Grace Kossia, A.B. '16, Ed.M. '17
Grace Kossia came to Harvard planning to be a teacher, but she also wanted a foundation of technical knowledge. Her roots are deeply tied to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and she grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, navigating life and an entirely new culture as refugees of the Congolese civil war. From a young age, she enjoyed tinkering with broken devices around the house and loved math and science.“When I was younger, it was really simple things like just being enamored by the chalkboard, and then the whiteboards, and then the smart boards,” she said. “Wanting to work with the tools that I was seeing teachers use was a motivation. I would be at home pretending to type on the keyboard, just imitating the things I would see my teachers do.”Beneath that early fascination with the tools of the trade lay a much deeper, personal driver. Navigating a completely new culture and language, Kossia experienced firsthand the transformative power of the personal investment her teachers put into her. They gave her a sense of belonging, saw her potential, and actively ensured she stepped into it.That profound investment became her blueprint for entering education. When applying to college, she knew exactly what she wanted to achieve. “My application letter was in honor of some of the teachers that had really impacted my journey,” she recalled. “I wanted to have that same effect on other students, being able to pour into young minds, being able to see talent in students that may have not recognized it themselves, and bringing it to the forefront”.Studying mechanical engineering as an undergraduate at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) provided that technical foundation, and it’s served her well since leaving almost a decade ago. She completed her master’s in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and has since worked across organizations at the intersection of education and technology.“The thing I probably gleaned the most from my engineering time at Harvard was the systems thinking mindset,” said Kossia, A.B. ‘16, Ed.M. ‘17. “Knowing that you're going into a space, you have to iterate. You can't just spend all your time brainstorming and planning. Being able to brainstorm, plan, test, and assess, I feel like that's been something that I use often in my line of work.”
