Sophie Lawson

Sophie Lawson spent the first decade of her career sitting across a desk from students who were stressed, confused, and convinced they were failing when the numbers actually told a different story. She worked as an academic advisor at two universities in Scotland, first at the University of Edinburgh straight after completing her undergraduate degree, and later at Heriot-Watt University after finishing her Master's in Glasgow. Her job was to help students understand their academic standing, calculate what grades they needed to reach their goals, and make sense of systems that universities somehow manage to make more complicated than they need to be.

She studied Education Studies at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 2011. Her undergraduate research focused on the relationship between student self-assessment accuracy and actual academic performance, a topic she found endlessly useful in practice because most students she advised were either more behind or further ahead than they thought. She completed her Master's in Educational Psychology and Learning Development at the University of Glasgow in 2013, where her dissertation examined how grading system differences between the UK, US, and European universities created confusion for international transfer students.

After nearly ten years in university advising, Sophie moved into educational content writing to reach a wider audience than she could from one office. The questions she spent years answering in person, how do I calculate my GPA, what grade do I need on the final exam, how do I convert my score to a percentage, turned out to be exactly the questions millions of people were searching for online. At Bro Calculator, she writes and reviews all tools in the Education and Time categories, bringing the same clarity she used in student advising sessions to every calculator page she works on.