About Us

Our Team

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Ferah Aziz, Founder & College Coach

Certified Educational Planner
B.S.B.A. Finance, M.B.A.
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Ferah has taught and coached students for over 20 years.

Ferah started helping students with college admissions coaching in 2007, and co-founded launchphase2 LLC in 2011. She enjoys guiding students to truly understand who they are, who they want to be, and how to create options to get there. Ferah’s coaching helps students be their best selves, from improving their grades, to gaining college admissions, and to finding internships, jobs and launching their careers.

Ferah stays current on the latest in college admissions by attending conferences, through professional development activities and by frequent college visits. Ferah enjoyed co-authoring an education column with P. Carol Jones, in the Fort Collins Coloradoan for three years. Additionally, Ms. Jones and Ferah were guest speakers at nationwide webinars on Student Success and Coaching Parents and Believing & Letting Go.

Prior to working as a college coach, Ferah began her fulfilling education career as a college instructor at The Institute of Business & Medical Careers (IBMC), where she taught Student Success, a course designed to help students discover their interests, strengths, and learning styles, followed by goal setting. Additionally, Ferah’s students learned study skills and test taking strategies. Ferah helped establish IBMC’s two-year business degree program and taught a variety of business courses along with Career Marketing, Speech, and Leadership. Prior to Ferah’s education career, she worked at Citicorp in a number of positions including as  a manager and a regional financial controller.

A Colorado native, Ferah enjoyed living in the Bay Area, NYC, Chicago, Germany, and in the Middle East, where she gained appreciation for various lifestyles, perspectives, and education systems. Ferah and her husband Asad Aziz, a business professor at Colorado State University (previously an electrical engineer and high-tech manager), raised their daughters in Fort Collins. Their oldest daughter graduated from Santa Clara University and worked in Silicon Valley (at SanDisk), in Portland, OR (at Columbia Sportswear) and now works for EY (in Seattle, previously in Chicago). Their second daughter, a University of San Diego graduate, is a dean at a Denver high school where she taught 10th grade chemistry.

Ferah’s Professional Development: College Visits, Education Columns (44), Conference AttendancePresentations, and Professional Development activities.

Ferah’s Service Work: launchphase2 Service Club Advisor (10 years), University of Colorado Healthcare Ethics Committee (16 years), Poudre School District Volunteer (20 years), DECA judge (8 years), Speech & Debate Judge (2021), Mock Interviews in local high schools (7 years), Speaker/Presentations at Poudre School District (3 years),  and pro-bono college/career coaching for disadvantaged students (8 years).

Prior Volunteer Positions: Leader’s Challenge high school club advisor (1 year), Girl Scout Leader (2 years), and Ferah started after school enrichment programs at Shepardson Elementary school.

Ferah’s Professional Memberships:

Ferah is a member of the American Institute of Certified Educational Planners (AICEP), the Higher Education Consultants Association (HECA), the ACT Colorado State Organization Council, the Rocky Mountain Association for College Admissions Counseling (RMACAC), and the College Consultants of Colorado (CCC) organizations.

 

 

College Consultants of Colorado (CCC) leadership positions: Ferah served the Denver based CCC organization (with about 60 members) as president (2020-22), as a board member (2019-22), as treasurer (2017-20) and as a marketing & press committee member.

Ethical Standards

Our coaches adhere to ethical codes and standards of conduct as prescribed by professional college admissions organizations:

  • National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC)
  • Rocky Mountain Association of College Admissions Counselors (RMACAC), and
  • Higher Education Consultants Association (HECA).
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Beth Godzich, College Coach

B.A. History, M. Ed. School Counseling
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Beth has been providing personalized service for college-bound students and their families for ten years (through Godzich Consulting LLC). She started collaborating with Ferah Aziz to support students in 2021. Beth supports students with varied profiles, including those with learning/attention differences and special needs. Beth directs students toward a path of discovery, success, and happiness by applying a strengths-based approach to help them maximize their potential. Devoted to a “Best-Fit” philosophy, Beth encourages students to be discriminatory in their college search and helps students complete compelling college applications.

Beth, her husband, and two teenage children have lived in Denver, CO for the past seven years. Prior to working as independent educational consultant, Beth worked as a school counselor in both public and private settings in Buffalo, NY Chicago, IL, and Minneapolis, MN.

In addition to her work with students Beth is committed to the community through her service with the Denver Scholarship Foundation. She has served as a Future Center volunteer at John F. Kennedy High School, and she annually helps to facilitate college application and financial aid workshops at area Denver Public High Schools.. Knowledgeable in assisting diverse learners to be successful in the K-12 setting and preparing them for higher education, Beth also served on the Technology Advancement Committee at a local school that serves students with learning and attention differences.

Beth’s commitment to her professional development is broadly evidenced. She has completed coursework in both UCLA’s College Counseling Certificate Program and UC Irvine’s Independent Consultant Education Program. She also maintains membership in the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), College Consultants of Colorado group, and Rocky Mountain Association for College Admission Counseling (RMACAC). By attending professional conferences and frequently visiting colleges and universities Beth stays current in the college counseling industry.

Beth adheres to ethical codes and standards of conduct as prescribed by professional college admissions organizations:

    • National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC),
    • Rocky Mountain Association of College Admissions Counselors (RMACAC), and
    • College Consultants of Colorado

P. Carol Jones
Essay Coach

Editor, Author
B.A. Journalism
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Carol is a freelance writer/editor and owner of an editorial services business that includes editing college admissions essays, and coaching secondary and college students in writing. She collaborates with launchphase2 by providing college admissions essay edits, as a co-author of the educational column in the Coloradoan, and as co-presenter at education seminars. Carol is the author of Toward College Success: Is Your Teenager Ready, Willing and Able?, a resource for parents of middle and high school students to help them evaluate and prepare their teenagers for success in college, or to help them make the decision that going straight to college after high school is not the right path for their child. The book emphasizes the non-academic and life skills that all teenagers need to succeed in whatever they do after high school. As a writer and journalist, Carol has written on a variety of topics for local, regional, and national audiences; as an editor, she has worked on both technical and general documents. or more information on her work, visit: http://pcaroljones.com/

Autumn Marie
Office Manager

Dance Instructor/Judge/Choreographer

Webinar Moderator/Data Management Specialist
B.S. Telecom, Theater Minor
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Autumn has multiple talents, from keeping launchphase2 organized and running smoothly, to preparing various tools and documents for students pursuing their college and career goals, while devoting herself to instructing and inspiring her dance students. After graduating from the University of Florida, Autumn continued her education in New York City at The Kane School for Pilates and The School for Film and Television. For 20-plus years, Autumn’s professional dance career has included performing around the world, including dancing with the Radio City Rockettes for seven years and at Tokyo Disneyland. After leaving New York City, Autumn and her husband founded the nonprofit, Make and Believe Productions and she taught dance at Brenau University in Georgia. Autumn is also a producer and director with The Project Dance Foundation and selected to write their Producer’s Manual. Autumn currently teaches, judges and choreographs around the country, is a receptionist at Advanced Otolaryngology and Audiology and manages the office for launchphase2 LLC.

Ferah Aziz, Founder & College Coach

Certified Educational Planner
B.S.B.A. Finance, M.B.A.
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Ferah has taught and coached students for over 20 years.

Ferah started helping students with college admissions coaching in 2007, and co-founded launchphase2 LLC in 2011. She enjoys guiding students to truly understand who they are, who they want to be, and how to create options to get there. Ferah’s coaching helps students be their best selves, from improving their grades, to gaining college admissions, and to finding internships, jobs and launching their careers.

Ferah stays current on the latest in college admissions by attending conferences, through professional development activities and by frequent college visits. Ferah enjoyed co-authoring an education column with P. Carol Jones, in the Fort Collins Coloradoan for three years. Additionally, Ms. Jones and Ferah were guest speakers at nationwide webinars on Student Success and Coaching Parents and Believing & Letting Go.

Prior to working as a college coach, Ferah began her fulfilling education career as a college instructor at The Institute of Business & Medical Careers (IBMC), where she taught Student Success, a course designed to help students discover their interests, strengths, and learning styles, followed by goal setting. Additionally, Ferah’s students learned study skills and test taking strategies. Ferah helped establish IBMC’s two-year business degree program and taught a variety of business courses along with Career Marketing, Speech, and Leadership. Prior to Ferah’s education career, she worked at Citicorp in a number of positions including as  a manager and a regional financial controller.

A Colorado native, Ferah enjoyed living in the Bay Area, NYC, Chicago, Germany, and in the Middle East, where she gained appreciation for various lifestyles, perspectives, and education systems. Ferah and her husband Asad Aziz, a business professor at Colorado State University (previously an electrical engineer and high-tech manager), raised their daughters in Fort Collins. Their oldest daughter graduated from Santa Clara University and worked in Silicon Valley (at SanDisk), in Portland, OR (at Columbia Sportswear) and now works for EY (in Seattle, previously in Chicago). Their second daughter, a University of San Diego graduate, is a dean at a Denver high school where she taught 10th grade chemistry.

Ferah’s Professional Development: College Visits, Education Columns (44), Conference AttendancePresentations, and Professional Development activities.

Ferah’s Service Work: launchphase2 Service Club Advisor (10 years), University of Colorado Healthcare Ethics Committee (16 years), Poudre School District Volunteer (20 years), DECA judge (8 years), Speech & Debate Judge (2021), Mock Interviews in local high schools (7 years), Speaker/Presentations at Poudre School District (3 years),  and pro-bono college/career coaching for disadvantaged students (8 years).

Prior Volunteer Positions: Leader’s Challenge high school club advisor (1 year), Girl Scout Leader (2 years), and Ferah started after school enrichment programs at Shepardson Elementary school.

Ferah’s Professional Memberships:

Ferah is a member of the American Institute of Certified Educational Planners (AICEP), the Higher Education Consultants Association (HECA), the ACT Colorado State Organization Council, the Rocky Mountain Association for College Admissions Counseling (RMACAC), and the College Consultants of Colorado (CCC) organizations.

 

 

College Consultants of Colorado (CCC) leadership positions: Ferah served the Denver based CCC organization (with about 60 members) as president (2020-22), as a board member (2019-22), as treasurer (2017-20) and as a marketing & press committee member.

Ethical Standards

Our coaches adhere to ethical codes and standards of conduct as prescribed by professional college admissions organizations:

  • National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC)
  • Rocky Mountain Association of College Admissions Counselors (RMACAC), and
  • Higher Education Consultants Association (HECA).

P. Carol Jones
Essay Coach

Editor, Author
B.A. Journalism
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Carol is a freelance writer/editor and owner of an editorial services business that includes editing college admissions essays, and coaching secondary and college students in writing. She collaborates with launchphase2 by providing college admissions essay edits, as a co-author of the educational column in the Coloradoan, and as co-presenter at education seminars. Carol is the author of Toward College Success: Is Your Teenager Ready, Willing and Able?, a resource for parents of middle and high school students to help them evaluate and prepare their teenagers for success in college, or to help them make the decision that going straight to college after high school is not the right path for their child. The book emphasizes the non-academic and life skills that all teenagers need to succeed in whatever they do after high school. As a writer and journalist, Carol has written on a variety of topics for local, regional, and national audiences; as an editor, she has worked on both technical and general documents. or more information on her work, visit: http://pcaroljones.com/

Autumn Morgenstern
Office Manager

Dance Judge/Instructor/Choreographer
B.S. in Telecom, Minor in Theater
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Autumn has multiple talents, from keeping launchphase2 organized and running smoothly, to preparing various tools and documents for students pursuing their college and career goals, while devoting herself to instructing and inspiring her dance students. After graduating from the University of Florida, Autumn continued her education in New York City at The Kane School for Pilates and The School for Film and Television. For 20-plus years, Autumn’s professional dance career has included performing around the world, including dancing with the Radio City Rockettes for seven years and at Tokyo Disneyland. After leaving New York City, Autumn and her husband founded the nonprofit, Make and Believe Productions and she taught dance at Brenau University in Georgia. Autumn is also a producer and director with The Project Dance Foundation and selected to write their Producer’s Manual. Autumn currently teaches, judges and choreographs around the country, is a receptionist at Advanced Otolaryngology and Audiology and manages the office for launchphase2 LLC.

Advisory Board

June L. Bouscaren, Advisor

J.D., Law , B.S., Electrical Engineering
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June L. Bouscaren graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and worked as an electrical engineer and software developer for 8 years at HP before attending law school. After graduating from Suffolk University in Boston, MA with a Juris Doctor, she began her legal career at Amp Incorporated where her practice focused on creation, acquisition, retention, protection and licensing all forms of intellectual property. After moving to Colorado in 1999, June started and operated a private law practice before joining Agilent Technologies, Inc. as in-house counsel in 2004, transitioning to Keysight Technologies, Inc. when it split off from Agilent in 2014. She is licensed to practice law in the states of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Colorado as well as before the United States Patent and Trademark Office and is currently employed by Keysight as Managing Counsel. June’s daughter graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Broadcast Journalism and is currently a free lance journalist living in Istanbul. June’s son is a iOS software developer for Reddit living in Chicago.

Vance Harwood , Advisor

B.S., Electrical Engineering
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After graduating from the University of Colorado, Vance embarked on a 35-year career working for HP, and various other high-tech companies in technical and managerial roles in R&D, Marketing, and Finance.  His corporate accomplishments included two international assignments, and the awarding of 5 patents. Vance changed gears in 2011, transitioning to developing a financial blogging / consulting business.

His blog,  , has logged over 3 million visits, and his twitter account, @6_figure_invest has over 15 thousand followers.  Vance covers a wide range of topics, including investor psychology, Exchange Traded Funds, volatility as an asset class, and various derivative strategies. Vance is a Senior Consultant for Invest in Vol, as well on being on their advisory board.  Vance has been quoted in multiple online publications, including Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal.

Laura Hester, Advisor

AB Psychology, MD Family Medicine
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Laura wears many hats: mother, physician, and professor. She commutes to work at the University of North Carolina where she teaches medical students and residents, and provides medical care for underserved patients in a rural emergency department where she is the Medical Director. Laura is the child of a military family, and graduated from high school at Jakarta International School, in Jakarta, Indonesia, where her father was assigned to the American Embassy. She then attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, majoring in Psychology and completing her pre-med requirements, all while working off-campus 40 hours per week. Upon graduation, she deferred medical school for a year to accept the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship which supported her as she studied traditional medicine in Indonesia and China. Her world travel slowed down a bit as she headed to medical school in North Carolina and completed her Family Medicine residency in South Bend, IN. She was in private practice there for 5 years while her husband, Chris Peterson, completed post-doctoral research in Mathematics at Notre Dame. In 1999, she and her family settled down in Fort Collins, CO and her husband joined the faculty at Colorado State University. Along the way, she has helped to launch her first 4 children, as well as their Indonesian exchange student, into their college careers at Stanford, Duke, Yale, The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and The University of North Carolina in Asheville. She has one child remaining in high school, and is beginning to prepare for an empty nest. Her eldest son is married and works in banking in Seattle, and her second son just began graduate studies in Mathematics at The University of Michigan. Laura and her husband enjoyed their own educational sabbatical last year, spending a semester in Bali, Indonesia where their two youngest children attended The Green School and the entire family became certified scuba divers.

Linda Kennedy, Advisor

B.S., Electrical Engineering
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Linda has a degree in electrical engineering and has spent the majority of her career building new businesses and driving strategy within a Fortune 100 company.  She is a startup coach, helping entrepreneurs build their dream businesses and her passion is understanding the customer and giving them meaningful products, services, and innovation. Linda has two US patents in her name in digital imaging.

Linda has two daughters in the bioscience space – both are graduates of CU Boulder in Molecular Biology.  They are both pursuing advanced degrees — one is a recent PhD graduate in Computational Biology at Princeton and the other is a fellow at the NIH in clinical research. Linda stays active with students by tutoring in math & guest speaking on marketing and career topics at the secondary and college level.

Bob Komives, Advisor

B.S.B.A. Art-Architecture, M.A. Planning
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Bob earned his master’s in planning from Harvard, and his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth where he was also an all-conference football player. Prior to retirement, he operated his own firm in Ft. Collins, providing land-use planning services (clients include the Kickapoo Indians and the City of Ft. Collins). Bob was also the regional planning director on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Fluent in Spanish, he worked almost five years in Central America, both as a Peace Corps volunteer and a watershed management professional. He also lead bicycle tours for three years in Costa Rica. His community involvement ranges from Spanish tutor to board member for Bas Bleu Theatre. Bob has published his poetry in Good Day (illustrated by Gale Whitman), and in Scribbles and Coddles with his own illustrations. He has economic thoughts as an e-book: Economics of Abundance: The Bob Komives Conjectures. The breadth of his work, including autobiographical vignettes (“Autobiographical Sketches”) can be accessed on his home page.

Mary Pat McCurdie, Advisor

PhD Chemical Engineering
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Mary Pat McCurdie has a wide-ranging background: chemical engineering, entrepreneurship, ballet, and not-for-profit organizations. She worked as a chemical engineer (Orbital/ATK, Ball Aerospace, CSU Graduate Research Associate, HP/Agilent Technologies) from 1983–2002, when she purchased “The Dance Closet,” a small dancewear boutique near CSU in Fort Collins. In 2005, she grew the store’s lines to include yoga and fitness wear, changed the name, and relocated to Old Town Fort Collins.

Mary Pat performed with Canyon Concert Ballet (1987-2009), dancing and mentoring many young dancers as they grew into young adulthood. She served on the Board of Directors of Canyon Concert Ballet from 2005–2011, acting as Treasurer, Vice-President, and President. From 2011-2017 she served on the local board of Book Trust, a national not-for-profit supporting early childhood literacy through providing choice and ownership of books to children in low-income communities. In 2019 she joined the board of the Fort Collins Symphony association where she currently is Treasurer.

She recently started a charitable foundation, Arts Without End, to provide internships to teens and young adults studying the classical performing arts. The interns will have the opportunity to learn about non-profit arts organization management; the goal being to create more adults in communities who volunteer, attend performances, and provide financial support to their local arts organizations.

She and her husband have one son who graduated from Westminster College in 2013. He recently completed a Project Management Professional Certification.

Original Co-Founders

Ann Keith, Co-Founder

BS Journalism/Public Relations
MS in Adult & Continuing Education
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Ann is retired from a career in international sponsored student program administration at Colorado State and Purdue Universities.   Her experience working with students and faculty of Agriculture, Engineering and Forestry also included planning training programs for short-term international visitors in those fields.

During her 34 years in Fort Collins, Ann has worked on boards and served as a volunteer at several non-profit agencies. She currently serves on the Administrative Team of the League of Women Voters of Larimer County.  Ann and her husband enjoy gardening, camping, and traveling.  They have two daughters, both living in Fort Collins again, whom they enjoy spending time with.

Bitte Lindell-Colby, Co-Founder

LCSW, MSW in Social Work
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Bitte has experience in counseling and coaching youth for over 27 as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and college coach. Bitte has post-graduate training in Family Therapy from universities and institutes in Sweden, London and Boston. Bitte managed a team of Social Workers in Colorado. She also provided clinical supervision to Master’s Degree Social Workers working toward their license (LCSW). Bitte and her husband have a son who co-owns a production company in NYC, and a daughter who is working in Public Health in Boston. Both have undergraduate degrees from Bowdoin College, and her daughter has a Master’s Degree in Public Health from Tufts University School of Medicine.