MEMBERCONNECTION
Costco kid goes
Ivy League
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT Brittany Stinson
was a much-buzzed-about name earlier this
year, when the 18-year-old went viral for getting into ;ve Ivy League schools with her college admissions essay comparing her
achievements, interests and life with shopping
at Costco. “Costco gave birth to my unfettered
curiosity,” she writes in her essay, ;rst published by Business Insider last April.
;e Wilmington, Delaware, resident tells
;e Connection by phone that her family has
gone to Costco every weekend since she’s been
in a stroller. As she notes in her essay, Costco
has held a steady presence in her life; it’s where
she ate churros, climbed a mountain of plush
toys and cultivated exploratory skills that she
uses elsewhere in her busy life.
A college admissions o;cer told Stinson,
“ ‘If your essay is on the ground and there’s no
name on it, your friend should be able to pick
it up and read it and tell it’s yours.’ So I used
that to guide me through the essay writing. I
wanted an essay that screamed ‘me.’ ”
;e teen was accepted by Ivy Leagues
Cornell, Dartmouth, Yale, the University
of Pennsylvania and Columbia, as well as
the highly competitive Boston University,
New York University, George Washington
University and Stanford, the latter of which
she’ll be attending this fall.
Stinson says she’s been self-driven and
goal-oriented from an early age, and set her
sights on elite universities as an eighth-grader.
She was at the top of her high school class every
year (she earned a 4.9 GPA), graduated as class
valedictorian, is ;uent in Portuguese and pro-;cient in Spanish, and is passionate about the
sciences, having presented an astrophysics
project at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology last summer. She hopes to pursue
;e teen was accepted by Ivy Leagues
the highly competitive Boston University,
t,
a v
COURTESY OF BRITTANY STINSON
both neuroscience and a ;eld in humanities
while at Stanford.
She plans to utilize Costco throughout her
college career to furnish her dorm and to stock
up on her favorite foods; she cites chicken pot
pie and apple pie as must-haves. It’s likely this
won’t be the last we hear of this high-achieving
Costco fan.—Hana Medina
Social skills education
so;ware that could help their sons develop
social skills. Unable to ;nd any, in 2011, the
and nonverbal communication.
Zimmermans developed a program to help
not only their own boys, now 14 years old,
but other children ages 5 to 20 who struggle
with social skills. ;e
online animated education program, called
;is year, ;e Social Express was included
in the U.S. Department of Education’s
National Education Technology Plan (tech.
ed.gov/netp), the ;agship educational tech-
THE SOCIAL EXPRESS
The Social Express
(thesocialexpress.com),
teaches social and
emotional lessons by
interactively engaging
users, allowing them
to learn through video
modeling.
WHEN MARC AND Tina Zimmerman’s
2-year-old twin boys, Jason and Jared, were
diagnosed with autism in 2005, ;nding out
more about this developmental disorder was
beyond di;cult.
“It was quite frustrating to get the information you needed, because it didn’t exist,”
says Marc, a Costco member in San Diego.
The content was
written by a team of
professionals, including speech language
pathologists, behavior
analysts, social workers, educators and occupational therapists.
;e curriculum covers eight target skills: self-management, conversation, relationship
management, critical thinking, paying attention, con;ict resolution, group participation
nology policy document for the U.S. ;e
program is now being
used in thousands of
schools, by numerous
professionals and in
homes throughout
more than 60 countries. The Social
Express also has a
reporting feature that
allows administrators, teachers and
specialists to analyze
data and print out
meaningful reports
for Individualized
Education Plan meetings, as well as check the
status of a student’s or a group’s progress.
A still from The Social Express videos.
THE SOCIAL EXPRESS
As the twins grew older, they were drawn
to visual learning on a computer, so the
Zimmermans began looking for computer
“It’s a really great tool that can be used at
home, at school and [to] empower parents,”
Marc says.—Christina Guerrero
OUR DIGITAL EDITIONS
Click here to see a video
example of The Social Express.
(See page 13 for details.)
CONNECT WITH US IF YOU HAVE a note, photo or story to share about Costco or Costco members,
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Member Connection, The Costco Connection, P.O. Box 34088, Seattle, WA 98124-1088. Submissions
cannot be acknowledged or returned.
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