John Bacolores
Dr. John Bacolores, Ed.D., is an experienced educator with 10+ years of experience in both college counseling and career coaching. He graduated with an AA in General Studies - Social and Behavioral Sciences with Honors from El Camino College (ECC) before transferring and graduating with a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley. He then graduated with an MA in Educational Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and graduated with a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Educational Leadership - Educational Psychology concentration at the University of Southern California (USC). He’s also earned certificates in Data Analytics (Excel, SQL, and Tableau), Python Programming, and Product Management.
John has spent the majority of his professional career in education. He’s a former K-5 teacher and taught 2nd and 4th grade. As an independent college consultant, his students have been accepted and matriculated to top 30 universities and liberal arts colleges such as Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, UChicago, Carnegie Mellon University, Brown/RISD (Dual Degree), Penn, Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, NYU (Stern/Tisch), Vanderbilt, Emory University, UT Austin, USC, Rice University, University of Notre Dame, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Miami, Northeastern University, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, University of Virginia, Vassar College, Middlebury College, and the UC and CSU campuses.
Recently, he worked for an international online coding bootcamp as a Senior Career Coach where he coached career changers to get hired in tech-related roles in User Experience (UX) Design, Software Engineering, Data Science, and Data Analytics. He’s led 8 hackathons, with 2 of his teams winning First Place and 2 winning “Crowd Favorite.” His grads have been hired at Fortune 500 companies such as Accenture, Activision Blizzard, Avery Dennison, Bloomberg, Google, Interpublic Group (IPG), Ford Motor Company, KPMG, and Yahoo! He’s currently volunteering with an international non-profit organization dedicated to helping LGBTQIA+ folks find community in the tech industry.
His firm yet supportive approach to counseling and coaching is the same: deconstruct and reduce the anxiety surrounding the college admissions, career development, and job search process with empathy, humor, and honesty.
For self-care, Dr. Bacolores is a hip-hop dancer with 10+ years of performance experience, returning to dance after taking a 5-year break, and is currently (re)training at an industry/professional level dance studio in Burbank, CA weekly. To balance his physical activity, he is an avid home chef and baker, currently learning how to adapt his Banana Bread recipe to his new vegan diet. He’s also a great cat stepdaddy to his fiancé’s cat, Reese.
His catch phase: sometimes things change, but they change for the better.