Michala Pollock's Higher Ed Master's Portfolio

Professional Biography

After graduating high school, I attended Georgia College & State University for four years where I received a bachelor’s degree in Business Management and a minor in Sociology. In my time in attaining my business management degree, I was HootSuite certified, which is an online tool to help navigate and automate social media platforms. I really enjoyed my time in undergrad and was excited about exploring the real world.

After graduating I moved to Nashville, TN, and worked two years as a wedding coach and planner for Laurel Avenue, a wedding planning company. After working there for that time, I wanted to do something out of the wedding industry. I was already involved in Young Life, a Christian ministry, and became a staff associate, where I assisted the director of Young Life College. Here was really where I grew my strength of wanting to lead college-age adults and further their education and growth. Young Life is a non-profit and there were a lot of ways we were involved in students’ lives, but I found I wanted to be more involved in the university than in the non-profit world and in general I didn’t want to be in the non-profit world. This was where I moved on to be involved in startups. Nashville has become another hub for startups in the United States, outside of Silicon Valley, and I worked at my first one, called, Go Check Kids, following Young Life. At Go Check Kids I wore all administrative hats. However, I continued to miss the interactions I had with college students. After deciding to leave Go Check Kids, I wanted to move more into customer care and account management which was what my role was at Yoshi. It was then that I realized I had to apply to graduate school to receive my degree in Higher Education in the hopes of impacting college students. After being laid off during the pandemic at Yoshi, I then began searching for jobs more in education to begin my new shift in my career. I now work for an ABA therapy company called Cultivate, where I’m the operations coordinator. There I am guiding the day-to-day activities, keeping up with billing, managing therapist relationships, and overall making sure our site’s schedule is staying up to date and the registered amount of therapy is being fulfilled.