Fifteen years of classrooms taught me what a transcript leaves out.
I'm Meghan Edwards. I started Find Your Path in Clayton, North Carolina, because families deserve a better first question than "where can you get in?"
How I got here
I trained to teach. My first job was in Human Resources.
I worked in training and development at a fast-growing dot-com, running new hire orientations — I was the first face more than two thousand people saw on their very first day, the one who helped them feel welcome and find their footing. What stayed with me was how rarely anyone asks a person what they actually want before telling them what they should do about it.
Then I found my way back to education, and spent fifteen years there teaching all kinds of different learners.
The pattern I kept seeing was the same one every year. Good families, doing everything they had been told to do, and a kid in the middle of it who had quietly concluded they were not enough. Not because anyone said so. Because the whole apparatus is built to rank, and a sixteen-year-old reads a ranking as a verdict on themselves.
Find Your Path is what I built instead, and the push for it came from my own family. My brother and nephew were working with an independent educational consultant, and I watched what she did for them. She took the stress off their shoulders, and as a calm outside voice she helped my nephew find a school that genuinely fit him. I could not stop thinking that every family deserves that, and that I wanted to be the person who did it for them.
Why a teacher and not a strategist
Most of this work is not strategy. It is reading a seventeen-year-old accurately when they are telling you what they think you want to hear, and then telling their parents something true in a way they can actually receive. Fifteen years of parent conferences is unusually good training for that. So is a decade of HR.
The practical version: I can tell the difference between a student who is bored and a student who is struggling, because I have taught both. I can tell when an activities list is a real interest and when it is a performance. And I know how a school actually feels from the inside, which is a different kind of knowledge than a data set.
Four things I actually believe
One
Fit beats prestige
A college should match the student rather than impress the neighbors. This is the whole practice, and everything else follows from it.
Two
The whole student, not the top two numbers
A GPA and a test score are the least interesting facts about most sixteen-year-olds, and they are the two that get all the attention.
Three
Families already know more than they think
Most of what I do is help people trust an instinct they already had and were talked out of.
Four
The right school is where they find their people
Belonging is not a soft factor. It is the single best predictor of whether a student stays and finishes.
Training, and where I am in it
B.S. in Elementary Education. M.S. in Instructional Technology. Fifteen-plus years in classrooms with students who learn in very different ways, and a Human Resources career before that.
I am completing the UC Berkeley Certificate in Independent Educational Consulting. Expected 2027.
I am a member of IECA, the Independent Educational Consultants Association, which means I have agreed to their Principles of Good Practice and am accountable to something beyond my own judgment. I work within a network of consultants inside IECA, colleagues I can call about a specific school or a specific student. That is how the useful knowledge in this field moves, and it is a large part of what membership is for.
Bring me the hard questions.
The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Bring the hard questions. I would rather answer them now than have you wonder about them in March.