Canfield BHP alum, Maya Josiam, graduated in May 2018 with her degree in Finance. After graduating, Maya started working in Dallas as a management consultant at Oliver Wyman, where she focused on cases across a variety of industries ranging from manufacturing and financial services to education. It was there in the education space that Maya further fueled her passion for education. Nowadays, Maya is a middle school math teacher and full-time student pursuing her master’s degree. We caught up with Maya to hear more about her transition.
“I was actually at Oliver Wyman for almost two years. I started in 2018 and left at the end of June, this past year, to start a master’s program in teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Currently, while enrolled in that full-time master’s program, I am also an apprentice teacher, which is just fancy talk for being a student-teacher at a Philadelphia middle school, where I teach sixth grade math and science.”
What helped to inspire you to make the pivot to education and become a teacher?
The education practice at Oliver Wyman really does a lot of different things across education, all the way from pre-K through college and even things like professional education and vocational education. I had done a lot of work and a ton of different projects across the education space in my second year.
The pivot to education, for me, has been a long time coming. Even when I was at UT, I spent a lot of time working in the UTeach Outreach program, which is an awesome education program that UT has on campus. All of my internship experience was in the education space, and I knew long term that I wanted to work in education. After doing two years of consulting, and after a year of that time being in the education space, it felt like the right time to make a career transition into a more direct form of education, which for me, was teaching. I knew if I wanted to do anything in the larger education space outside of consulting, I needed to be a teacher first. The way I decided to pursue becoming a teacher was getting certified through a master’s degree program where I would also have the ability to teach in a real classroom.
I’ve known that I’ve wanted to teach math for a long time. I was a math tutor in high school and in college for elementary and middle school students. I love teaching math and seeing students light up when they can understand how to do long division, for example. I think what inspires me about teaching is taking people who say “I’m not good at math” and inspiring them to realize the fact that everyone can be good at, and enjoy, math. It’s about building a growth mindset in students and helping them realize their own strengths and abilities to solve problems. One of the biggest things that I took away from Canfield BHP that I try to bring to my classroom every day as a student teacher is this idea of problem solving. So much of what we did in our classes and CBHP were group projects where you’re given a case and you have to break it down into its component parts and try to create a recommendation. That’s a huge part of teaching and what inspires me as a teacher – helping my students learn how to problem solve. It’s not just about learning what’s five times seven. If I get a word problem in front of me, and I need to figure out how to solve it, what are the steps that I need to take to get this from some kind of ambiguous concept to an answer that I can share with my peers or my teachers?
As a teacher, what have your challenges been in the time of COVID? How have you managed them?
I’ve told this to everyone who’s listened to me talking about this – virtual teaching is really, really far from ideal, and it’s really, really hard to do. My heart is with all teachers right now who are trying to navigate this extremely uncertain space while also trying to attend to their students’ needs. We have kids in our classes who don’t want to turn on their cameras for various reasons, or who are maybe more reluctant to speak up. But just as much as teachers are stressed out right now about teaching, the kids we’re teaching are also stressed out. For example, a lot of them have siblings – I have a younger sister and both of us trying to be on Zoom at the same time is hard. If you’re a middle school student, you have a younger sibling in elementary school, maybe another older sibling in high school, then that is three kids in the same house, all on the same Wi-Fi, all trying to use Zoom, and all trying to be in class. So it’s very demanding on students, and it’s up to us to work together to figure out what works best for our students.
The other piece I see is there are some unique challenges with being on Zoom. But a lot of those challenges do have parallels in a physical classroom. For example, students not wanting to turn their videos on or turn their mics on to share is similar to students not wanting to raise their hand in class. You have to learn how to address those types of things, whether it’s virtual or in person, and it’s about learning to lead with empathy and work with the student to figure out why they are reluctant to share or why they don’t want to turn their video on. What me and my mentor teacher do is try to figure out what’s really driving that. How can we as teachers support our students? That might mean having them turn their cameras on during small group time if they’re not willing to do it in a whole group or telling them in advance that we’re going to call on them so they have a little bit of time to prepare an answer, rather than just cold calling. There are different ways to lead with empathy in that space, and I definitely try my best to do that.
What’s next for you after you receive your Master’s degree? How has Canfield BHP prepared you for this moment?
I’m definitely a chronic planner. My current plan is to get this master’s degree, go be an actual middle school math teacher, and in a few years, pursue a PhD and ideally get that PhD while still being a classroom teacher. I want to eventually transition to academia and into teacher education. I’m focused on preparing more teachers to enter classrooms feeling like they’re fully equipped to serve students.
CBHP helped me understand how to think about problem solving. So much of the case-based classes are focused around exactly that, and problem solving is huge as a teacher. Every thirty minutes there’s a new problem that you have to solve, and I’m able to solve it because I’m so practiced now from CBHP and from being in consulting. I’m able to think on my feet in that capacity. Another thing I took away from CBHP was learning how to work in teams because so many of our projects in CBHP are group projects. Something that people don’t realize about education is that yes, I’m a teacher and technically by myself in a classroom (once I start teaching full time), but it’s still a team sport. You’re still working with your students, other teachers in the grade, your principal, and often other specialist teachers in the school. Understanding how to work on a team is something that was instilled in me in CBHP, and I use that every day.
From a curricular standpoint, I’m using Excel all the time. I definitely used it more in consulting but even now, because I’m a math teacher and take math methods classes, I can do a lot of my math problem solving and visualizations in Excel, which is great. I loved having to work very hard in MIS. Also Dr. Prentice’s LEB class was amazing. The fact that the ethics piece is built into the curriculum is crucial, and Dr. Prentice puts so much thought into that. It’s something that I think about every day. I thought about it often as a consultant, and I think about it often as a teacher thinking about ethical decision making and how that translates into what I teach and how I teach it. At the end of the day, it comes down to you and your integrity. I specifically appreciate Dr. Prentice for stressing that so much in class and for CBHP overall having such an emphasis on ethics.
Final Thoughts and Advice for Students
It’s okay to step into your comfort zone! A lot of people in college focus on the need to explore and get out of their comfort zone, which is great, but there are often reasons why people are attracted to certain things. For me, it was education; I pursued that path throughout my four years at UT, and I’m continuing to do so. It’s okay to lean into your interests even if they aren’t the “stereotypical interests” of what you think everyone in CBHP is interested in. If you’re not interested in management consulting or investment banking – that’s okay. There is a universe out there of so many other things.
The more tactical advice would be to reach out to upperclassmen and alums who are doing the things that you want to do or even might want to do, and just pick their brains. I say that as a person who loves it when current students or recent alums reach out to me about education. There are tons of alumni doing such cool things, especially those alum who are at least two years out of undergrad, and there is always someone doing what you’re interested in. Embrace the fact that CBHP has a phenomenal and phenomenally helpful network because that’s something that not everyone has access to. It’s a blessing of the program.