Problem Solving and Education Admission Essay

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Whomsoever it May Concern:

I feel privileged to write this letter of recommendation for Amy Ma, for whom I have the highest personal and professional regard. Amy is one of the founder members of the educational, nonprofit organization Teach for Japan (TFJ) that I initiated., and I have no hesitation to say that her contribution towards the success of TFJ has been nothing short of phenomenal.

I first met Amy in October 2008, when I was exploring the feasibility of replicating the Teach for America model in Japan at XXX Graduate School of Education. She was then, a recruiter at Aiueo, and I still remember our first meeting where she impressed me with her passion on people development, in particular, on leadership education. I was also convinced that her expertise as an HR professional would be useful in order to achieve my goal as an GSE alumnus, to transform the Japanese education system. Soon after I returned to Japan in 2009, I asked Amy to work with me to establish a program modeled on Teach for America, in Japan.

Without Amy's help, TFJ would not be the success it is now. While still working at Aiueo, Amy made many valuable contributions to the organization during the start-up phase deploying two key strengths she possesses: management and problem solving. Amy is a natural leader who is confident and passionate with the ability to motivate others. She has the capability of not only breaking down the overall strategies into individual tasks for team members, but also motivates them to aggressively tackle them. She used these talents very effectively in recruiting and motivating over 100 volunteer staff and student interns for our organization. The reason student interns showed great performance despite little or no compensation was that Amy assured that the volunteers were provided great learning opportunities and important practical exposure by delegating important and responsibility-laden tasks to them with full confidence. Without their dedicated work, which was engendered by Amy's leadership and vision, TFJ could not be successful.

Amy's dedication to, and passion for community leadership and personality development is evident from the fact that after two years of the preparation phase, Amy decided to leave Aiueo to focus on TFJ despite the significant decrease in her monthly emoluments.

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Amy's problem solving skill was particularly important in the first six months after becoming an official partner with Teach for All (TFA) network, when we faced seemingly insurmountable problems, such as lack of access to funding, reaching out to school boards, and recruiting talented college graduates to be teachers in our program. Whenever a meeting place became silent because of any such serious issue, the person who suggested effective solutions was almost invariably, Amy.

She is very good at understanding the interests of all stakeholders and developing win-win schemes that satisfy all interests. For example, right after our official launch in 2012 when we started contacting education authorities and local governments, we faced stiff bureaucratic resistance that impeded our progress, causing frustration. The irony was that authorities and the officers (who were used to the conservative and closed Japanese education system) were hesitant to introduce a model from the U.S., regardless of its popularity, utility, and success. However, Amy read the situation perfectly and patiently continued negotiations and tried to convince them by elaborating her experience as a recruiter at Aiueo, especially on why top tier companies wanted to hire TFA alumni. At the same time, she introduced a unique recruiting strategy, which was to reach out to young professionals because she identified that there were many who had obtained teaching credentials but were not pursuing teaching as a profession. As a result, during her time with TFJ, we were able to place XX teachers to XX schools in XX districts in our first year, and the second year class got expanded with XX teachers in XX districts.

Amy's strong ability to multitask is still essential especially when we have large external events where key stakeholders are involved. Last year, when Wendy Kopp, a founder and CEO of Teach for All was on a visit to Japan, we organized a few events; recruiting events for over 300 guests, meetings with Board of Education….....

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