CO-FOUNDER

A Princeton University graduate with a Bachelor’s in English Literature, Kristina spent 9 years in the Education Consulting industry, acting as an academic advisor, college counselor, SAT tutor, writing coach, and program coordinator. Her love for nurturing talent and ensuring a good personality fit pervades everything she does— whether it’s helping to match students with their best-fit tutor, mentor, university, or career.

Her students have gone on to attend top-tier universities around the world and often return to Kristina for advice on networking, applying to graduate programs, and procuring meaningful internships. This demand, combined with her passion for and education in psychology (Developmental, Social, and Abnormal) led Kristina to serve clients as an Early-Stage Career Coach.

Kristina’s client base has grown over time through word-of-mouth, and it is this same phenomenon that led to the formation of Bright Start Group International Limited in 2022.

For many years, families would ask Kristina to recommend tutors. BSG is born out of Kristina’s desire to optimize this tutor/mentor procurement process and to build a community of highly effective tutors with a commitment to professional development.

Private tutors played a very important role in Kristina’s life, both as a way to consolidate concepts taught in school and to cover specific pain points. Founding BSG was her way of helping students to achieve success while giving back to the education community through providing professional development.

In her academic career, Kristina’s research has focused on investigating the systemic and systematic mechanisms underlying social mobility. Sitting at 90 pages, her proudest accomplishment to date is her Princeton Senior Thesis entitled, “American Dreams/American Abjection: Systematic Oppression in F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry & Marlon James”.

Kristina has an MSc in Human Resource Management and a CIPD accreditation from the London School of Economics and Political Science, She is also certified in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. While completing her MSc, Kristina transitioned out of her role at BSG.

DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION & CO-FOUNDER

With 7 years of experience in the Education industry and a Bachelor’s in Environmental Biology, Shantay has been a college counselor, an elementary school educator, a STEM tutor and a curriculum developer for students K-12.

Shantay began her journey in education as a dedicated SAT tutor, working with students to create and implement successful test prep strategies. To this day, she gives her students the strategy, tips and tricks necessary to consistently improve their scores by an average of 300 points.

However, she soon discovered that many of her students also needed help with more fundamental concepts and that short term test preparation was insufficient.

While working with college-bound students, Shantay noticed that many of the educational gaps stemmed from much earlier in their lives. In order to understand how these gaps were created and how to prevent them, she decided to explore teaching at the elementary level. She began coordinating curricula at a bilingual elementary school.

Shantay emphasizes the creation of lessons that build critical thinking skills and executive functioning skills while providing content. She believes that the core job of any teacher is to create an intrinsic curiosity in their students. As such, she enjoys creating engaging activities that facilitate learning by following the interests of the student.

In 2021, Shantay founded a homeschooling group that allows her to use the framework of the existing local curriculum while supplementing it with project-based lessons that drive long-term success.

With her homeschool up and running, Shantay found herself with far more students than she could handle alone, and as such, she partnered with Kristina to create BSG.

A big believer in continuous learning, Shantay oversees all of BSG’s programming and leads BSG’s professional development for tutors.

Shantay has a certification in college counseling from Rice University and is certified in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.