Are you still unsure about taking a gap year? Hear from one of our current Saga Tutoring Fellows about why taking a gap year was the best decision for him. A native New Yorker, Mark Cort knew that he wanted to give back to the community similar to those in which he was raised before dedicating his time to himself and to medical school. His desire to work in education and in a school setting motivated him to join Saga as a Tutoring Fellow this school year.

Karlyn served as a Fellow at Harlan Community Academy in Chicago, IL during the 2014-2015 school year. Karlyn’s life after her service year has been rather unique! Read on to learn how she has ultimately arrived at being awarded one of the University of Chicago‘s prestigious Institute of Education Sciences Fellowships towards obtaining her Ph.D.

The first semester is over, and Saga Fellows are halfway through their year of service. Time has flown by! This month, we caught up with Jeffrey Antoine to hear about the Saga experience from a first-year Fellow’s perspective. Jeffrey is currently a Saga Fellow at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York, and is passionate about closing the achievement gap through education.

During her years as an ethnic studies major at the University of California, San Diego, Danielle Bulante built a passion for social justice. Among her classmates and professors, she often had discussions on the public school system and the challenges it faces. She and her classmates talked about social justice and ways to provide more education to low income areas. But there was one problem: these were just discussions. Danielle wanted to move beyond concepts and participate in the ideas she closely valued.

Lucy Knowlton grew up in rural Maine and attended Bowdoin College, a small liberal arts college in her home state. She had a passion for teaching but, aware that there was a much bigger world outside of Maine, knew that she wanted to leave home to experience life in a big city. As she looked for teaching opportunities, Lucy found a number of non-profit agencies that gave young college graduates like her an opportunity to teach in a world must faster and busier than her own. Above all the options that she weighed, Lucy decided Saga had something the others did not.

Before moving to the United States several decades ago, Dan Heymann was a musician touring in his native homeland of South Africa. He and his band wrote songs in protest of apartheid while the world watched a nation in crisis—divided by race and fighting their way towards equality. For Dan, music was a chance to fight for social justice.