From the Corner Office, an Interview with Anne Wager

Featured in EdSurge’s newsletter HiredUp on November 12, 2019


Corsava empowers every student to find a great college fit by helping them discover their deeper preferences in a fun and positive way. CEO Anne Wager founded the company in 2016 and has been at the helm since the very first day. Here, she shares a glimpse of their mission.

How would your employees describe you?
Hmmm, Mom? (Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.) Hopefully hard-working and creative, open to new ideas, along with a weird combination of counseling skills and understanding that most people struggle with some kind of issue and we need to make room for life’s surprises while trying to innovate, sprint and keep our customers happy. I probably let my counseling skills flow into our support for customers more than most, but I actually think that’s a good thing. For me, the best part of Corsava is the respect everyone feels for one another.

What does diversity mean at your company?
I love that question! As a counselor, I have read thousands of college essays and worked with over 1700 students, and that question comes up a lot on college applications. I would say the same thing I say to my students: Diversity can be geographic, racial, religious, or economic; you can benefit from diversity of viewpoints and from those who are older or younger, as well as those with learning or physical differences—the list is long. Our company values every type of diversity—this extends to our team, our advisors, our lawyers and to product development features, as our users come from all over the world and represent diversity on every level.

What is the toughest thing your company is doing, and how are you working on it?
Making sure that college lists are powerful for students. My goal has always been to find an alternative to the ubiquitous, yet meaningless rankings. Rankings drive so much of the college admissions industry, from college administrator salaries and trustee boardrooms to counseling offices, as parents come armed with rankings to help support their student’s college process. Corsava is using machine-learning to take more powerful emotional metrics to help students find colleges where they will thrive on many levels, and while tough, I hope that we can blow the standard rankings out of the water.

To help us achieve that goal, we’ll be looking to fill multiple roles in the new year: Director of Strategic Partnerships, Program Manager, Principal Full Stack Developer, Junior Mobile Developer