Megan has always been curious about the world around her. Growing up in Cincinnati as the daughter of two opera singers, much of her childhood revolved around music. She studied piano, cello, vocal music and ballet at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, while some of her favorite nights were spent on the back deck with her dad, listening to classical music and staring at the stars. Long before she knew what astrophysics was, she wanted to understand the universe.

By eighth grade, Megan had outgrown the academics at her school and set her sights on Ursuline Academy, an all-girls high school known for its academics. There was one significant problem: her family couldn’t afford the tuition. Megan prepared for the entrance exam and earned a full merit scholarship that made attending Ursuline possible. Her education there would ultimately help open another door for a scholarship to study astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Ursuline also gave Megan something she wouldn’t fully appreciate until she left. She spent four years surrounded by intelligent, ambitious young women in an environment where girls were expected to ask questions, challenge themselves and pursue big goals. During her first physics class, a teacher pulled her aside and told her there weren’t enough women in physics and that Megan had a knack for it. The conversation transformed a lifelong fascination with the night sky into a direction for her life.

College challenged Megan in ways she never anticipated. She entered a male-dominated physics program and, for the first time, began questioning whether she belonged in the room. She also faced significant personal adversity that interrupted her education and eventually led her to step away from school for a semester. She returned determined to finish what she had started, rebuilt her confidence as a student, and earned her degree in Astrophysics.

One of the people who influenced her most during her college years was her first female astrophysics professor. She was curious, creative, unapologetically herself, and unlike the image Megan had unconsciously formed of what a physicist was supposed to be. Watching her made Megan recognize how much representation had shaped her own life. She had experienced what it felt like to grow up surrounded by women who made ambition feel normal, and she had experienced how quickly that certainty could change when those women disappeared from the room.

For years, Megan told people she had three goals: earn her Ph.D. in astrophysics, contribute to the field, and eventually create a STEM initiative for young women. After graduation, she taught astronomy in California before moving to Montana and beginning what she expected would be a temporary job tutoring physics and calculus while preparing for graduate school. Instead, she spent the following years becoming an educator and learning how to build an education company from the inside out. Eventually, Megan realized that the STEM initiative didn’t have to wait.

She founded All Girls’ Prep around a conviction that had been built through every stage of her own education: the environments young women learn in, and the people they learn from, can profoundly shape what they believe they are capable of. Megan wanted girls to be surrounded by women who expected them to be curious, work hard, ask questions, take risks and keep going when something was difficult. Above all, she wanted them to enter the next stage of their lives already believing that they belonged there.

Megan’s path to this work was not particularly straight, and she wouldn’t change that. She has built her life around pursuing things that challenge her, from astrophysics to entrepreneurship to ultramarathons through the mountains. Along the way, she has learned to trust that both adversity and the hard things she chooses to pursue will introduce her to a version of herself she hasn’t met yet. That experience has shaped the way she shows up for her students: with an unwavering belief in who they are capable of becoming, even when they can’t see it yet.