MINDI TRIMBLE
I've lived on cul-de-sacs my whole life — grew up on one in Bakersfield, moved around a bit, and somehow landed right back on one in the San Fernando Valley. I've decided I was always meant to close loops.
Growing up between Bakersfield and Fresno gave me an early education in impermanence and a surprising comfort with starting over. It also meant I learned pretty young that not having it all mapped out wasn't a crisis — just a starting point. That turned out to be useful training for the work I do now, with teenagers who think uncertainty is a character flaw.
For years I coached students on test prep and essays while moonlighting as an opera singer — spending my days helping kids find their voice and my evenings trying to find mine.
I studied peace and conflict studies at UC Berkeley, then went back for a second degree and a master's in opera performance, which meant I spent a combined decade learning how to stand out in a room full of samesie sopranos, how to make a story land in two minutes, how to be unmistakably yourself on a stage that would rather you be impressive than true.
Then at one particularly memorable audition, the elastic waistband of my pantyhose gave out mid-aria and slowly slid down my legs. I finished the phrase, shuffled out of the room, didn't get a callback — and walked away knowing something I'd been circling for years. My heart had been singing louder in my students' breakthroughs than in any performance of my own. The students were the thing. Specifically: watching a kid who'd been guessing about their future suddenly know something — about what lights them up, what they want to explore, where they want to aim.
That was basically the end of me chasing an opera career, and the real beginning of this one.
Here's what I believe, and what nobody in college prep seems to want to say out loud: college majors matter more before you get to college than after. Not because students need to have it figured out — but because having even a directional sense of what they might want to study changes everything. It focuses the classes they take, the experiences they pursue, the story they can tell. It turns a pile of activities into a narrative. And yet everyone's obsessed with the college list before a student has any idea what they're building toward. That's backwards. That's the problem I exist to solve.
I'm also a mom of twins, sandwich-generationed between growing kids and aging parents, which means I understand deeply what it costs a family — in time, money, and sanity — when the process feels more chaotic than it needs to be.
I work with a small number of college-bound students and their families in Los Angeles and beyond — the ones who are done guessing and ready to actually figure it out.
Teenagers are, I will die on this hill, genuinely gorgeous. Even the moody ones. Especially the moody ones. They're more idealistic than they let on, more capable than they believe, and watching one go from "I don't know" to knowing — that still makes my spirit sing louder than any aria ever did.
If you've been wondering why the college prep process feels like everyone's skipping a step, you found your person.