Our Team

Senior Coordinator

Jeannine Palhegyi

Not too long ago, Jeannine’s family faced the challenges of navigating the college planning process for her younger son. Not only does she belong to the HelloCollege Family as a team member, but she was also a client. Her appreciation for the challenges that families face as well as her knowledge of our programs allow her to assist in guiding families on the right path.

Jeannine has more than 20 years of customer service and sales experience. She has an extensive background in administrative services including budget management, personnel support, and client interaction to provide the utmost in customer satisfaction. Her organizational skills, attention to detail, and pleasant personality ensure each family has a successful start in the HelloCollege program.

Additionally, she volunteers with Hope for the Journey, a company that assists senior citizens with organization, decluttering and staging as they prepare to move to a smaller living environments.

Jeannine lives with her husband and youngest son in Chicago. She enjoys time with her family, her three grandchildren and her older son and daughter-in-law. She enjoys singing occasionally with her husband’s band and spending time with her parents and siblings.

She loves being a part of the HelloCollege Team, motivated by her passion for taking care of families.

College Counselor

Debra Gershow

College Counselor

Amanda Yoder

Amanda moved 14 times between kindergarten and 12th grade. This life of constant change taught her a lot about how to build resiliency and form relationships with all types of people. After the 9/11 attacks, she felt the call to serve her country and joined the military, where she learned key components of leadership, various careers, and diverse cultures–all of which she loves to apply when working with students.

Amanda then worked as a financial counselor while completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s of Education at Old Dominion University. Since then, she has served as a school counselor for nearly 10 years. In part due to her background as a combat veteran, Amanda possesses a diverse and extensive understanding of the challenges that military families face. When she became a counselor, she found they were underserved in the college application process, so she used that knowledge to innovate various presentations and programs to support children of military members in their pathways to college.

She has delivered training to thousands of educators and families and has served on the Virginia Department of Education’s Military Student Support Process Action Team since 2017. Amanda was born in Pennsylvania and now resides in Virginia. When Amanda is not working, you can find her traveling, gardening, or spending time with family and friends.

College Counselor

Rabab Ahmed

Rabab Ahmed is a coffee fanatic, adventure seeker, and proponent of student success. She has worked with diverse student populations in K-12 and higher education. She served as their academic advisor, mentor, and college success coach. She is a firm believer in the holistic student experience. As a proponent of student success, she aims for her students to thrive in and out of the classroom.

Rabab has her Doctorate of Education from Bowling Green State University in Leadership Studies. Her expertise in the realm of college readiness allows for her to enhance the successful transition of secondary graduates to post-secondary education through the utilization of the concepts of sense of belonging, the academic and non-academic factors of college readiness, and various data collection techniques. Her passion for student success stems from her inaccessibility to an inclusive learning environment that was designed to foster high academics, social, and emotional competencies of each student while growing up.

When Rabab is not working, she enjoys visiting local coffee shops, cooking, and running.

College Counselor

Raymond Gonzales

College Counselor

Don Keller

Don is an accomplished College Admissions Counselor with over two decades of professional student services experience emphasizing precision and detail. He earned both his MS in Sports Management and his BA in Elementary Education at University of Florida. Don has also spent over five years reading applications for UC – Berkeley and the Questbridge Scholars program.

Essay Coach

Will Wagner

Will fell in love with the written word his junior year in high school, thanks to an English teacher named Mrs. Kelley. She exposed him to the magic of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and especially John Steinbeck. Just like that, his future came into focus.

And while Will never became the next Steinbeck (darn!), he did go on to have a gratifying career in publishing as a writer and editor for everything from national magazines to websites. He even wrote a book of his own, Wrigley Blues: The Year the Cubs Played Hardball with the Curse (but Lost Anyway), published in 2004 by Taylor Trade. For the past several years, he also has worked as an essay coach at HelloCollege. His goal in this role is simple: to bring a little “Mrs. Kelley” to the game and help students down the path of fulfilling their passions and achieving their dreams.

Essay Coach

Chris Bench

Since he was a child, Chris has known he wanted to teach. Whether it be in his classrooms at the University of Chicago or Roosevelt University or the hundreds of students he’s worked with in his decade of essay coaching, Chris loves helping students find their voice on the page. “It’s an amazing privilege,” he reports, “seeing a student learn who they are as a writer. You’re really watching them discover themselves.”

In his free time, Chris is an avid cook. He particularly enjoys preparing Mexican food, even growing his own chiles for salsas and moles, and every Fourth of July, he throws a pig roast for his friends. An Eagle Scout, Chris also enjoys camping, backpacking, and paddling. He has gone trekking in Glacier, King’s Canyon, Yellowstone, and Gates of the Arctic National Parks. When he’s relaxing, Chris loves music and record collecting, and he’s always excited to learn what’s in his students’ earbuds.

Chris received his A.B. in English Language and Literature from Kenyon College and his M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago.

Tutor

Chris Judkins

Chris graduated from The University of Texas at San Antonio with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and a minor in Biology. After graduating, he jumped right into teaching and tutoring and hasn’t looked back. For more than a decade, Chris has taught Chemistry, Biology, and Physics at the high school level and tutored a variety of academic subjects and all manner of standardized tests including the SAT, ACT, and MCAT. Most recently Chris has been teaching and tutoring various subjects in Taiwan to local high school students. When he’s not teaching, he loves to play pickup basketball. If seen in the wild, he can be drawn in with a casual mention of tacos.