We recently connected with Michael Wang and have shared our conversation below.

Michael, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

As a recent university graduate and entrepreneur in the education space, I see both the progression and stagnation in our education system. 

In Arizona, where we average 48th out of 50 states in education quality, the inequities can be so obvious that you only need to cross the street to see them. 

Based on my observations of my community’s public schools, we are more focused on reactive intervention instead of proactive support. If we can change this approach and transition from firefighting to student growth and success, I believe we will be doing a great favor for our collective future. 

Let me give an example. 

The zip code I live in has a median household income of just over $100k. Here, you can expect many families with parents dedicated to their child’s education, providing the kids with many opportunities, and believing that they can succeed – sometimes so much so that some parents become blind to their child’s shortcomings. 

And in these cases, one may expect the other role models in their child’s life to speak up and suggest a corrective course as soon as possible (someone like a teacher that spends 35+ hours each week with the child). 

But in this community, and elsewhere too, you’ll find parents who lack respect for educators, schools that lack a unified vision, and thus, inaction until it’s too late. Just before this interview, I was told about a parent in the community who just now decided (1

week before the start of school) to have her son retake 9th grade by transferring him from one highly competitive school to another highly competitive school. 

What this child needs is not the guilt of having to lie about his reason for transferring to future friends nor the discouragement of being told it’s okay that he had to repeat a year. What he needed was an educator, a counselor who would stand firm in their professional 

opinion that this child needs immediate intervention. Perhaps that’s learning skills to help him get accustomed to the rigor of high school or switching to an accelerated math class allowing him to refresh the previous grade’s math skills. 

Though I am the owner of a tutoring company, do I think every child should come to tutoring? No. But do I believe effective resources should be accessible to all who qualify? Definitely! That’s why I will keep working towards making in-school peer tutoring part of a proactive approach to student success.

Michael, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a 2021 business school graduate – finance to be specific. Kind of weird that I would start a tutoring company and want to work with schools, no? But, I feel that that different perspective is where I bring value and what helped me win my early successes. 

When I was a high school junior, my friends and I started a peer tutoring club. At the start, my motivation for participating was 80% to boost my resume and 20% to help others. But by the end of that year, I realized peer tutoring allowed me to lead and connect with students I’d otherwise never come in contact with. 

So despite zero knowledge of working with public schools, pitching to principals, etc., in my sophomore year in college, I competed for and won $15k towards building a company focused on peer tutoring.

In summer 2020, I launched PeerSquared’s first tutoring program. It was a pilot with a local elementary school to provide free Mandarin tutoring. This summer was particularly brutal. You had students already feeling disconnected from distance learning. Then, add to that the traditional summer learning loss. So our 20 high school volunteer tutors made a real difference, spending 240 of their summer break hours helping these students practice their Mandarin skills. 

During the following school year, we worked with another high school to transition their peer tutoring fully virtual as they see-sawed between distance and in-person learning. Crucially, we pushed their tutors to be proactive in inviting the tutees to come to tutoring and set up recurring sessions. 

The motto for the business school I graduated from is, “Where business is personal,” and I took that to heart when building PeerSquared. Every student we served was unique. Take time to hear them out and discover where they need help; that’s what I learned, and that’s what I told our tutors to do. 

PeerSquared is a public benefit corporation on a mission to bring K-12 students convenient, effective, and relatable support. We want all students to know and realize for themselves that it’s not scary to ask for help. Through true peer tutoring, where the tutors are no more than high schoolers, we help schools and parents bring their students a friend when they get stuck on homework, study for a test, or simply want to feel confident. 

Have you ever had to pivot?

So we started out thinking we’d be an education technology company addressing the main problem I witnessed during my time as a high school peer tutor: inefficient communication and scheduling. 

Traditionally, a student would first reach out to a teacher to request help. Then, the teacher would have to recommend tutoring. If the student agrees, the teacher contacts the club sponsor (another teacher) to contact the club officer (a student) in charge of 1-on-1 tutoring scheduling. It’s cumbersome just trying to explain this process! It had far too many places where the ball could be dropped.

As amateurs in the education industry, my co-founder and I thought that if we could build a tutoring platform to streamline tutoring requests and scheduling, we’d be able to get more students the help they needed. But as we talked to more stakeholders, we realized that a tutoring platform wouldn’t help us serve more students. 

The root of the problem was the challenge to increase the adoption of peer tutoring in schools – which theoretically is no different than trying to implement change anywhere else. You start by finding a desire for change, get buy-in from the people involved, and there needs to be someone in charge of implementation. But in reality, in public schools where everyone is overworked, there simply isn’t the human resource to organize peer tutoring to the scale where it would become a worthwhile investment. Sure, helping 10 or 20 students feels good, but that means nothing to the hundreds of teachers and thousands of students in our local high schools. 

That’s when we decided to help schools build sustainable and systematically-integrated peer tutor programs instead of just selling a tool that no one will feel incentivized to use. For the schools, PeerSquared would serve as the one-stop shop to recruit and train tutors, convince teachers and students to try peer tutoring, and make scheduling a breeze. Our goal would be to serve 20% of the school population and provide valuable volunteer opportunities to tutors. 

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

As a new company with non-traditional founders offering a totally new service to the market, we tried a variety of means to build our brand. Having a good reputation was necessary for us because successful peer tutoring relied on the involvement of all stakeholders. And in the bureaucratic school environment, teacher and student buy-in was necessary even before a pilot could be launched. 

To build a strong reputation, one thing I decided to do early on was to hire interns. The interns were meaningful to us in three ways. One was through the work they did. Two was through providing our company with greater exposure to professional and learning networks. And three was that having interns allowed us to live out a core value of PeerSquared: continuously learning.

At the start, we worked with my alma mater to recruit college interns in an unpaid capacity. I know hiring unpaid interns is a controversial topic. Some believe that all labor should be paid and just because they are learning does not justify free labor. It does also exclude who can participate in the internship. However, my interns will tell you that their internship experiences have been very worthwhile because, were it not for this opportunity, they would not have had any at all. In fact, many of the college interns we hired were third or fourth-year students who were attempting to transition career paths and really needed someone to give them the opportunity to demonstrate their new passion while gaining real-life experiences. 

As a result, not only did the internships provide meaningful professional development to members of our future workforce, but they also gave PeerSquared additional exposure by establishing us as a company out there to do good every step of the way. 

Just recently, we also partnered with a local nonprofit, the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation, to hire paid high school interns. With high schools being our target, this opportunity further emphasized our commitment to quality education and positive impact within the local community even allowing us to be recognized by entities like the Better Business Bureau and local media. 

To wrap up, I feel that building a strong reputation in your marketing doesn’t mean only being active in front of your target segment. There are many other ways, such as through hiring interns, that will gain you exposure all the while doing something truly fulfilling and impactful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://peer-squared.info
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peersquaredinc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peersquaredinc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/peersquaredinc

Image Credits
Mani Kandan Emmanuel Garcia Perez