A Day in the Life: Brett Noble ’26

6:30 a.m. 

I fell in love with teaching early and spent 10 years in the classroom at KIPP North Carolina, a network of public charter schools. When I got into systems-level leadership, I realized a lot of the things that helped me drive results individually didn’t scale to hundreds of teachers and thousands of students. I wanted to put my mind to finding better solutions and building sustainable systems.

The time at Broad is really sacred, because for these residency weeks you put up an out-of-office email and commit to learning for 12 hours a day. I don’t normally get to do that. Stephanie Dunson, one of our professors, encourages us to write and reflect as much as possible, so I started out the day journaling. I try to do that every morning I’m in New Haven.

7:00 a.m. 

There’s a very encouraging and welcoming group of classmates who like to exercise early in the morning. I went to Payne Whitney Gymnasium, the campus rec center, with Leea Driskell-Garcia, Brian Forde Jr., Rachel Rucker Kargol, and Dorian Camp. It’s great to get the blood flowing before the day starts.

The breakfast setup at our hotel is amazing—and I’m not even a breakfast guy. It’s also a great space to see everyone and be in community before we get to class. There’s a bus that takes folks to campus, but a crew of us are pretty religious about walking every day.

9:00 a.m. 

To start out the day, we had a guest lecture from Caitlin Richard, a program alum who’s now the CFO at Hartford Public Schools. Recently, the system faced a significant budget deficit, and she gave an account of her time navigating that challenge, partnering with the state to get to a more sustainable place, and representing the district on the news and in other high-stakes situations. Seth Zimmerman, one of our professors, also serves on the Connecticut Board of Education, and he discussed how they approached the problem.

9:30 a.m. 

The lecture was a great preface for our first course, Financial Information for Strategic Decisions with Thomas Steffen. I was pretty nervous about this course. I don’t have an accounting background, and the pre-work involved reading some heavy case studies and textbook chapters on financial cost accounting, so I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. But Professor Steffen has become one of our favorite professors across the cohort. He’s empowered us with the understanding that internal cost accounting is a series of values-based decisions, not just a process of plugging in numbers.

Professor Steffen was also my faculty advisor for my capstone project, which involved creating an early-college program for my high school. For a long time, we had an issue with the top academically performing eighth graders leaving us to attend other early colleges in the area, so we decided to develop similar programming ourselves. Creating that program was a perfect challenge to take on for the capstone—it touches every stakeholder in the school system and addresses a real need that no one else had solved. When I was considering staffing models, Thomas helped me see all the creative funding options at my disposal. Now, we’ve gotten to the point of enrolling our first class of students.

11:00 a.m. 

We’re usually pretty fired up during class breaks, so we keep the conversation going to digest what we just learned. Rene Rodriguez and I have gotten really close this past year, both from hearing our leadership stories and finding similar interests. We text at least every week and have become lifelines this summer. Ahead of this residency week, he and I flew to Boston to spend a night with our classmate Brian and then play Yale’s golf course before starting class on Monday.

12:50 p.m. 

That day, the program team had invited alumni from previous years—many of whom studied with The Broad Center when it was based in Los Angeles—to do a day of learning and expand their network. We got the opportunity to have lunch with them and learn about their work. The food was top-notch. We always get spoiled during residency week.

One part of the Broad experience that I really value is the attention paid to cultivating relationships and networks in service of creating change. If the program team knows you’re interested in something specific, they’ll put you in touch with someone from a previous cohort who’s also doing that work. For example, they connected me with Josh Czupryk, who recently started his own talent firm. We talked about what it might look like to partner with our school district, since we have some big searches coming up.

Of course, when Handsome Dan came in, all conversation stopped.

2:15 p.m. 

After lunch, we had Internal Communications with Stephanie Germeraad. The first thing she said to our cohort at the beginning of the week was, “I just Googled every one of you.” It was a striking way of starting a conversation about what it means to have an online presence as a systems-level leader. From there, we zoomed out to ask bigger questions: how do we communicate with internal stakeholders? How do we communicate with different constituencies in the district?

Later in the session, we split up into groups to analyze a sample communication to district families about enrolling their kids in advanced math. The letter wasn’t that effective about communicating the message to the intended audience, so we revised it using some of the strategies—like avoiding jargon—we learned from Professor Germeraad. Liz Striebel was our team captain, organizing all the complexities that we needed to get into one letter.

3:45 p.m. 

Ashley Daniels-Hall always provides some comic relief during class breaks. I also caught up with Professor Steffen on my early-college project. Professors here are genuinely invested in our success and make themselves available above and beyond teaching us in the classroom.

7:45 p.m. 

Some nights, we stay on campus for dinner and evening classes. Sometimes, we’re encouraged to go out to dinner with our A-teams to strengthen our relationships. That night, we had a karaoke night. Traditionally, karaoke is really stressful for me, but because of all the trust and love in the room I was able to lean into it. I chose “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield as my song, and everyone knew the words and sang along. The raw joy I experienced really speaks to the power of building a cohort of people who care for each other the way we do.