👋🏽 Shanaz Chowdhery

🗣 About Me

I am an operations executive with a deep passion for education. Throughout my career, I have pursued two main missions: democratizing access to high-quality education and creating systems that elevate the entire company. I firmly believe that education is the strongest vehicle of social and economic mobility, having experienced its transformative power firsthand: I was the first in my entire family to attend college, earning a B.A. in Sociology with Honors from Yale University. After graduation, I began my career as as a Teach For America corps member and taught 5th and 7th-grade math in Ward 8 of Washington, DC.

From 2015 to 2018, I served as the Regional Director for  General Assembly in Washington, DC, empowering thousands of students to  pursue the work they love through practical skills-based education. I  strategized for scale and expansion while overseeing daily operations:  marketing, admissions, classroom experience, instructional quality, and  student outcomes. Prior to becoming the Regional Director, I worked as  an Admissions Producer and Admissions Manager and obsessed over building  empathetic consultative sales teams, optimizing sales funnels, and  finding sales operations efficiencies.

In 2018, I left General Assembly to join Vemo Education  as a General Manager. I worked with non-traditional education  institutions to develop and oversee Income Share Agreement programs that  help increase enrollment, equalize access to education, and align  incentives between schools and students. In 2019, I was promoted to  Chief of Staff where I worked alongside the Vemo team to identify +  execute strategic initiatives and add velocity to the operational rhythm  of the business.

In early 2021, I joined Career Karma as their Head of Community  where I worked to democratize access to tech careers by solving the  inequitable distribution of social capital and increasing access to  information about high quality education pathways. In late 2021, I joined Emeritus as their Chief of Staff for the Revenue organization. Outside of work, you  can find me working to close the digital divide as a Board Member at Byte Back and mentoring others via OOO Hours.

🎓 Education

Yale University: I majored in sociology, with a specific concentration on pathways of American inequality; my studies included a particular focus on the sub-cultures of gangs & policing, social control, and social stratification. Like most sociologists, I firmly believe that education is the most powerful vehicle of economic mobility. My senior thesis explored how participation in the college internship market is mediated by social capital and access to financial resources. I became the first in my entire extended family to earn a Bachelor's degree when I graduated with honors.

University of Oslo: I explored Nordic exceptionalism and gender equality, with a particular focus on Norwegian gender equalization policies regarding childcare.

Johns Hopkins University: I studied effective practices for teaching and learning in general education environments, classroom management techniques for general and special education environments, and transformational leadership in teaching to drive student success. When I withdrew, I was halfway through completion in earning a Master's of Science in Education with a 4.0 GPA.