About Susan

Susan Chan Shifflett is a former Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale, where she evaluated over 2,500 applications. She is currently an independent college admissions consultant at Endurable Education. She works with students to prepare them for the college admissions process and to thrive academically, extracurricularly, and personally. She has been interviewed on outlets such as Good Morning America, ABC, CBS, and CNBC, to discuss issues of higher education and admissions.

Susan’s career has focused on education, spanning the public, private, and non-profit sectors. She formerly worked at the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), where she managed a $12 million+ budget of trade promotion and education activities. She organized study tours for international trade delegations, featuring training at colleges across the U.S., including Stanford, Yale, University of Arkansas, University of Wisconsin, and University of Maryland. She also managed the agency’s intern program, piloting the first agency-wide intern presentations. In addition, she led the agency’s Traditional Energy and Power Team, which launched the largest energy initiative in the agency’s history. As a result, she was the recipient of the Agency’s Innovation Award (peer-nominated) for two years in a row.

Prior to USTDA, Susan was a program associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum (CEF), where she wrote numerous publications and appeared on media outlets, such as BBC, as a thought leader on U.S.-China food security issues.

Susan lived in Beijing from 2007-2010, with stints at China’s Center of Disease Control and Cummins, Inc. In Beijing, she served as a Yale alumni interviewer and helped to implement the 1st Yale Book Award Program in China.

Susan holds an M.A. in International Economics from Johns Hopkins University – School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.S. in Biology from Yale University. She is bilingual in Mandarin Chinese and English.

She currently resides in the Washington, D.C. metro area with her husband, kids, and Golden Retriever. In her spare time, she enjoys playing guitar, following UCLA gymnastics, scouring Yelp for good eats, and doing barre.

Awards: USTDA's 2018 and 2017 Innovation Award; Bill & Melinda Gates Fellowship; Global Governance Futures Fellowship (Robert Bosch Foundation); C.V. Starr Foundation Fellowship; Douglas K. Bereuter Fellowship (The Asia Foundation)