(Portland, Ore.)—For Angela Finke CAS ’08, the field of education has always been an appealing career option. As a little girl, Finke used to turn her stuffed animals into students, assigning them homework and teaching them lessons.

This fall, Finke will stand in front of her first real classroom as a Teach for America (TFA) teacher, tasked with significantly boosting student achievement as part of a national initiative to overcome education gaps in some of the country’s most underserved schools.

One of 12 Lewis & Clark students accepted to the highly competitive program this year, Finke is part of a growing group of alumni from the nation’s most prestigious institutions bringing myriad majors and backgrounds into classrooms and devoting two years of service to TFA. Though not all TFA corps members plan on a career in education, all are devoted to helping students make considerable gains.

“It’s always in the back of your mind at Lewis & Clark that you want to do something really meaningful,” Finke said. “Now I feel like, for once, I’m really doing something. I’m contributing to something and making a difference in my students’ lives.”

A sociology/anthropology major from Golden, Colorado, Finke excelled in student government at Lewis & Clark and weighed potential careers in the nonprofit sector after graduation. Though she says a career in education has been in the back of her mind her whole life, TFA’s two-year commitment will give her time and experience to make informed decisions about her future.

“For me, Teach for America will be a trial run, a time when I can figure out whether the classroom is a good fit, or whether I might be better suited for education administration or a different field entirely,” Finke said. “While I’m learning if education is right for me, I’ll be working for Teach for America and doing something really important. The closer I have gotten to the first day of school, the more I’ve felt that I’m exactly where I need to be.”

Lewis & Clark shines amid national trend

Competition for TFA placements has grown rapidly in recent years. The program, which began in 1990, has steadily gained popularity with graduating seniors from elite colleges across the country; this year, TFA received more than 25,000 applications for 3,700 positions, as roughly 10 percent of the graduating classes at institutions like Lewis & Clark, Yale, and Harvard vied for placements in some of the neediest schools across America.

With an acceptance rate nearly double the national average this year, Lewis & Clark has grown a network of TFA corps members that reaches into the upper levels of the organization’s administration. In the past five years, 36 alumni have been accepted to TFA, with nearly 30 percent of applicants accepted this year, compared to 15 percent nationally.

Minda Heyman, director of the Center for Career and Community Engagement, considers the ambitious mission of TFA a natural fit for Lewis & Clark alumni.

“It’s in the DNA here,” she said. “Lewis & Clark students want to make a difference and want to help solve the problems they see in the world. Many students see Teach for America as a clear way to do that, but we also know many students head into AmeriCorps or Peace Corps, or another career in the public interest.”

Why Teach for America?

Given the intense competition for positions, Teach for America corps members must have a balance of qualifications and interests and must complete a rigorous application and interview process, during which they present model curricula and talk at length about how they plan to transfer skills from their undergraduate education into the classroom.

For Finke, whose parents are both teachers, the decision to join Teach for America felt like a culmination of her upbringing and her experiences at Lewis & Clark. This month, as she takes her post in a third-grade classroom in Denver, Colorado, Finke feels optimistic about the work she has ahead of her.

“It was because of everything I learned at Lewis & Clark that I knew I wanted to do this,” Finke said. “In a lot of ways, the Teach for America mission feels like an extension of the Lewis & Clark experience,” she said. “You’re working hard, seeking a goal, and committed to making a difference.”

As she begins this new pursuit, Finke hopes to contribute to her students’ academic lives and perhaps learn a bit more about herself.

“At this point, I’m not sure what’ll come after Teach for America,” she said. “But I have a suspicion that once I’m in education, I won’t be able to leave it.”

Heyman says that’s just how TFA is supposed to work.

“TFA believes that even if corps members choose to leave the field of education after their two-year stint, they’ll remain committed to issues of educational equality—no matter what career they end up in.”

Other Lewis & Clark alumni accepted into the TFA corps this year:

Sarah Ballard-Hanson, Anna Bondarenko, Jennifer Bradley, Sarah DiSabatino, Chris Estrella, Eric Franz, Ashlee Hill, Evan Perkiss, Kate Phillips, Puja Rao, Frances Wells