Mara Quinlan PCC, CPCC

Mara spent the first decade of her career on the other side of the table: three years in agency recruiting, then seven in-house, finishing as a senior recruiter for a national health system where she hired everyone from analysts to VPs. She read something like forty thousand resumes in those years. What stayed with her was not the resumes - it was how many accomplished people sat across from her interviewing for roles they had already quietly outgrown, because applying for the same job at a different company felt safer than asking a bigger question.

She trained with the Co-Active Training Institute (CPCC, 2015), earned her ICF Professional Certified Coach credential, and opened Halsted Career Studio in a one-room Lincoln Park office in 2016. The studio has grown to six coaches, but her model has not changed: small caseloads, honest conversations, and homework that happens in the real world rather than in a workbook.

Mara still coaches roughly twenty clients at a time, most of them mid-career professionals navigating a change of direction. She leads the studio's coach supervision and is the voice behind most of the essays in our Field Notes.

Outside the studio she is a lap swimmer, an over-committed perennial gardener, and a person who has genuinely read the acknowledgements section of every career book published since 2010.