We were lucky to catch up with Sasha Chada recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sasha, so great to have you on the platform and excited to have you share your wisdom with our community today. Communication skills often play a powerful role in our ability to be effective and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your communication skills.
Talking with people and really understanding them is probably the most important part of my job. I work with students and parents on the college application process, and this has to start with understanding what they want to get out of it. I may come in with my own ideas about strategy or the best colleges to fit their situation, but what they want needs to remain the focus; I can advise, but I can’t dictate.
A turning point for me in understanding this was reading an excerpt from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Sean Covey. Specifically, the fifth habit: Seek first to understand.
This articulated something I already had the outline of, and gave me the tools to then teach these strategies to others, which was good when I had to start training new employees. There is some trial and error involved of course. You can have the perfect theories, but until you try putting them into practice you have no guarantees on how they will actually work.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I consider Ivy Scholars a candidacy building company: it’s our job to help the students who come to us, become the kind of candidates that their target universities want to accept. I work with students from middle school and on, helping them in all aspects of their educational journey. I started out just doing college counseling; helping students compose essays and decide which colleges are the best fit for them, and this is still a central part of my business. College admissions is growing ever more competitive though, and students want an edge to help them stand out.
The other offerings of my business grew from this naturally. Candidacy building is the process of helping students round out their resume: finding and coaching them through internships, research projects, nonprofit collaborations, leadership activities, and all the other components of great college essays. I offered test prep services to help students prepare for the highly stressful exams that punctuate high school, from the SAT and ACT to APs or high school entrance exams. I offered counseling to younger students who were already worrying about college, and wanted to know what they could do right now to help them prepare.
Some students needed help adjusting to high school, and learning the skills to help them manage their time; building the sort of good habits that would serve them later in life. Others needed advice on specific aspects of their application, such as managing the athletic recruiting process, or figuring out how college admissions works when you’re homeschooled.
I’m still growing the company; recently I hired research mentors, PhDs with years of experience who help students conduct their own scientific research, giving them a taste of topics they otherwise wouldn’t be able to explore until college.
My goal remains the same through all of these services; to help students find and explore what they are passionate about, and achieve academic success in their chosen field.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The first quality which I found most helpful was introspection. The ability to stop, and reflect, and determine what went right or wrong in any given engagement is incredibly helpful to stimulate personal growth, and to avoid making the same mistakes twice. You may go on to make new and exciting mistakes, but at least you don’t need to tread the same hard ground again.
To develop introspection requires being able to reflect on yourself and your actions honestly. What went wrong that wasn’t your fault, and what went wrong that was? When things went wrong that weren’t your fault, how did you handle it? How could you avoid those circumstances, ro handle them better in the future? Taking the time for a post-mortem after major projects or engagements allows for this growth to occur, and to build your muscles for introspection.
The second skill I’ve found useful is active listening. This goes beyond simply waiting for the other person to finish talking so it can be your turn again, but working to draw out more from them, and to understand them as they are speaking. This is another skill which takes practice, because it is easier to do with some people than others. Some are gregarious and eager to share, while others are more reticent.
The trick with active listening is to make the other person feel both heard and understood, as if you are endlessly capable of empathizing with their particular situation. I find this useful both working with students, and when discussing problems with employees.
The final skill I find most useful is gentle guidance. People don’t like being told what to do, especially if they have some idea of what they want already, but lack specifics. Offering them concrete directives works sometimes, but often can lead to fits of contrarianism, deciding that they want anything except what you have proscribed, even if it is the best option based on your long experience in the industry.
The trick is to offer sets of choices to guide decision making. Focus on soft positives and negatives, ones which they may or may not have strong feelings about, but each of which further restrict their options. By doing so, you can lead them to the conclusion you wanted them to reach all along, and they will think it was their idea. This skill takes practice to master, but the best trick is to ask questions, rather than making statements.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
There are two schools of thought on this, but I’ll include the same advice I give to students I work with. This is specific to college applications, but we do find that it extends to other areas as well.
When admissions officers look for students to admit, they most often want specialists. Students who are passionate about and invested in something in particular, and who have spent long hours honing those skills. They do want all students admitted to have a basic level of competence, but are not looking to recruit generalists. Their goal is to create a well rounded community, and they do this by searching out students with particular strengths and abilities.
We find this to be useful in most other areas of life as well. You don’t want any glaring weaknesses, but specializing in a few core strengths is most beneficial, and often the best use of your time. After all, nobody is going to ask a top quarterback to fix a nuclear reactor, or a brilliant nuclear engineer to lead a game winning drive. Success as a whole comes from the specialization of individuals.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ivyscholars.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ivyscholars/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IvyScholarsHouston/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ivy-scholars-education
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/ivy-scholars-sugar-land
Image Credits
Sasha Chada
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