Tom Vander Ark

Corey Mohn and Sophia Porter on Career Connected Pathways

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Key Points

  • The CAPS network’s model of integrating industry connections and real-world experiences helps students develop transferable skills and career readiness.

  • Introducing AI in education is crucial for preparing students for a future where AI plays a significant role in the workforce.

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, we explore the transformative power of professions-based learning through the lens of the CAPS network. Join Tom Vander Ark as he gets into how CAPS integrates real-world learning experiences with career-connected pathways, creating dynamic opportunities for students across the nation. With over 100 sites and participation from 200 school districts, the CAPS model emphasizes self-discovery and entrepreneurial mindsets, equipping learners with durable, transferable skills. Featuring insights from Corey Mohn, CAPS Executive Director, and Sophia Porter, a distinguished CAPS alumna, we discuss the essential role of AI in education and envision the future of professions-based learning. Discover why CAPS is redefining the traditional education model and empowering students to thrive in a rapidly changing world!

Outline

Introduction to CAPS

Tom Vander Ark: The Blue Valley Center for Advanced Professional Studies, or CAPS, opened in 2010 in Overland Park, Kansas. That’s southwest Kansas City. It’s a terrific next-gen career center, and it features professions-based learning experiences for juniors and seniors. The early success of CAPS quickly spread around Kansas City. There are now about 90 high schools that participate in a real-world learning initiative. That was really inspired by the entrepreneurial experiences, client projects, and internships at CAPS, and it’s also inspired a national network.

The CAPS network is now over 100 sites. About 200 school districts participate in hosting CAPS experiences. I’m Tom Vander Ark, and you’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. Today, we’re talking about professions-based learning more broadly, career-connected learning as they say in Kansas City, real-world learning. We’re joined by the CAPS Executive Director, Corey Mohn. Hey, Corey.

Corey Mohn: Well, as you know, the CAPS socks, it’s kind of taken on its own culture and lore.

Tom Vander Ark: I got a pair on and I have mine here. You’re the only school network that has socks as swag, and I appreciate that. I wear ’em on a bike ride frequently.

Corey Mohn: It’s a lovely tradition that we have where we share part of our culture and some of the excitement and energy of our group and our familial feeling within our network educators. It’s always a lot of fun.

Tom Vander Ark: Corey is the chief cheerleader, he likes to say, for the CAPS network. He gets out and visits a lot of the members. A few weeks ago, he was here in Seattle visiting the Highline School District where several schools are members of the CAPS organization. Corey invited distinguished alumni of the CAPS network, Sophia Porter. She was an early graduate of this brand new program. The program, as you’ll learn, served her extraordinarily well in launching her career. She’s now a member of the technical staff at Anthropic. Sophia, what a treat to meet you in person, and thanks for joining us again today.

Sophia Porter: Tom, it’s a joy to be here. I really try to do everything I can to support CAPS because it made such a huge impact for me, and I love to see it benefiting other students.

Tom Vander Ark: Corey, in her new book, our friend Kathleen deLaski said that experience is the new silver bullet in career advancement. It just struck me that what your members do is create these powerful professions-based learning experiences. So, what is Kathleen right? Is experience the new silver bullet?

Corey Mohn: Well, it’s interesting. I love that idea, but I also, I’m kind of chuckling to myself because if we’re talking about the next silver bullet, it means the previous silver bullets didn’t do what they’re supposed to do. So, how trustworthy is it to think that there’s a silver bullet? I’m not so sure.

Tom Vander Ark: Experience is a big deal, right? And yes, that’s what your members share is this goal of creating really career-connected experiences for young people.

Corey Mohn: Yeah. I was just about to say, I do believe whether or not we think it’s a silver bullet, I believe strongly that experience is the avenue to drive engagement to help young students and really any human being as we’re learning in a world that’s rapidly changing what it is that I can do with my skills, with my interest. Knowing what challenges are out in the world, what can I do to make the world better? I mean, I don’t know what a better way would be than authentic experiences and that. So, I live into that. I try to, and people like Sophia, you know, that come up and do amazing things just feed me even more fuel to go out and get after it and try to get more students these experiences.

Sophia’s CAPS Experience

Tom Vander Ark: Sophia, you made the choice to leave your home high school and spend part of your junior and senior year at this new CAPS place. Why did you do that? What kind of experiences did you have, and what did it mean for your early career moves?

Sophia Porter: Well, I’m not sure I realized how fortunate I was at the time to be in the first school district ever to have a program like CAPS. But I was so, so lucky. I got to leave school every morning and head to this beautiful building where inside we had teachers who were eager for me to get my hands dirty with whatever was interesting to me. That was also true of my home high school, but particularly so at CAPS. I was dressed up a little bit more. I was ready for a professional environment. I was treated like a professional and given a professional level of freedoms to pursue what was interesting to me, to walk around the hallways on my own time, to make purchases at the coffee shop on my own time. The whole environment was conducive to me feeling like I was empowered. Not just to be a student, but to be a leader from the moment that I walked through those doors, even as a high school student. And so really what I experienced was a collapse of the barrier between school and work. CAPS was a more reflective environment of the real world. And as a consequence, I actually learned how to approach my work as a learning opportunity. So, even as a professional now, I expect to encounter challenges in my work. I expect to face the same types of novel problems that I would in a class that I haven’t taken before. And I also learned at CAPS about professional norms. I learned how to network. I built a Rolodex of mentors, some of whom still advise me today. And I also learned how to write emails, how to communicate, how to generally meet the expectations of a workplace, which in some ways are higher than the expectations of students because it’s easy to lose a job if you don’t meet those expectations. And so I arrived at college way more prepared than some of my other fellow students because I had had the opportunity to be at CAPS.

The pinnacle of my CAPS experience was leading a team of seven students to develop an application for our local hospital, Children’s Mercy Hospital, to help patients navigate around the hospital, and I certainly wouldn’t have had the capacity to lead a group like that in, in something as complex as software development if not for the diverse types of experiences that I got in CAPS, the high expectations that I was held to and all of the norms that I learned before I took on that project.

Tom Vander Ark: Sophia, 15 years ago, I think it was an interesting choice that you made because you were clearly a college-bound student. But you chose to go to this place that’s like a career center. How did your, were your parents okay with that choice? And it is one of the remarkable things about CAPS, that it was one of the first places to sort of break the old college-bound versus career and technical education. It said, we’re gonna invite kids into work-based learning, professions-based learning. And yes, college is a viable next step, but was that a tough choice? Did your parents support that?

Sophia Porter: My parents were immediately supportive, although I was fortunate to have parents who were generally supportive of anything that interested me. But I viewed CAPS as being perfectly harmonious with my aspirations to go to college. I don’t think there was anything different about them. And even if I had spent more of my time at CAPS doing technical or manual work that’s not traditionally studied in universities, I still think I would’ve been better prepared. You know, my first job was working in rocket engine test operations, and I worked with a ton of technical staff, and they were so much more knowledgeable than I was. Many of them had 20 or 30 years on the job. And so if I hadn’t had the experience of working in a professional environment, I might have come in with some arrogance because of my college education or thinking that, you know, I knew more about the environment than they did. But on the contrary, I was able to walk in and sincerely appreciate all of the experience that they had built up because I had the context of knowing that we learn lessons in the real world that we can always learn in the classroom.

Sophia’s Professional Journey

Tom Vander Ark: You weren’t in the Rocket Science pathway at CAPS. So, what did, what kind of experiences did you have there? Was it in digital arts? Remind me of what kind of things you did there.

Sophia Porter: It might be faster to explain what I didn’t do while I was at CAPS. That’s actually always been my mo. I think of myself as a generalist, and as specialized as rocket engines sound. I think that succeeding in them actually requires adherence to the same types of principles that bring us success in the CAPS environment. That’s showing up on time, that’s being trustworthy and reliable. That’s, you know, being ambitious and curious, and those are qualities that CAPS seeks to draw out of students. So no, it was, it was actually quite easy for me to land in that environment because of the hands-on experiences that I had at CAPS. And to be honest with you, a lot of what I learned in the classroom at college didn’t apply one-to-one. I learned more critical thinking skills. I learned other types of skills, but I certainly wasn’t drawing on my undergraduate degree probably as much as I was drawing on my CAPS education.

Corey Mohn: I might jump in there just because one thing I remember about Sophia’s senior year is I found her more often in classrooms that she wasn’t a student in than in the ones that she was. And you know, she, she in some ways pushed the envelope of our willingness to allow for the flexibility and freedom, but to her credit, she took full advantage of it.

Sophia Porter: You know, there’s a unique philosophy among CAPS teachers. Also, the fact that they were willing to let me do that in the first place, the fact that they recognized the value in not saying no to a student request that was unconventional, just because they could say no. I felt so privileged that I was inspired to meet higher standards because I, I was allowed the freedoms to choose. So I think CAPS helped me to aspire to follow my passions and learn things that I was interested in. And because we were in an academic environment, the learning was right at my fingertips.

Tom Vander Ark: I just want to underscore for both of you that I find this dialogue exciting and wonderful and there’s a little bit of tension in the way I’ve historically been thinking about career pathways that we’ve been advocating for, pathways that prepare young people for and link them to opportunity. And so that’s traditionally been a sequential set of experiences that lead to an identified job, and what you’re describing is something quite different, more interest-based, more exploratory that resulted in the development of a set of really strong transferable skills. Corey, tell us about the design principles that around which your, you know, your diverse members adhere. What’s the core set of principles that makes it a CAPS location?

Corey Mohn: Yeah, for sure. And I appreciate what you just shared, Tom, because there is a lot of healthy tension, I would say, between the breadth and depth piece of building into career-connected learning. And there’s no right or wrong. As I see it, there’s a lot of good things that happen and it’s a matter of optimizing based on your local community or the students you’re working with. That’s how I always view it.

Core Values of CAPS

Corey Mohn: To your question, the design principles, we always talk about the five core values of CAPS. Most people that think about the CAPS model or have had some familiarity with it, they always tend to start with this connection with industry and this authentic connection with industry, and that’s incredibly important. But the thing I would first share is that the reason this program exists when it started in Blue Valley, in the Kansas City area, and as it’s expanded is, is the core value of self-discovery and exploration that we want every student to have the opportunity to truly understand what they’re interested in. What they are good at and where their strengths lie and how they can impact something out in the world that they care to make progress on or to a way to make the world a better place. And so leaning into that purpose part and like really helping to hone that and rule some things out as you go is really, really important. It’s the reason we do the work, the lens by which we do the work is what we call profession-based learning. And so that connection in with industry is one of the other core values of what we do. Having it be more than a token check the box, like we’re gonna have a one guest speaker and call it good, right? This is more about how can I roll up my sleeves and actually do some of the work and have it be meaningful and real work. And then the other pieces that are really part of the design principles, as you, as you phrased it, are building entrepreneurial mindsets with students. Really, really important for us. Something else Sophia hasn’t said directly, but she is a living testament to the entrepreneurial mindset in the sense that she’s not afraid to try things or to be curious or to have something that she works on and then realize I’m not the expert in the room. I need to rely on someone else. Like that is huge for unlocking potential. So building that is important. And then the other things we referenced and there’s been a huge move of late around this terminology of durable skills. Apps, the value name is professional skills, but it’s synonymous with durable skills. If you are able to identify that purpose and that kind of the reason why you exist and what you’re trying to accomplish, and then you can build confidence around those durable skills, we feel like you can run through a brick wall, come out the other end, be just fine, and get there. And the last one is being responsive. CAPS programs are notorious for adjusting very quickly on the fly as the world changes.

Tom Vander Ark: Sophia, you seem really well equipped to make good career choices.

AI in Education and Career Development

Tom Vander Ark: You’ve vaulted into some of the cutting-edge technology jobs and after Blue Origin. You created identified and created a place at Anthropic doing AI safety and I don’t know, say a little bit about those career choices. How did CAPS prepare you to spot these sort of leading-edge companies, leading-edge jobs, and secure a spot for yourself?

Sophia Porter: That’s a great question, Tom. And you know, especially as I work with high school and college students, they’re often worried about their choices. What if I choose the wrong job? What if I choose the wrong school? But I kind of want to turn the paradigm on its head and say that any choice can be a great choice. It’s really what you bring to the table and what you take away from that experience that changes you and equips you to make the next choice to open the next door. So I think right now and in my experience, the traditional notion of linear career pathways is just becoming obsolete. People don’t spend their entire career at a company. I think individuals benefit from that, and I also think companies benefit from that because they have so many more diverse sets of perspectives and expertise in the room. So just to talk through my career pathway a little bit. While I was at CAPS, I started in medicine, I jumped to aerospace engineering, I jumped to manufacturing. I dabbled in software development, and I also spent some time in the design classroom, although I was never officially enrolled there. And then when I was in college, I studied physics and because I had had CAPS experience doing astrophotography, I was able to get an internship doing Hubble Space Telescope Astrophotography. So welcome to the big leagues. From that experience, I was able to negotiate my way into an internship at NASA headquarters. And because I was at NASA headquarters, I met representatives from Blue Origin and SpaceX. And I interned at both of those companies, absolutely leaning on those connections that I made. And then professionally, because I had interned at Blue Origin, I was able to find a really fascinating role in rocket engine development. By the way, I had no rocket engine experience, zero rocket engine experience. When I joined Blue Origin, I had a degree in physics, which is foundational to a lot of what we’re doing, but not always really directly applicable, especially in the world of test. We’re thinking a lot more from like various systems, perspectives and some more applied engineering perspectives. But there were specific principles that worked for me. First of all, I want to be clear, I was not an A student in college. So during these internships, during my career, I was navigating without getting perfect, straight A’s. And I learned that I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. I think Corey was saying this just a moment ago. That always comes with the feeling of imposter syndrome not being the smartest person in the room. And throughout my career I have just learned to push through it to. Bus through that brick wall, so to speak and be comfortable not really understanding what’s going on and needing to rapidly come up to speed. That has been a common theme and when I look for situations where I feel most out of my element, most uncertain about what’s going on, that’s typically when I’ve landed on the cutting edge of something really fascinating. That’s where we, we thrive in uncertainty at these companies, and I love being around people who thrive in uncertainty. So the principles that work for me are those professional skills showing up on time, following through using professional language, knowing how to communicate in professional ways, being a good teammate, building a network of people who I care about as human beings, not just as colleagues and also. Resonating with the mission. I’m always gonna do my best work when I am personally aligned with what I’m doing, when I believe that it’s important for the world and when I’m learning and being challenged. And finally all of that flows into integrating my life with my work. So. I wake up, I maybe do a personal activity. I do a little bit of work. Maybe I make myself some lunch or do the laundry when I’m working from home. You know, work and personal life are integrated not only in the scheduling, but also in my identity and how I choose to make an impact and in what I care about. It’s so much more comfortable for me to. Identify with the work and have that be part of my life and also feel like I’m living while I’m at work and really enjoy what I’m doing. I talk to a lot of students who.

Are very worried about the next decision they’re going to make. If I don’t get this job, I’m a failure. If I don’t go to this university, I’m a failure. If I don’t study at college, how am I fulfilling my potential? And there are just not standard paths anymore. I work with people who don’t have a college education and who are working alongside people who do. It just doesn’t matter. It’s about what else you bring to the table. There are many ways to learn things that don’t involve traditional career pathways. And so I always advise students, no matter. What class you’re in, no matter what job you take. Learn how to break down complex problems, learn how to collaborate across various disciplines, and in the process, learn about those multiple disciplines. Learn how to communicate complicated topics in a way that’s really straightforward. And in order to do that, you have to master the complex topics to begin with. And finally, just stay curious. Be open to trying new things. Be humble take risks and prioritize learning over being in a comfortable spot no matter what you’re doing. That will create trajectory. That’s what makes or breaks a career. So I like to think about a career more as a portfolio, a collection of experiences rather than a ladder. And in that sense, jumping around at CAPS, getting all sorts of professional experiences is how you open the doors.

Tom Vander Ark: Sophia, you’ve stepped into one of the leading AI companies and it’s known particularly for, it’s, it’s design principles and its stance on, on safety. So I really appreciate your. Your career choice there and the values alignment that you sought with a leading company. It makes me wonder about the next age of professions-based learning as we think about, particularly these client projects and internships that young people do, and career-connected learning. Do you think AI should be included in that? Should students be using AI tools like Claude in framing and delivering value through a client project? I’d love both of you to sort of headline the future of professions-based learning and where and how AI fits in.

Sophia Porter: I can’t emphasize enough, Tom, how important I think it is that we include AI in classroom environments. And this is urgent. I think we need to be doing this right now. AI is not going anywhere as a technology. I think we haven’t even fully absorbed globally the impacts of how much AI has developed so far. And it’s currently scaling exponentially, so it’s going to become a much, much more influential over the next couple of years. We haven’t seen any slow down yet, so this is something students are going to be exposed to and it hasn’t even reached its potential level of influence yet. I think that’s something we all need to be aware of is a ground truth. What AI means is information has never been easier to access. That’s an incredible privilege. Your middle school student, if you are a parent or a teacher, can have the functionality of a whole team of college graduates at their disposal, at their fingertips today, and they can do that for free in some cases, for a couple of dollars a month. In other cases I know that there are real concerns about AI. Replacing learning, but I think this is more of an evolution in learning that we need to absorb. Professional skills and critical thinking are still going to be indispensable, but information recall maybe is less important. And so learning can evolve to teach students how to sift through piles of information and figure out what’s true, what’s useful, what’s accurate. I think we need to teach AI usage kind of like we teach typing. It’s a critical function in order for people to succeed in school and in the workforce ultimately, AI is going to make our future much more complex, and I think it would be a disservice to limit students’ access to that reality by blocking them from using AI. Students who don’t get to use AI will be outpaced by students who do, and that doesn’t mean that we need to completely replace their education. It just means we need to adapt their education to the modern reality.

I don’t think there’s a better place to do that adaptation than in professions-based environments.

Tom Vander Ark: Corey, how are you and your affiliate sites thinking about AI and AI entry points?

Corey Mohn: Yeah, there’s, there, I mean, there’s an incredible amount of interest and energy. Curiosity. I mean, in many ways it’s kind of a, a slightly more ramped version of what we’re just hearing out in education in general. Because no one has all the answers of where things even are today, where things are headed, and that comes with both excitement and anxiety. I would say it leans a lot more to the excitement side inside of our network, but there are still considerations around safety and, and how do you tee up. You know, using this in the right ways and getting the most bang for your buck out of this. I just, two thoughts in addition to what Sophia shared that come to mind. One is. AI for the CAPS world seems to work really well as a curiosity engine and partner for students and teachers. So the ability to prompt out and help tease out thinking that’s not originating with the AI, it’s originating with the human, but to be able to kind of begin the first phases of the process of teasing out. What is it exactly that I really want to put my time to? With a project, with a created product, whatever that may be, getting a whole series of ideas and kind of a brainstorming session with AI can really move things and get the process flowing around that entrepreneurial mindset. And so the prompting power of AI and that being a curiosity engine is a big one. There’s obviously opportunities for career mentoring and connecting into industry and learning about industry with information, but I’m also, it would be awesome if the advent and the growth of AI and the integration into K-12 would actually force us all into revolutionizing teacher prep. Because that is where we struggle in the CAPS model is when there are educators who are connected in with a district or with a school that moves the direction of CAPS and they have not been prepared for teaching in the facilitative style of the project manager.

Shorts Content

Anthropic’s Approach to AI Safety

Tom Vander Ark: Sophia, I mentioned it already, but I think we both really appreciate Anthropic’s approach to developing AI tools. We had a. We had an inspiring and worrisome dialogue about some of the AI risk factors that are being developed right alongside the, all the extraordinary possibilities of AI. Maybe you could say a few words about Anthropic’s approach to safety and values that make it such an important company and industry leader right now. And if you can, you could say a few words about their recent outreach to educators.

Sophia Porter: Absolutely. It’s Anthropic’s approach to safety mindset around safety that attracted me to the company in the first place. And so once I sort of woke up to the exponential pace of AI development, I knew that this was the only company where I wanted to be contributing. And so our approach is unique because we are trying to build AI systems that are helpful, harmless, and honest, not just powerful. And we believe that as AI becomes more capable, it’s critical that these systems are aligned with human values, which is quite non-trivial as many of us have seen in publications that talk about bias or talk about, you know, sharing facts that aren’t quite true misinformation or disinformation or even just subtly changing people’s perspectives. In addition to some of the larger scale risks, like enabling people to develop weapons more easily, or even sometimes we talk about risks due to AI autonomy itself. Of course, we also have economic risks. There are so many uncertainties associated with the technology. Anthropic takes these all quite seriously, puts out a significant amount of frontier research on these topics, and in both professional and personal contexts. I use our models because I trust them to be truthful and to refuse any harmful requests that might come from myself or from others who are using the same products. And also to acknowledge uncertainty. I think this is crucially important. Just because I’m using an AI tool does not mean it has all the answers. Some things in this world are not black and white. They’re very gray. And I want an AI system that can live in that gray space and help me as a human being to be more sophisticated and more nuanced in the information that I leverage. I think this is as important for professionals as it is for students who are trying to land on stable ground when it comes to the facts that they’re basing their education on.

So that brings us to Claude for Education. That’s a university plan that Anthropic has put together. And for students, it’s primarily tuned to help them apply the Socratic method to interrogate information. It’s not giving them the answers, it’s teaching them how to use AI tools to find their own answers, and it’s driving critical thinking and student accountability. For the work that they put together, which is precisely the same as what I do in the workforce. I am ultimately responsible for my work products, even if AI helps me to build them. If I copy and paste something that was wrong, nobody is going to accept. When I blame the AI model. It’s really my responsibility. So I think we need to be teaching that to students, and Claude for Education is a tool that makes that possible. That’s currently something offered to college students. I expect in the next couple of years we’ll see that many particularly knowledge workers are uplifted by AI. And that includes the job that I’m doing in AI safety. So I will potentially have a greater output. I might have the output of multiple people of a team because AI will be providing me information and helping me to work more quickly. It can draft documents, it can help me find templates. But at the end of the day, it will be uplifting me because I’m the one who’s accountable for that work. So I hope that I’m more productive, that I make greater leaps in the AI safety work that I’m doing. And ultimately, I hope that these economic changes actually lead to a world of greater abundance where because we are all being more productive. We’re also producing things hopefully in ways that are friendly for the climate, in ways that are sensitive to other conflicts around the world right now. Maybe even more sensitive because AI can help us operate in those gray spaces, and this is something that Anthropic takes very seriously. It’s one of the reasons that I’m quite proud to be representing this company and doing this work.

Final Thoughts and Advice

Tom Vander Ark: You’ve been listening to some great advice from Sophia Porter. She’s a member of the technical team at Anthropic. You can learn more about Claude for Education that she mentioned at anthropic.com/education. Corey, one of the greatest things you’ve ever done for me is introduce me to Sophia. What a treat to have you both on today. Corey, take us out with a tweet-length word. Some words of advice for ed leaders that want to advance professions-based learning at their school or in their district. What should they do next?

Corey Mohn: Make a move. There’s three words. It doesn’t have to be the full vision of where you think you can go or where others are. It’s about making moves and not waiting to make moves, because guess what? There are students just like Sophia in your school, in your classroom, in your community. Any move you make in this direction is empowering them. It’s giving them agency, it’s allowing them to figure out who they are and to ultimately contribute to making the world a better place. So don’t be afraid. Take Sophia’s advice and power through and you’ll be glad you did.

Tom Vander Ark: If you want to learn more about CAPS, you can go to yourcapsnetwork.org. Corey, is that the best place to go?

Corey Mohn: That is the best place to go.

Tom Vander Ark: I also want to compliment you about a year ago you invited a number of students at Blue Valley CAPS to help promote the exciting work of the CAPS network. And they have just lit up the network on, I think, four different social streams. I smile several times a day when I learn about the cool stuff happening at CAPS. So, you can also follow CAPS on Insta, Facebook, and LinkedIn. So you and your team and your learners are doing a great job getting the word out.

Corey Mohn: Thank you, my friend. I appreciate that.

Tom Vander Ark: Corey Mohn from the CAPS network and Sophia Porter from Anthropic. What a treat. We’ve learned a lot about professions-based learning and why it makes such a difference. I think I want to underscore those durable, transferrable skills and the agency to know where and how to act on the world. Thanks for joining us this week, and thanks to our producer, Mason Pashia, and the whole Getting Smart team. Till next week, keep learning, keep leading, and keep innovating through profession-based learning. See you next week.

Guest Bio

Corey Mohn

Corey is the President and Executive Director of CAPS Network, empowering high school students to fast-forward into their future through real-world business projects and the development of professional skills. Prior to CAPS, Corey served as Director of Statewide Programs for the Kansas Center for Entrepreneurship. In July 2015, CAPS launched CAPS Network, a consortium of school programs committed to this model of profession-based education. CAPS Network has grown to include 121 affiliate programs, including over 180 school districts across 25 states and four countries.

Sophia Porter

After attending CAPS, Sophia has interned at SpaceX, where she performed certification testing for Dragon 2 hardware, and in the International Space Station Division at NASA Headquarters, working on the 2017 Transition Report to Congress. During her first two years of college, Sophia worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute to develop a naive Bayesian classifier, called PACMan, to sort proposals for Hubble time. The PACMan project is published in the Astrophysical Journal. Sophia also volunteers with Women in Aerospace and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. She is responsible for co-founding the Ask A Brookie mentorship program

Tom Vander Ark

Tom Vander Ark is the CEO of Getting Smart. He has written or co-authored more than 50 books and papers including Getting Smart, Smart Cities, Smart Parents, Better Together, The Power of Place and Difference Making. He served as a public school superintendent and the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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