On paper, the job looks dubious. Wanted: teacher for Australia's most disadvantaged schools. Tough conditions, average salary and rigorous selection process. Must be super bright, yet humble. Don't bother to apply; we'll find you.
If you're a top-notch graduate with an eye on a lucrative career in banking or law, you may be tempted to hide. But interestingly, hundreds of others aren't. And each year, a lucky handful of the country's creme de la creme find themselves parachuted into disadvantaged schools, by way of Teach for Australia, a non-profit outfit dedicated to lifting standards in the most underperforming areas.
The woman behind it all is an unlikely hero. Quietly spoken, with a lilting accent that matches her name, Melodie Potts Rosevear oozes cognitive strength in every sentence. How did an only child from a small mountain town in America's Bible Belt, with no experience of teaching, become the chief executive of this US import initiative? 
Potts Rosevear gives a tinkly laugh. It's a long story, she acknowledges, with many weaves and turns. And yet it is a very ordinary one, with no wincingly awful experiences needing to be alchemised into gold. Her mother, a social services case worker, and her father, a businessman, were kind and supportive, and her school experiences were largely positive. "I definitely tested my teachers and had a couple of formative experiences ... but I also had ones that made me stop wanting to go to school."
She remembers undergoing a crisis of confidence in the early teenage years - the ugly ones, she calls them - and a teacher from an extra-curricular club coming to her rescue. Although he didn't do anything extraordinary, the message she internalised was that a teacher who values a student for who they are can have a very powerful effect on their wellbeing.
That is foremost in her mind when each year she goes hunting for recruits among universities, clubs and organisations such as Youth Without Borders, and the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Victoria. The ideal rookie is bright - very bright - with an ATAR of above 95, not that it is a selection criterion, as she is keen to point out. They have leadership skills, are personable and well rounded. Most importantly, they have humility.
"We are looking for a certain type of person, not just because the job is so demanding but because the way they come into it is even more demanding and we want them to care deeply about this issue. So there are a few additional components that we want to help cultivate."
Last year, Teach for Australia put 1500 potential students through a filtering process for 124 places. Each successful candidate received a frantic six weeks of formal, intensive preparation in the summer break before disembarking into some of the most disadvantaged schools in Australia.
Currently there are 419 fast-tracked teachers working in 96 schools in four states and territories, at places such as Hopper's Crossing, Tenant Creek, Stawell and Pinjarra, Western Australia. After two years they receive a master of teaching - or they can leave.
Despite its good intentions, the scheme has been criticised by some, including teachers' unions, who argue that it is preposterous to suggest that teaching is a skill that can be learnt in a mere six weeks (although the new recruits do further training during their postings).
Can these freshly-minted rookies, often from fairly affluent backgrounds, really have the skills and nous to relate to disadvantaged children? Potts Rosevear is quick to defend the program, firing off statistics like bullets: of all those who have gone through it, 64 per cent are still teaching, 15 per cent are working in education or think tanks and a further 10 per cent are pursuing further study in education or policy. More than 40 per cent are working in regional communities in hard-to-staff positions.
And yet she acknowledges it is not a perfect system.
There are understandable questions of legitimacy. In 2004 she came to Australia for the first time to help Noel Pearson set up the Cape York Institute, dedicated to ambitious social and economic reforms.
By now a public policy graduate, former Wall Street intern and employee of the Boston Consulting Group (where she chose to work on projects with a social impact rather than re-designing airport lounges) she was ready for a sea change, literally speaking. She had got into Harvard to study for a master's but deferred, seduced by the notion of living in a place "where rainforest meets reef".
Working with Pearson wasn't all picture postcard, though. "It was hard," she says frankly. School attendance rates were so dismal they were posted outside the general store. Any child who turned up 60 per cent of the time was lauded. By year 12, only 6 per cent of students were still enrolled.
And yet, for a successful, go-getting white woman from the conservative state of North Carolina, she was aware of her limitations in making change.
"All I could do was bring my mind and skills to serve the work that was being done because I didn't have any real standing."
She did, however, fall in love, not just with the country but with a fellow colleague, Sam Rosevear, who is now her husband. After returning to Harvard to complete her master's she made the somewhat difficult decision for an only child to emigrate to Melbourne.
Sitting in an office thousands of miles from where she grew up, listening to the rain bounce off the roof, she smiles ruefully at the irony of how a good education has allowed her to make cosmopolitan choices about where to live, and at the same time causing a good deal of pain. (On her screen saver is a photo of her three-year-old son Harry, whom her mum has just been over to visit.)
The Cape York experience cemented her passion to break the bind that demography is destiny. At the age of 28, she drafted the business plan for Teach for Australia, based on the American model, Teach for America. Luckily for her the stars aligned; both the state and federal government had identified a need for a program that got the country's top talent into teaching, particularly in areas of highest need. Her wish was granted.
Initially partnered with Melbourne University, it is now affiliated with Deakin and has recently received charitable status. Its offices are in Flinders Lane, aptly in the same building that once housed Fifteen - the Jamie Oliver eatery that offered marginalised youth from tough backgrounds an opportunity to train to be chefs.
The idea of the privileged "giving back" to society is endemic in the American culture and embraced by the British, too. Judging by the enthusiasm that Potts Rosevear has encountered in the so-called lucky country, Australia is clearly just as keen to do its bit. Education, she insists, is freedom. "It's the ability to choose a life that you have reason to value."