Unabashedly high standards and a ton of love.

I have an electric mind and an overflowing heart. My favorite thing to do is to help other people shine. For me, it is all about the personal connection. Offering a student an ear, a mirror and a map is my life’s work.

Also, my credentials

 

My undergraduate degree is in American Studies, with honors, from Stanford. I love American literature, history, and politics, and I didn’t know I loved art history until I studied it. I worked my way through college as a private chef and a tour guide.

My J.D. is from Duke Law School. I love constitutional law and American legal history. My very first teaching job was freshman writing for Duke undergrads.

I was a student in a special humanities program in San Diego public elementary and junior high schools before property tax changes gutted the funding of California schools. The scholarship I got to attend Santa Catalina for boarding school changed my life. Teachers are my first and forever role models.

For several years, I practiced corporate law in Silicon Valley. I loved making deals come together both in the big picture and down to every tiny detail of real life. It was in this work that I started being an advisor, and I loved being the person with whom clients could talk through all the angles of an issue.

While raising my daughter, I wrote grants for a then-fledgling tutoring and publishing center, worked on non-profit projects for a bluegrass-loving billionaire, wrote for a parenting site, and counseled both a small hedge fund and a large modern art museum in San Francisco. I love doing whatever the team needs to get done.

Most recently before Rees Advising, I taught and counseled high school admissions at a girls’ middle school and then, during peak pandemic, founded and ran the middle school program for a public charter school. Teaching those young people, counseling them and their families about high school choices, and working with brilliant and unthinkably burdened teachers and administrators to do right by our students was the happiest and most meaningful work I’d ever done, and it was also the hardest and had the highest stakes.

Continuing the work of teaching and counseling students and families on my own terms of having the highest standards and the fullest heart is the point of Rees Advising.

My students and families tell me they couldn’t have done it without me. I hope they believe me when I say that, truly, it has been my honor.

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The real reason I’m smiling here is because one of my students took the photo. But writing can make you smile too, even in a really challenging time.

Amy Rees, May 2019