Julia Quintero, ’15, STEP ’18, knew when she was in high school that she wanted to be a teacher. Her mother was supportive, but her father wasn’t entirely on board. “He was concerned about whether I’d be challenged enough to stick with it,” she recalls. “I told him that teaching is one of the most intellectually demanding enterprises I can possibly imagine—especially at the elementary school level, where we lay all the foundations.”

As a Stanford undergrad majoring in history and human biology, she enrolled in seminars at the Education and Society Theme (EAST) House on campus and wanted to build more of a community for undergrads like herself who were interested in becoming educators. So she and several classmates founded the Stanford Pre-Education Society (SPREES) to help future teachers find support and service opportunities, and to entice others to the profession. “I was in the Human Bio core, which is mostly pre-meds, and everything was pre-med this and pre-med that,” she says. “I thought, why not pre-ed?”