Our Beginning

The Education Symmetry Project was founded in September 2024 and incorporated in 2025 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by two students: Garrett Barnes and Neil Sharma. Both Garrett and Neil had either experienced or noticed others experiencing challenges relating to their backgrounds. Both sought to help support students struggling in that way by joining the Undergraduate Student Government at UNC where they met and worked together to lessen the barriers to education and career success of which they knew their peers were capable. Eventually, both founders realized that supporting students to the extent that they wanted would require a more tailored approach, so they founded ESP with the intent of providing information and support written by and written for rural, first-generation, and transfer students.

Our Beginning

ESP’s mission could not be achieved without the volunteer staff members who support the project. This will always be true, but never more than at the very start of the organization. ESP could not exist without the first cohort of volunteers who helped create the framework that ESP uses today, troubleshot challenges as they arose, and worked to grow the organization. They didn’t expect payment and didn’t shy away from the hurdles that come with starting a nonprofit. They took challenges head-on and made ESP possible so that other students could have the same educational opportunities that they did. For that, we thank Sam Hiner, Katie Noble, William Epley, Andrew Forbes, Annabel Dougherty, Katie Hopkins, Aakash Palathra, Lyla Bullard, Matthew Thornton, and Doug Daniel. When looking for those who were responsible for ESP’s process, we can look only to them.

  • ESP was founded as a result of its founders’ realization that one of the leading factors limiting many of their rural and first-generation peers’ educational trajectory was that they often had less information about systems of higher education than their peers from more privileged backgrounds. They realized that this was often due to their peers not having mentors or family members at home or in their community who had already walked the path that they were attempting to traverse. This problem was especially true for students attending more prestigious and competitive institutions in which the culture may be significantly different from what they were used to. ESP’s founders began referring to this concept, that some students had much more information about the paths to success than others, as “information asymmetry” and began work to fix it. Given that ESP’s purpose was to even the playing field in that way, it was titled the Education Symmetry Project.

  • When discussing the Education Symmetry Project’s mission, our future plans, or the resources we produce, the term “constituent groups” is often used. This term is used to refer to the three groups of students that ESP was originally founded to support: rural, first-generation, and transfer students.

  • ESP was founded to support its three constituent groups in partuclar due to our founders’ realizing that all three groups shared a similar trait: they generally have less information regarding the paths to success than students from more privileged backgrounds and they generally have a more time sensitive need for that information so that they can plan for their educational future such that their outcomes are equal to those of students from more privileged backgrounds.

  • Absolutely not. While ESP was founded with our constituent groups in mind, the lion’s share of the resources we produce are applicable to students from any and all backgrounds. We encourage all students, regardless of their backgrounds, to engage with ESP and use our resources wherever possible to support them in their educational planning and their paths to a brighter future. This tenant of ESP is consistent with our driving mission, to ensure that all students have the information they need to achieve education outcomes equal to that of any other student.

  • No. Currently, ESP does not provide direct financial support to students. However, we provide and are working to produce more informational resources that assist students in finding scholarships, grants, and other funding sources to make their securing their educations possible.