High-focus learning. Real time back.

My name is Lauren Marques, and I’m a K–2 guide with four  years of experience in special education. One thing I’ve come to believe strongly is that failure is one of the most important parts of learning. Many students- especially high-achieving students, put a huge amount of pressure on themselves to be perfect all the time. I believe every student deserves opportunities to struggle, make mistakes, reflect, and try again in an environment where failure is seen as part of growth instead of something to avoid.

As a guide, I’m passionate about making learning feel meaningful, exciting, and real. I love designing experiences where students can create, collaborate, take ownership, and challenge themselves in new ways. Some of my favorite moments are when students realize they can do hard things, recover from setbacks, and grow more confident because of it. I hope to create a classroom where students feel safe taking risks, learning from mistakes, and using failure as fuel.

I teach how things actually work.

My background cuts across computing, finance, cybersecurity, and education — not as surface exposure, but through deep operational work in each.

I started in a computer engineering lab at UT Austin, working directly with Professor Yale Patt on the second edition of his foundational computing textbook — the book that teaches how computers work from the transistor up. From there I moved into Silicon Valley, spending four years at National Instruments doing forward-deployed engineering: translating real customer problems into working measurement systems on-site.

Then came cybersecurity and organizational scale. As employee #3 and later VP of Sales at Praetorian, I helped build an elite Austin cybersecurity startup through roughly 800% revenue growth. Later, at Microsoft, I led worldwide cross-solution sales strategy.

Along the way I passed all three CFA exams on the first attempt, founded and operated my own registered investment advisory firm, and earned the CISSP. Computing, finance, cybersecurity — each was a real immersion, not a passing tour.

Then I left corporate America to teach.

I realized the thing I was best at — taking a complex system, revealing its underlying architecture, and helping someone else see it clearly — mattered more to me in a classroom than a boardroom.

At Fusion Academy, I became the most requested educator on campus, logging more than 3,000 hours of one-on-one mentorship and building a waitlist for my classes. The method was the same one I’d used throughout my career, just pointed at a different audience.

At GT Georgetown, that method drives everything I build.

Competition Lab is organized around depth, ownership, and earning your way in. Game Forge teaches systems thinking through game design. Every workshop starts from the same question:

“How does this actually work?”

The domain changes — robotics, strategy, risk, competition prep, entrepreneurship — but the skill underneath stays the same:

See the system. Find the lever. Build from there.

Pressure alone doesn't make a diamond — the right conditions do. Guiding is no different: the craft lies in knowing exactly when to push, when to ease off, and when to step back entirely. That balance is what I've built my career around.

I bring a competitor's intensity and a designer's precision to everything I build for students. As the founder and head coach of our Mathletes program, I've trained students to perform under real pressure in MOEMS and MATHCOUNTS, with our team earning top-3 medals at MOEMS. Next year, we'll host our own MOEMS tournament — a milestone for what is quickly becoming one of the school's flagship programs.

I also design workshops engineered to stretch students into territory they would not reach on their own:

• Chemical Cuisine — molecular gastronomy as a lens into the science of food
• Laugh Track — public speaking taught through the rigor of stand-up comedy
• Story Spark — a competitive writing intensive that culminated in a published student anthology

My philosophy:

Students thrive under structure. Schools too often confuse academic freedom — the freedom to explore ideas — with the freedom to choose what is actually good for them. The two are not the same. Turn the dial to full and most students will choose a game over nearly anything else.

Limitations are not the enemy of creativity; they are its engine. When the easy path closes, students discover what they are actually capable of. That principle matters more than ever in an era when AI offers a frictionless shortcut around effort itself. I want every piece of work my students produce to look unmistakably like them — even when that means failing. I would far rather see a student stumble through something authentically theirs than succeed by submitting someone else's thinking. Teaching students how to use AI well, and when not to use it at all, is one of the most consequential responsibilities of Guides today.

This philosophy is most visible in the Launches I design — 10-to-15-minute openers built to make students think, struggle, and yes, fail. Every Launch carries a deliberate friction point that demands creative or critical reasoning. The response I look for is not the right answer on the first try; it is the student who fails the challenge and immediately asks to attempt it again.