The Beginning

By Suetmui Yu

Jan 11, 2021

How did Nitya and I come up with the idea of starting a community organization?

The TEA Proposal actually started with a casual conversation that Nitya and I had over the phone on a day in December 2020. On the 28th of December, I called Nitya with the intention of telling her something that I felt embarrassed about after attending a Zoom meeting earlier in the morning. As we continued our talk that lasted around a total of 5 hours, the topic somehow turned into a contemplation of our high school experiences and our processes of applying for extracurricular programs, as well as post-secondary education. We chatted about the large number of programs that use extracurricular experience as an evaluation criteria for selecting applicants. We also talked about how certain programs are designed to help high school students gain a variety of experiences, including volunteering, internships, and research, but the students must have prior experiences for them to be competitive, or even be qualified.

We continued our conversation as we worked on our LinkedIn profiles and browsed the profiles of others. We began to notice that many of our peers who had prior connections (such as parents, parents’ friends, and parents’ colleagues) were able to gain wonderful opportunities, including shadowing physicians and working in a research lab, as high school students. We linked this to our thoughts about the difficulties that certain high school students, especially those of low socioeconomic status, may have while seeking opportunities due to the limited access to connections and resources. Hence, we aspired to create a platform that allows us to provide help to these students by connecting them with the organizations and professionals that they are interested in working with. We hoped that our work would aid students by helping them find their “first step” to their future opportunities. This platform we envisioned ultimately became The TEA Proposal.