that people have the capacity be good, that the nature of individual and group action should be noble. Often society gravitates away from this to the lowest common denominator. Quest supports and encourages the noble nature in our students. This commitment extends beyond participation in the summer program through college and beyond. Summer participation in Quest marks the beginning of a long relationship commitment to our students.

When good people are thrown together in a house for five weeks, they don’t automatically, or easily, give up the assumptions that others will cheat at some level. A combination of warm, but strict, environment allowed students to feel safe to let down their guard, to open up, and to explore together as a team.

When high school students feel safe, they are also apt to celebrate. Standard high school enrichment program runs the risk of degrading to one big party. One of the Quest secrets is to combine strict discipline with unconditional warmth. In an effort to liberate participant’s attention and energy, distractions are removed: no television, radio, internet chatting, emailing, phone calls, flirting or romantic involvement. In its place, we keep the students active with an engaging curriculum ranging from lectures and labs to Aikido and public speaking.

The glue that binds this together is reflection and internal growth. We are not as concerned with what facts the students retain as that they learn how to think maturely and question for themselves. Students are also encouraged to integrate their growth at Quest in the context of their lives--past, present and future. Quest participants are provided with an hour of reflection daily in which they can pray, introspect, write or reflect in any way that enriches their souls. It is not Quest’s role to tell students how to engage the depths of their character, but rather to build a curriculum and schedule that allows them to do so.

Lectures and projects are more focused on process than outcomes as students are taught how to create and answer questions for themselves. When a student’s inner curiosity is ignited in the silence of this reflection, the whole Quest program takes on a different mood.

All of this inner growth happens in the backdrop of Quest assisting participants with college admission, SAT performance, financial aid and skills workshops. The days are full, the mornings early, the nights late. Five weeks is not much time.

Five weeks is not long enough to end a journey, but it is long enough to begin one. Quest graduation is more of an introduction to a new future and new opportunities. And a journey our graduates can take with the benefit of each other.

Ana and I did not foresee the strength of the culture we would create at Stanford once so many of our graduates arrived. The majority of our graduates remain loosely bonded in a web that spreads across the Stanford campus and is now a substantial presence at Harvard where Quest operated in 2000 and 2001. It also clearly exists independent of us. Some sort of ‘Quest identity’ has emerged. Many Quest graduates become roommates, take classes together, work together on outreach projects. Two are even engaged to be married. For many graduates, Quest has evolved into something of an extended family at Stanford. The spirit spreads beyond just the Quest alumni, but to Quest staff and others who have joined the Quest culture.

Over time, this year-time culture is becoming the heart of Quest at Stanford. The summer residence program, rather than be the locus of Quest, is now merely the introduction to it. The generation of the Quest culture itself is our product. We are trying to think of how to maximize the impact of the Quest culture both on the communities from which our students are drawn, as well as the colleges in which they eventually attend.

Most of our Quest students have enrolled at either Stanford or Harvard. We have no formal relationship or link with the admissions offices of either college, but, starting in 1996, we have been lucky enough to get 72% of the graduates from the Stanford program into Stanford or Harvard since 1996.

Building an Organization

Beginning year two, the program would not have survived during my emergency medicine residency or Ana’s law school if the Quest alumni had not stepped up to ensure its survival. From these early student workers emerged several standouts such as Isabel Cesanto, Erin Palm, and Annie Ma, all whom took off a year from school to work for Quest full-time. Sarah Chandler stands out among all others having worked for Quest from 1998-2005, and for three years as Executive Director of the Quest Scholars Summer Program, renamed QuestLeadership until entering business school at Stanford fall 2005.

At the board level, Quest incorporated as its own non-profit 501(c)3 organization in 2000. Rick Berthold and Terry Gannon (who also served on Quest’s steering committee 2003-2005) served diligently as Chairs of the Quest Board, a position now held by Ana McCullough beginning August 2006. Other core board members include Frank Brucato and Dick Jacobsen. Meanwhile, a solid donor base infused Quest with vibrancy. Core individual donors include David Mills (also on the Quest board), Ed Fein, George Roberts, Helen Bing, Irv Grousbeck and venture capitalists Bruce Dunlevie and Bob Kagle. Important foundation partners (e.g. Mellon, Goldman Sachs, Packard, and Hewlett Foundations) allowed Quest to grow and scale at key junctures.

The Origins of QuestBridge

The Quest Scholars Program has built its success in part on its ability to mentor and add value to the growth of motivated Quest Scholars from the junior year of high school to their first job or professional or graduate school, not simply college placement. Since 2000, we have sought to scale Quest from helping 20-40 students a year to hundreds, perhaps even thousands.

With QuestBridge, we believe we have found the model to do this. As the price of computers has dropped since 2003, more low-income students have gained access to the Internet. With this late Internet revolution, new potential arose for Quest to create a new form of online community. With this, we can use our 12 years of expertise to assist students in new ways, both by ourselves, and by bringing together others who want to help talented low-income students (prep-schools, colleges, universities, mentors of all kinds, companies, enrichment programs, scholarships and professional and graduate schools). The potential exists to form a national clearinghouse or meeting place for talented low-income students and opportunity.

Our hope is to help bring talented low-income students into important decision-making roles in society. This is a lofty goal, and one that implies we wish to link students to opportunity from high school through college into their first job. And similar to Quest’s summer residency program, our hope is to involve students in vibrant ways in helping each other as well. We are most interested in helping those who help themselves, and even more interested in mentoring talented low-income students who help themselves with energy left over to help others.

That is one root of the vision. I happened across it late in the application season of 2003. The lowest hanging fruit in this vision was to begin helping colleges recruit talented low-income students as Quest had between 1,000-2,000 applicants a year.

Despite the vibrancy of the potential, having thought of the full model only by November, I questioned whether we ought to try to go forward. Like Quest, QuestBridge also owes its debt to Quest alumni who got it off the ground. Two students, Teresa Sesera and Chitua Alozie, took off terms from school to work full-time founding QuestBridge. Teresa stayed for two years, becoming both a backbone of the effort and the youngest full-time hire in Quest’s history. QuestBridge joined forces with the Mellon Foundation, Goldman Sachs and Hewlett Foundations as well as Stanford GSB’s Center For Social Innovation and Ashoka in the vision. All in all, we began building good momentum.

Amherst, Rice, Grinnell, Wheaton and Trinity joined in our first QuestBridge College Match, which despite some early hitches, worked well enough to prove the concept.

Two years later, we have signed on 11 more colleges to QuestBridge, including Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Swarthmore, Oberlin, Williams, Wellesley, Scripps, Bowdoin, Pomona and others, with many more colleges expressing interest in just these past months. While fees we charge colleges do not cover all our costs, they subsidize the energy we put recruiting deep into the fabric of America looking for the best talented low-income students.

In August 2005, Tim Brady joined our team as CEO. I moved to the position of president, Ana to the Chair of the board. Under Tim’s direction, QuestBridge has doubled our staff and greatly expanded our reach through new programs such as the QuestBridge College Prep Scholarship for High School Juniors.

We have come a long way since I shuttled eight local students interest in medicine to Stanford in 1987. This season, QuestBridge will place hundreds of students into elite colleges, and we hope to place thousands eventually. Meanwhile, eventually Quest aims to provide a train of opportunity from high school, through to graduate school or a first job. In exchange for this help, we hope students will help each other, and later their communities and the larger world as a whole. America has a wealth of talent locked up in our bright low-income students, talent we hope to serve as a catalyst to unleash.


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Home National College Match College Prep Scholarship Student Resource Center Refer A Student About Us Mission & Vision History Board of Directors Board of Advisors Quest Staff Donors How to Donate Job Opportunities QB In The Press Contact Us	History of the Quest Scholars Program By Michael McCullough, Co-Founder The Quest Scholars Program grew from a few simple ideas, and a lot of help. With roots extending to 1987, Quest has flourished thanks to the nurturing, commitment, and creative effort of hundreds of dedicated people. The Quest Scholars Program officially started in 1994 as a five-week summer enrichment program on Stanford University’s campus for high school juniors. In 2004, the program launched QuestBridge in an effort to expand the number of high schools students it reached. Early Beginnings Quest’s early origins actually also belong to Marc Lawrence, a fellow Stanford undergraduate, who had the idea of starting a local commuter-based outreach effort in 1987. I joined him early in the planning stages. Eight students interested in medicine from East Palo Alto (at the time, one of the poorest communities in the country) journeyed daily to Stanford where they received college lecture and clinical experiences. We called it the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program (SMYSP). The Stanford academic community responded generously with world-class instruction and incredible hands-on experiences, like watching open-heart surgeries or witnessing births. But the lectures were over the heads of some of our first students. Moreover, at days’ end as we brought them home to East Palo Alto in the afternoon, Marc and I often journeyed past drug dealers and gang activity. We realized that the student’s having to bridge two worlds on a daily undermined our impact. Clearly, our results had been mixed. SMYSP required stronger students than simple local recruiting could produce, and we needed to create an educational environment without distraction. The transformation to a residence-based program solved both of these problems. We could draw from a wider and stronger pool of bright, hungry, low-income students beyond commuting distance. At the same time, we could immerse the participants in the Stanford environment and give them a more fertile soil from which to grow. The efforts exponentially increased as we took on twenty students for the first residence program in 1988; I was 21 at the time. The Beginnings of a Residence Base Co-Founder Marc left for medical school before the residence-based program began, but with the help of Marilyn Winkleby, SMYSP’s academic advisor, and six undergraduates, we embarked on the larger residence-based program, which I directed for the next two years until graduating from Stanford. On a shoestring budget, the staff all volunteered their time (we took turns preparing meals). But it worked, and it worked well. SMYSP grew quickly. I spent the next year institutionalizing SMYSP program, which operates successfully to this day under the guidance of Marilyn Winkleby who began as our academic advisor, but has since gone on to become the heart and soul of SMYSP. Conceptualizing, Then Launching Quest Between graduation and starting medical school, I spent a year at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. Ana Mallari, then-girlfriend now wife, joined me at Oxford. Our time at there allowed us to reflect on our experience at SMYSP and conceptualized a new program that took full advantage of the potential that a residence base provided. That new program was Quest. We believed that Quest could teach leadership and outreach as well as science. Moreover, if we could get more Quest graduates into Stanford, then we could improve continuity, and even create a culture of support at Stanford. We could also teach public service. Most importantly, we could try to reflect the noble potential in each student, and create a mutually reinforcing culture where ideas and growth could flourish. Ana returned from Oxford to complete her degree at Stanford, and I began medical school at the University of California in San Francisco. Ana and I spent two years building our model, taking the best of SMYSP and adding our new ideas. Midway through medical school, in 1994, we launched Quest – then called the Stanford Youth Environmental Science Program (SYESP). Quest’s environmental theme had an advantage over the SMYSP model of recruiting students with wide ranging interests other than medicine. Switching from a medical to an environmental theme allowed Quest to accept motivated low-income students with nearly any professional interest: medicine, law, engineering, policy, science, and nearly every other academic area somehow impact the environment. Approaching one subject from so many different areas also introduces Quest students to the complexity of intellectual thought and public issues. Shortly after beginning Quest, we realized that the communities from which our students were drawn sorely lacked leadership in environmental and other important issues. We wanted to develop public service entrepreneurs who were concerned about local and national issues affecting their communities. By the third year, our recruiting pool was large enough to allow us to screen applicants for their dedication to public service. By the year 2000 we had 2,800 applicants applying for 44 spots at Harvard and Stanford. The enthusiasm, sincerity, intellect, and raw hunger of our students began attracting many of the best professors at Stanford to our program from the former Stanford President Don Kennedy to former Secretary of State George Shultz. Several Nobel Laureates, eight Rhodes Scholars, two MacArthur fellows and thirty other Stanford faculty signed on. Working for Quest also became one of the most popular student jobs at Stanford. Five Quest staff went on to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars. The Quest students responded enthusiastically to this collection of energy. Most of our alumni worked for Quest at some point during college career, including several that decided to take a semester or two off to help grow Quest. The strength of the Quest model carried us through some difficult times as Ana began law school at Stanford, and I began my residency in emergency medicine at Stanford. On multiple occasions, Ana and I were both encouraged to focus exclusively on our careers in law school and my emergency medicine residency rather than running the Quest program. While Ana and I both continued full-time work, we also kept growing Quest. During this time Quest entered ‘email mode’ as Ana and I managed Quest with between 1:00 and 3:00 AM, after emergency medicine shifts in the pockets of time in my emergency medicine residency. I returned phone calls between running traumas in the evenings during months on trauma surgery, in Ana’s case between law school classes. Surprisingly, despite our busy law school and emergency medicine residency schedules, Quest not only survived, it flourished as former Quest graduates began pitching in as staff. Quest’s acceptance rates to Stanford and Ivy League colleges collectively passed 90%. Simultaneously, Quest began to take “higher risk” applicants, still obtaining similar results. We have 48 Quest graduates currently enrolled at Stanford and a growing presence at Harvard. Over half of Quest graduates have eventually worked for Quest, ensuring continuity. Just before completing my emergency medicine residency, I met Dari Shalon who was visiting his father, Yehuda, in the Stanford hospital. Dari, Ana and I decided to create a new Quest chapter at Harvard. This was made possible by hiring two 1995 Quest graduates, Dana Gavrieli and Brian Anderson, who served as directors of Harvard’s Quest chapter. Our biggest question was whether Quest’s culture of altruism and warm-hearted inclusion could be transplanted to Harvard. It was, thanks in large part to Stanford Quest graduates who worked at Harvard. (Half of the Harvard chapter’s staff was former Quest graduates. The other half interned for a week at the Stanford chapter in advance of the Harvard opening.) Still, it wasn’t easy. And the transplantation of the Quest culture became the rate-limiting step of Quest’s growth. In 2002, we opted to return to focusing our efforts at Stanford and brainstorming a more effective expansion plan to bring Quest to scale. Sarah Chandler, who worked for Quest for eight years, took over direction of the summer program in 2002 as Executive Director while Ana and I continued our search for a model which would allow Quest to survive over the long-term. The Creation of a Strong Culture Quest operates under the assumption that people have the capacity be good, that the nature of individual and group action should be noble. Often society gravitates away from this to the lowest common denominator. Quest supports and encourages the noble nature in our students. This commitment extends beyond participation in the summer program through college and beyond. Summer participation in Quest marks the beginning of a long relationship commitment to our students. When good people are thrown together in a house for five weeks, they don’t automatically, or easily, give up the assumptions that others will cheat at some level. A combination of warm, but strict, environment allowed students to feel safe to let down their guard, to open up, and to explore together as a team. When high school students feel safe, they are also apt to celebrate. Standard high school enrichment program runs the risk of degrading to one big party. One of the Quest secrets is to combine strict discipline with unconditional warmth. In an effort to liberate participant’s attention and energy, distractions are removed: no television, radio, internet chatting, emailing, phone calls, flirting or romantic involvement. In its place, we keep the students active with an engaging curriculum ranging from lectures and labs to Aikido and public speaking. The glue that binds this together is reflection and internal growth. We are not as concerned with what facts the students retain as that they learn how to think maturely and question for themselves. Students are also encouraged to integrate their growth at Quest in the context of their lives--past, present and future. Quest participants are provided with an hour of reflection daily in which they can pray, introspect, write or reflect in any way that enriches their souls. It is not Quest’s role to tell students how to engage the depths of their character, but rather to build a curriculum and schedule that allows them to do so. Lectures and projects are more focused on process than outcomes as students are taught how to create and answer questions for themselves. When a student’s inner curiosity is ignited in the silence of this reflection, the whole Quest program takes on a different mood. All of this inner growth happens in the backdrop of Quest assisting participants with college admission, SAT performance, financial aid and skills workshops. The days are full, the mornings early, the nights late. Five weeks is not much time. Five weeks is not long enough to end a journey, but it is long enough to begin one. Quest graduation is more of an introduction to a new future and new opportunities. And a journey our graduates can take with the benefit of each other. Ana and I did not foresee the strength of the culture we would create at Stanford once so many of our graduates arrived. The majority of our graduates remain loosely bonded in a web that spreads across the Stanford campus and is now a substantial presence at Harvard where Quest operated in 2000 and 2001. It also clearly exists independent of us. Some sort of ‘Quest identity’ has emerged. Many Quest graduates become roommates, take classes together, work together on outreach projects. Two are even engaged to be married. For many graduates, Quest has evolved into something of an extended family at Stanford. The spirit spreads beyond just the Quest alumni, but to Quest staff and others who have joined the Quest culture. Over time, this year-time culture is becoming the heart of Quest at Stanford. The summer residence program, rather than be the locus of Quest, is now merely the introduction to it. The generation of the Quest culture itself is our product. We are trying to think of how to maximize the impact of the Quest culture both on the communities from which our students are drawn, as well as the colleges in which they eventually attend. Most of our Quest students have enrolled at either Stanford or Harvard. We have no formal relationship or link with the admissions offices of either college, but, starting in 1996, we have been lucky enough to get 72% of the graduates from the Stanford program into Stanford or Harvard since 1996. Building an Organization Beginning year two, the program would not have survived during my emergency medicine residency or Ana’s law school if the Quest alumni had not stepped up to ensure its survival. From these early student workers emerged several standouts such as Isabel Cesanto, Erin Palm, and Annie Ma, all whom took off a year from school to work for Quest full-time. Sarah Chandler stands out among all others having worked for Quest from 1998-2005, and for three years as Executive Director of the Quest Scholars Summer Program, renamed QuestLeadership until entering business school at Stanford fall 2005. At the board level, Quest incorporated as its own non-profit 501(c)3 organization in 2000. Rick Berthold and Terry Gannon (who also served on Quest’s steering committee 2003-2005) served diligently as Chairs of the Quest Board, a position now held by Ana McCullough beginning August 2006. Other core board members include Frank Brucato and Dick Jacobsen. Meanwhile, a solid donor base infused Quest with vibrancy. Core individual donors include David Mills (also on the Quest board), Ed Fein, George Roberts, Helen Bing, Irv Grousbeck and venture capitalists Bruce Dunlevie and Bob Kagle. Important foundation partners (e.g. Mellon, Goldman Sachs, Packard, and Hewlett Foundations) allowed Quest to grow and scale at key junctures. The Origins of QuestBridge The Quest Scholars Program has built its success in part on its ability to mentor and add value to the growth of motivated Quest Scholars from the junior year of high school to their first job or professional or graduate school, not simply college placement. Since 2000, we have sought to scale Quest from helping 20-40 students a year to hundreds, perhaps even thousands. With QuestBridge, we believe we have found the model to do this. As the price of computers has dropped since 2003, more low-income students have gained access to the Internet. With this late Internet revolution, new potential arose for Quest to create a new form of online community. With this, we can use our 12 years of expertise to assist students in new ways, both by ourselves, and by bringing together others who want to help talented low-income students (prep-schools, colleges, universities, mentors of all kinds, companies, enrichment programs, scholarships and professional and graduate schools). The potential exists to form a national clearinghouse or meeting place for talented low-income students and opportunity. Our hope is to help bring talented low-income students into important decision-making roles in society. This is a lofty goal, and one that implies we wish to link students to opportunity from high school through college into their first job. And similar to Quest’s summer residency program, our hope is to involve students in vibrant ways in helping each other as well. We are most interested in helping those who help themselves, and even more interested in mentoring talented low-income students who help themselves with energy left over to help others. That is one root of the vision. I happened across it late in the application season of 2003. The lowest hanging fruit in this vision was to begin helping colleges recruit talented low-income students as Quest had between 1,000-2,000 applicants a year. Despite the vibrancy of the potential, having thought of the full model only by November, I questioned whether we ought to try to go forward. Like Quest, QuestBridge also owes its debt to Quest alumni who got it off the ground. Two students, Teresa Sesera and Chitua Alozie, took off terms from school to work full-time founding QuestBridge. Teresa stayed for two years, becoming both a backbone of the effort and the youngest full-time hire in Quest’s history. QuestBridge joined forces with the Mellon Foundation, Goldman Sachs and Hewlett Foundations as well as Stanford GSB’s Center For Social Innovation and Ashoka in the vision. All in all, we began building good momentum. Amherst, Rice, Grinnell, Wheaton and Trinity joined in our first QuestBridge College Match, which despite some early hitches, worked well enough to prove the concept. Two years later, we have signed on 11 more colleges to QuestBridge, including Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Swarthmore, Oberlin, Williams, Wellesley, Scripps, Bowdoin, Pomona and others, with many more colleges expressing interest in just these past months. While fees we charge colleges do not cover all our costs, they subsidize the energy we put recruiting deep into the fabric of America looking for the best talented low-income students. In August 2005, Tim Brady joined our team as CEO. I moved to the position of president, Ana to the Chair of the board. Under Tim’s direction, QuestBridge has doubled our staff and greatly expanded our reach through new programs such as the QuestBridge College Prep Scholarship for High School Juniors. We have come a long way since I shuttled eight local students interest in medicine to Stanford in 1987. This season, QuestBridge will place hundreds of students into elite colleges, and we hope to place thousands eventually. Meanwhile, eventually Quest aims to provide a train of opportunity from high school, through to graduate school or a first job. In exchange for this help, we hope students will help each other, and later their communities and the larger world as a whole. America has a wealth of talent locked up in our bright low-income students, talent we hope to serve as a catalyst to unleash.
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