The Story Behind The Book

Once upon a time, there was a nice family–a dad, a mom and four teenage daughters.  They lived in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Everything was just fine and dandy.

Then, one day, they decided to sell everything and move to Mexico.  The daughters were just about to enter their freshman, junior and senior years of high school and the oldest was a senior in college.

Okay, there were some other things that happened, but that’s how the story starts.

Ultimately, the family figured out how to “do school” in a whole new way.  It wasn’t always easy.  There were some bumps in the road, to be sure.  But, well, things are turning out just fine and dandy.

Daughter #1 spent her junior year in high school on a year-long exchange in Chile, returned to Oregon and spent her senior year taking classes in both her high school and the local community college while working at a health clinic.  She discovered her passion for public health, entered university at 18 as a junior, graduated with honors and a BS at 19, traveled for several months in Latin America, moved to New York City, got a job as a health educator, and earned her (employer-financed) master’s in urban health while working full-time as a program manager in a clinic in Harlem.  These days, she’s passionate about her work as the program director of an award-winning harm reduction nonprofit in Washington Heights.  She is 24.

Daughter #2 spent her junior year in high school on a year-long exchange in Brazil, returned to Oregon and graduated the summer before her senior year.  She spent a year in Mexico with the family while taking online courses, spent a summer in Germany studying, went to Canada for a semester at a university, spent a semester at a university in Argentina, graduated from an  Oregon university with a make-your-own major in foreign languages, linguistics and communications.  She has worked as a teacher for a nonprofit that offers foreign language instruction to preschoolers, finished an internship at the Mexican consulate.  She juggled two Manhattan internships–one at a top Latino ad agency, and the other at MTV’s international division–then decided she’d had enough of the hustle-bustle life in New York and moved to Buenos Aires, where she worked as the marketing director for an American-owned language-learning company and taught English to a range of professionals.  Now, she is happily teaching a classroom of first graders at a school in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.  She’s 23.

Daughter #3 spent her junior year in high school on a year-long exchange in Brazil, and since her parents had moved to Mexico while she was gone, she didn’t return to Oregon.  Instead, she moved to Argentina with her parents and younger sister, took online courses to finish high school and gain college credits, attended university in Argentina (both English and Spanish courses) alongside students from top US universities (they were paying five times the price for the same class), worked with an American writer to sharpen her essay skills, studied with a Canadian history professor to gain an understanding of global shifts in the past and the present, and entered a university in Canada as a junior majoring in sociology and Spanish.  She was a TA in Spanish and an RA in the international dorm.  Prior to graduation, she was offered a job as a multilingual events coordinator for Norwegian Cruise Lines.  After a year and half of cruising in the Mediterranean, along the South American coastline and making a couple of trans-Atlantic crossings, she has decided to pursue her interests on land.  The world is full of possibilities, and she’s taking some time to choose her next move.  She’s 21.

Daughter #4 never went to high school in the US.  She spent a year with her family in Mexico, where she was the only foreigner in her private, all-Spanish high school.  She was selected as the spring princess of her class and made the cover of all the newspapers.  Then she moved to Argentina with her family and entered an international high school.  She felt she needed more instruction in Spanish, so she enrolled in an intensive Spanish course at a local university alongside American students from top colleges.  She supplemented her Spanish courses by studying with private tutors from around the world. Then she spent a summer in Oregon taking college courses.  Finished with high school and already packing a year of college credits, she is studied for a year at an American university in Buenos Aires.  She got a sweet scholarship/grant offer at a small liberal arts university in upstate New York, was offered a TA position immediately, spent a summer doing independent research in Argentina, and graduated with a BS.  She’s currently working in Buenos Aires as the assistant recruiter for a global headhunting firm specializing in creative directors.  She’s 20.

None of them ever submitted an SAT score.  They didn’t take a single AP or IB course, skipped the angst of the college admissions process, and glided into the jobs they wanted based on experience and enthusiasm rather than impressive diplomas or connections.

The Frosts were intrigued by the challenge of finding ways to get a good education if you’re not on the traditional track. They learned a lot and got interested in ways to give kids a premium, multilingual, globally relevant education.

And so, Maya began to write a book about their experience in order to share all of the strategies, shortcuts, loopholes and other surprises they’d discovered along the way.

The book is called The New Global Student:  Skip the SAT, Save Thousands On Tuition, and Get A Truly International Education.

If you’re looking for ways to completely avoid the craziness of the college application process–and the years of preparation before your child even gets to university–you won’t want to miss this book!

Whether you stay where you are, send your child abroad while in high school, take a year off to travel with the family, or sell it all and move abroad permanently, you’ll find immensely valuable information in this book that will save you a tremendous amount of money, time, and frustration.

Better yet–you’ll give your kids an outrageously relevant education that blasts them ahead of their peers in a uniquely off-the-charts way.

Without mortgaging the house.  Without loans.  And–if you choose–without even living in the United States.

Learn more about the book here