About early bird college
We believe every student deserves a college admissions experience that elevates their
strengths, expands their opportunities, and helps them achieve their best-fit future.
Our Values in Action
Together, Carrie and Jessica are committed to ensuring students are not left navigating alone, but equipped, empowered, and ready to claim their future.
Families deserve to celebrate this time in their student’s life. They are about to leave the nest and pursue their future. Instead, parents are overwhelmed, students are disempowered, and everyone is stressed, often leading to conflict and/or tension. At early bird, we provide focus and act as a calm in the college planning storm.
Our goal is simple: to make thoughtful college planning more accessible, less stressful, and more grounded in each student’s strengths and aspirations.
We believe every student deserves the clarity and support needed to find their best-fit future—so the parent can go back to being a supportive cheerleader rather than a taskmaster or nag. We see this as an opportunity to bring connection and celebration back into this pivotal phase in a family’s life.
– Carrie Jorgenson & Jessica Shearon
Meet the Founders
Carrie Jorgenson
Carrie’s path into college counseling began with a moment that stayed with her. During her junior year of high school, her leadership class participated in an exercise that illustrated how opportunity can diverge based on background and circumstance. By the end, the room had physically spread apart in ways that reflected differences in race and socioeconomic status. The experience left a lasting impression and sparked her curiosity about how systems create — or limit — opportunity.
That curiosity became the foundation of her career.
Carrie went on to work across multiple parts of the college admissions ecosystem, including K-12 schools, university admissions offices, and the private counseling sector. While working in K-12 schools, she supported more than 1,000 families navigating the college planning process. She later served in the admissions offices at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, where she evaluated more than 2,000 applications and gained an inside perspective on how admissions decisions are made.
Her perspective deepened again while working in the private sector, advising families who could afford elite counseling services. There she noticed something surprising: even highly successful families often felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the college process. Resources could help navigate the system, but they didn’t necessarily make it clearer.
That realization crystallized a larger insight. If families with significant resources still struggled to make sense of the process, many others were navigating it with far fewer tools and far less guidance.
Carrie founded early bird to help close that gap. Her goal is simple: to make thoughtful college planning more accessible, less stressful, and more grounded in each student’s strengths and aspirations. She believes every student deserves the clarity and support needed to find their best-fit future—not just those who can afford private counseling.
Jessica Shearon
Suddenly, at sixteen, Jessica was on her own. She completed three years in the International Baccalaureate program when her circumstances changed overnight. She left school and began supporting herself. Quickly, she learned and pivoted life priorities, determined that she could write her own story and not become a statistic.
Over time, she rebuilt her life and education from the ground up, ultimately earning her degree and becoming one of the first women in her family to graduate from college. The process was complex; no tools could connect the dots, and there was not enough money to pay for help. Today, that complexity has significantly grown.
For more than 25 years, Jessica has built and scaled technology at companies including Apple, USAA, and Poly/HP. Her work focused on solving complex problems and anticipating needs before users could articulate them, launching and scaling products and experiences used by millions, and helping to position Poly for its $3.3B acquisition by HP.
Jessica believes education is the ultimate multiplier. She saw an opportunity to apply the same disciplined systems thinking to a place where clarity matters most, ensuring that capable students don’t lose momentum. Early bird college was built at the intersection of lived experience and execution. It exists to provide the structured support system and forward-looking guidance Jessica never had, guidance she was forced to construct on her own, so that capable students don’t fall through the gaps of a fragmented system. The future should not depend on insider access. The future should belong to students who are ready to build it.
Jessica is the driving force behind early bird’s platform, committed to ensuring that the tools for a “best-fit” future are intuitive, empowering, and accessible to all. Her mission is clear: create the infrastructure she once needed and make it available at scale, so no one has to face one of life’s most pivotal crossroads alone, and so no capable student’s potential is ever left to chance.