We live in 12 cities, hail from 14 different countries, and speak 17 languages. Our careers have been a mosaic of professions, but what binds us is a belief in Baret’s mission.
Twenty years after she taught her first English class at China’s most renowned high school, Renda Fuzhong (RDFZ) in Beijing, students of that class still call her for all manner of advice, whether they should marry, take a post, or move to another city. To them, she will always be “Laoshi,” translated as “old teacher,” no matter one’s age as a show of respect. And teaching will always be at the heart of her career. She rose quickly at RDFZ: by her mid-20s she managed its extensive international connections, including its membership in G30, the organization of the top 30 schools in the world. She created and oversaw more than 40 outbound and inbound international programs to 30+ country destinations annually for its 4,600+ student body. Soon she was recruited to become Secretary General for China's most highly regarded bilingual school, YK Pao School in Shanghai. And, then, on to a global leadership role at Whittle School & Studios, where she managed a team of 30 members in the US and China (including 4 CPAs, 2 hedge fund managers, a nuclear energy scientist, a physicist, Ivy League admission officers, and a presidential special assistant!). She led the creation of Whittle’s 1000-student campus in Shenzhen. In her spare time, believing students should not be judged on mere academic excellence, she cofounded a multi-city art organization.
Serving from Beijing, Li Jing will be a member of Baret Scholars’ Advisory Board, with a particular emphasis on the creative aspects of our Baret program.
Raised in a small town along the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, he’s the one who recommended the Baret Fellowship 73-mile trek on the Appalachian Trail! Early on, Chris enjoyed building things, organizing his childhood friends to construct forts and cabins in the woods they would play in. And build he did. In his 50-year career, Chris founded and led 5 education and media endeavors, collectively employing over 8,000 team members. Founded in his college apartment, Whittle Communications grew to be one of America’s top 100 media companies, publishing Esquire and broadcasting daily to 8,000,000 students through the Channel One network, with Anderson Cooper as its first anchor. In the mid-1990s, along with former Yale University President Benno Schmidt, Chris pioneered America’s charter school movement, founding over 100 campuses with 60,000 students. In 2012, Chris co-founded and led Avenues: The World School, now one of the largest private schools in New York City with important campuses in São Paulo, Shenzhen, and Silicon Valley as well. Chris led the creation of the two Whittle School & Studios campuses in Shenzhen and Suzhou. He is one of the few entrepreneurs to found not one but two “unicorns,” the Silicon Valley created moniker for entities realizing market valuations of over $1B. He is the author of “Crash Course: A Radical Plan for Improving Public Education.”
Inspired by his own, year-long, post-college circuit of the globe and by the 180 full-ride, 5-year scholarships he funded to his alma mater which included a year abroad, Chris conceived and is full-time Executive Chairman of Baret Scholars. He regrets being one of only two monoglots on our team but argues his lingering southern accent qualifies him as bilingual.
With a mother who was the Rhonda in The Beach Boys hit “Help Me Rhonda” and a stepfather who was twice Mexico’s Ambassador to the United Nations, the easy path would have been to become a diplomat
(or groupie!). She chose the world of art. For 20 years, Alexandra has broadened access to art as an editor and publisher of over 100 art titles; she’s been the artistic director of several leading international galleries and curator of important art exhibitions. She’s held publisher or editor positions at Turner Libros and A&R Press. In São Paulo, she co-founded and was Artistic Director of Associação para o Patronato Contemporâneo and was Artistic Director for Galeria Nara Roesler. For the 2015 Venice Biennale, she produced the monumental Dansekwa and Lee Ufan exhibition. Alexandra opened the first Latin American gallery, Galeria Nara Roesler, in New York City. She is right at home in Basel, Hong Kong, Miami, FIAC in Paris, or MACO in Mexico City.
As Co-President of Baret Scholars and alongside a fellow Co-President from Asia to be appointed in early 2024, she will be the creative spirit of the organization, leading the team charged with developing every aspect of the Baret Scholars experience. Her mandate includes production of The Morning Program, Fellowships, and, one of her favorites, The Advisory Program.
With Swiss and Indian parents, Noah says that the idea of an independent year between high school and college was assumed and supported. Having grown up in the particularly competitive, pressure-cooked environment of New York City independent schools, both his sister (who provided good, early advice to Baret on the balance of structure and independence) and Noah benefited from gap years which they self-styled. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Princeton in International Affairs, Noah spent his year between high school and college in Argentina, advancing his Spanish, attending a French cooking school, hiking in Patagonia and, very effectively it seems, advancing his tennis game. A year later he “walked on” to the Princeton team—the first “walk on” in two decades—and by his senior year was its Co-Captain; he was named for 4 straight years a Scholar-Athlete of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA). Following Princeton he was recruited to Lazard’s Investment Banking group specializing in healthcare mergers and acquisitions. Noah lives in a hothouse of fellow Princeton entrepreneurs in the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York City.
As Baret’s CFO and COO, Noah will guide the complex operational aspects of Baret Scholars including booking roughly 40,000 hotel room nights in our first year of operations.
By her account, she grew up in a small town in Anhui province, China. For the record, Bengbu’s population is a mere 1,900,000! Her love for “Journey to the West” as a child ignited her lifelong quest to explore the world. As an engineering major in Shanghai, she watched her share of the American TV series “Friends,” and, soon enough, Andi pursued her dream of her very own “Friends” inspired, NYC life, doing her first Master's degree in civil engineering and construction management at Columbia University. Soon, she really saw the streets of the city, managing construction projects for a large, Chinese state-owned enterprise, Plaza Construction. A second Master’s degree, a Harvard MBA, came quickly. Following her time in Boston, she joined BCG (a favorite destination of other Baret team members) where she consulted on many assignments, including in education, retail, tech, healthcare, and private equity. Her consultancies included firms as far afield as the Persian Gulf and Australia.
Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original Homeric Greek and hosting one of the largest and most successful parties Yale has ever seen (Electro) reveal the range of Farhad’s personality. He’s a natural-born advisor to students. Following Yale, he worked at ReD Associates in New York and Copenhagen, but he soon moved back to India to form a highly successful, full-service college consultancy, guiding 100s of students over a decade. Studying to one day become a psychoanalyst, his Saturdays in London are spent at an institute understanding Freud and Lacan. He enjoys writing metrical poetry and is the author of a beautiful book on grammar— he also co-wrote and edited the book you are reading right now. We’re told he can identify almost any tree in Delhi where he also became a national level swimmer. Quitting his first job, he took a gap year around his home country of India, in Greece (Athens, Delphi, Arcadia, Hydra), Israel, Jordan and Thailand. Crossing the Allenby Bridge into Jordan during that year remains an important moment for him.
Most of the Baret team have done a gap year. Gaby did two—both before and after her time at Cambridge. She holds our internal record for reach, spending time in 52 countries around the world, with a heavy dose of the Far East including Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Korea, China and Japan. She stayed two months in the Dalai Lama’s Himalayan hometown—but reports no sightings. Her grandparents were from Yemen, Libya, Poland, England and Israel, and members of the family were close advisers to the Israeli governments from the 1960s to the 1990s. Professionally, she has served at Monitor Deloitte as a strategy consultant and at E&Y in mergers and acquisitions. A number of her consulting assignments covered fashion and cosmetics and gave rise to her own entrepreneurial adventure, launching an online luxury cosmetic platform after completing an Entrepreneur in Residence program at Antler VC. Prior to Cambridge, she attended North London Collegiate School—the first girls’ school in the UK—where she completed her IB.
Probably the first in Harvard history, Jaein did her senior thesis on the food trucks of New York, titled “The New Kid on the Block: How Food Trucks Have Transformed from Roach Coaches to Cultural Phenomenon.” Her hands-down favorite was a lorry of lobster rolls on 6th Avenue near 53rd Street. Jaein, the daughter of a mechanical engineer and a children’s book author, grew up surrounded by numbers and words. Moving from Korea to the United States when she was 10, she did not know a word of English, but after living in local libraries for months, she was quickly accepted into a “gifted” program. And she could clearly write, serving as an editor at the Harvard Crimson and doing internships at the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Chosun Ilbo back home. Professionally, marketing has been a theme at Bain, Google, Verizon and an online insurance start-up called Lemonade. Passing on her good fortune, while at Harvard, she co-founded a leadership conference for underprivileged high school students in Korea.
While his Italian grandfather was scoring goals for AS Roma, his Brazilian grandfather built roads, bridges, and tunnels as Secretary of Transportation for the State of São Paulo. Guilherme’s life has merged the two fields with a career in sports and transportation—and a healthy dash of education. His career included nearly a decade with world shipping giants, including Maersk. In the past decade, he had leadership posts at Somos, one of Brazil’s most important education companies. He co-founded Complete Sports Solution Complete Sports Solution, an organization taking Brazilian student-athletes around the world for training. His life has been a rolling, global experience! Following an early childhood in Brazil, he did his high school days in Milan, Italy and his university ones in England. For 11 months, he signed on to the crew of a cruise ship, visiting ports from the Black Sea to Drake’s Passage. His career in shipping led him to live in Norway and Denmark, and while on a sabbatical year of volunteer work, he set up camp in Mozambique and Zambia. Buenos Aires remains one of his favorite cities and he believes Patagonia, one of Baret’s Fellowship locations, is the most beautiful place in the world.
As we look for future expansions of the Baret route, it is only fitting we have one ex-NASA team member on board, so to speak: early in his career, Ofori was at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Los Angeles. Educated in the U.S. Northeast (first at the Hotchkiss School and then at nearby Amherst College), he headed to the UK for his MBA from Oxford. A college Water Polo athlete, he later substituted water for ponies, playing polo from Buenos Aires to Accra. Note: in Ghanaian culture, one’s middle name is the day you were born; Ofori arrived on a Thursday and thus he is “Yaw.” Professionally, Ofori has been a senior consultant, first at The Oxford Strategy Group (serving clients in Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam and the EU) and then on to Ernst Young-Parthenon where he worked in restructuring US-based entities. The last post required a great deal of travel, which will come in handy as he oversees Baret’s activities in many of Africa’s 54 countries.
Surrounded by the beauty of the South China Sea, Hainan Island was Naijing’s first home. Alongside a rigorous high school education, Naijing also taught herself the US high school curriculum in countless libraries and cafes in her hometown, designing her course of study along with her parents. It worked—and her self-study established a thread of educational endeavors throughout her life, including her recent Master's degree in Education from the University of Oxford. Naijing brings to Baret a deep belief in the power of educational design informed by data-based learning methods. At the age of 15, she founded her first school, a summer camp for primary schoolers in the fishing village where her mother grew up. During Cambridge and then at Deloitte, she was co-founder and Chair of the Trustees of DirectEd Development Foundation, providing coding bootcamps to 150+ under-resourced students in Kenya and Ethiopia. A few thousand hours short of the blues scales she desires, she’s working on her jazz piano.
Road tripping as a youngster from a small Wisconsin town across all 48 continental United States, she seemed destined to go beyond them. And she did, particularly to India. Kalady has won 15 scholarships, research awards, and fellowships, including a U.S. Department of State Fulbright/Nehru Student Research Award: India became her second home, and Bangla and Hindi her second and third souls. To help other students benefit as she has from scholarship opportunities, in her spare time, Kalady advises college students on grant-writing for Fulbright awards and serves as a volunteer for the Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship awards. In addition, she helps scientific expeditions connect with students to increase the diversity of students in exploration and research.
Xian is from Harbin, famously known as the “Ice City”, home to the world’s biggest ice sculptures. And, true to her roots, Xian has sculpted an incredible and inspiring career for herself. She attended Harbin’s first bilingual boarding school, a foreign language private school in Beijing and then, at age 14, left China to pursue her A-level studies in the UK.
At school and university, Xian focused her attention on drama – having been inspired by her role as Hermia in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. She attended the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London where she produced two commercially successful plays (Lovesong by Abi Morgan and Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen) and took them on tour to Beijing and Shanghai. However, Xian’s love of drama didn’t continue on stage but she found her own Lovesong in the theatre of education. She returned to China to take on the role of Head of Enrichment at Beijing BISS International School and was soon a part of their Senior Leadership Team.
She’s a champion of bespoke learning, finding unique ways to enhance a student’s educational journey. At BISS, she developed new Extra-curricular Activities, Events, Festivals, and student leadership related projects in mentorship and entrepreneurship. After her global educational experience, she’s passionate about creating responsible, resilient, and reflective global citizens.
Isabella has volunteered at an animal refuge in Bolivia, helped build a school in Uganda, taught English in Spanish prisons, and worked as an intelligence analyst in London. Though it might be hard to join those dots, for Isabella it’s simple: she’s fascinated by people and inspired by travel.
Raised in London by German parents, Isabella took a gap year after school to explore Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Uganda. Her travel and experiences brought her to Madrid to study psychology, Spanish, and International Studies. However, Isabella wasn’t content with just being a student – she wanted to work with people, and she found a volunteer position at a Spanish prison that changed the course of her career. Teaching in prison showed her that she wanted to be a step ahead of crime – not working in its aftermath. Isabella then went to get Masters in Forensic Psychology at Newcastle
University and then moved to London where she pursued a career in intelligence analysis and strategic campaigning. She worked tirelessly to stay that step ahead, becoming an expert in decoding behaviours and understanding the complexities of people.
Now in Mexico, she brings her range of expertise and understanding of how careers and passions emerge to our programming efforts at Baret Scholars.
A native of Michoacán, Mexico’s Avocadoland, Daniel developed a profound interest in international affairs from an early age. In fact, he organized his very own model UN in middle school: to engender better relations among his young classmates.
His passion for creating these better relations continued – on a much more international scale - and he went to Mexico City to study International Relations and later to serve in his country’s Foreign Service Corps. After serving for six years, Daniel decided to broaden his horizons and enrolled in Columbia University’s graduate program in International Studies. During his time in New York City, Daniel even had the opportunity to achieve one of his long-desired goals: to work at the United Nations Headquarters. The M had fallen out of MUN; Daniel had a come long way from middle school.
Education has been central to Daniel’s and his family’s endeavors. Both his parents taught in classrooms and held senior academic positions. Daniel is committed to bringing diverse people together and engendering dialogue, essential qualities for his work in the programming team at Baret.
An old saying goes: “the front-line troops are always in favor of retreat.” Not so with Kristal Shipe. For 38 years she has not just held the line but run to the problem, any problem she has been asked to tackle. She does so with a patience and charm that belies her immense capacities. In 1983, she joined Whittle Communications (then called 13-30), a rapidly rising media endeavor with team members scattered across 7 buildings in Knoxville. Two years later she became the EA of Chris Whittle, and for nearly 4 decades hence, she has helped make possible the 5 media and educational endeavors he founded. Though in later years not based where the companies were, during the annoying days of dial-up, she could have patented the concept of virtual work. Her home base in Knoxville is not an outpost of, but an inbox for the leadership teams she has helped coordinate. For sanity, she’s a strength and fitness buff, owning Downtown Gym. She’s a top-shelf gardener, hands deep in the dirt.
Salta, Argentina to Bremen, Germany is 6,958 miles. To a 16-year-old, it's even further. During high school, Fernando thought a year outside his home country would broaden his education, and off he went from Bachillerato Humanista Moderno to Ökumenisches Gymnasium zu Bremen. He looks back on this year as foundational to his multi-cultural life. His 30-year financial career took him further afield to Hong Kong, New York, London, and Madrid. JP Morgan was the first decade and foundation of his professional path in finance before launching his own asset management company focused on hedge funds, Antarctica Asset Management in 2001, and after that BAU Advisors with a broader investment mandate in 2015. BAU, with partners in New York, Buenos Aires, and Miami, operates across a number of sectors, but one appealed particularly to Baret: a focus on the financing of cultural institutions from museums to schools. Over the past 15 months, BAU has provided instrumental advice on our global corporate structure, our financing strategy and broadly on our capital raising efforts. They also introduced us to both our CEO and our Co-President.
As an Advisory Board Member, Fernando will continue to do what he has already done for Baret: guide us in a wide range of matters from capital to program. Fernando says: “I firmly believe having more than 100 best friends is possible.” Baret’s team looks forward to being 20 or more of those.
Nobody has ever correctly guessed where Elahe is from, and we know why: She has ethnic roots in India, Pakistan and Germany but was proudly born and raised in Kenya (the fourth generation of her multicultural family)! She’s a foodie with a love for travel and bringing people together; she turned her Stanford residence into a crêpe restaurant every quarter. Although she went to a British boarding school, Elahe arrived in California for her undergrad without having ever been there, a challenging adjustment, which a Baret-like-year could have cushioned. Consulting has been the core of her career, first at Bain in the UK and South Africa and now at BCG in Kenya. Her work has spanned multiple sectors and countries, including supporting African healthcare startups serving over 1 million customers in 28 countries, HR strategy in Nigeria, banking in Zambia, IT across East Africa and smallholder farmers in Ghana and India.
As a member of Baret’s Advisory Board, she’ll particularly provide guidance on both our Morning Program and Fellowships in Africa. And on our food.
Francisco spent his youth almost entirely on the 35th parallel, albeit in two different hemispheres. A childhood in Buenos Aires (35.9 degrees South) and his college days in Chapel Hill (34.6 degrees North) were interrupted only by a year-long exchange program as a high school senior in Columbia, Missouri. “It was tough: different language, different country, different culture, and my first time away from home,” he recalls. “But after that experience, my desire to get to know the rest of the world increased significantly: After my first year in college, I backpacked around the globe.” He and an Argentinian friend (see Fernando Moncho Lobo, another Baret Advisory Board member) both applied for scholarships to UNC—and they both won. Little did they know then that their careers would intersect at JP Morgan and that they would later co-found both Antarctica Asset Management and then BAU Advisors.
Francisco serves on the Board of Advisors of Baret Scholars and, since our inception, has guided the organization in multiple ways, including being one of its earliest investors. His parents are founders of a significant Buenos Aires school and his father was the Secretary of Education in Argentina: Francisco brings a wealth of educational experience to Baret.
Jeanne Baret was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. In December 1766, she not only followed her star but also boarded one. The ship - L’Etoile (The Star in French) - which took her around the world, enabled her to pursue her passion in botany by discovering strange, new plants in faraway, exotic lands. Now, in September 2024, 180 recent high school graduates from all over the world will gather in New England to follow in her wake, to begin a global expedition, to find and follow their own stars.
