education

Over the past decade, I’ve grown to care a lot about the field of education. I started off by teaching competition math to elementary and middle school students, and I keep teaching in various ways to this day. Since then, I’ve become much more interested in expanding educational opportunities and educational policy.

teaching

TA for 14.19 (Market Design), 2023

My first time teaching as a grad TA! I’d taken 14.19 with Parag in 2019, and really enjoyed being on the other side of one of my favorite classes as an undergrad. I think that with a couple more years of experience, I was much better prepared to be a good TA, being able to provide more context about economics research (including mine), more intuition about why different things worked, and overall had a really great time. Overall rating 6.6/7, and got some fun comments calling me an “absolute legend” who “really helped me learn the subject” 🧡

TA for 14.02 (Principles of Macroeconomics), 2021

While macroeconomics isn’t my main field of interest, I think that introductory macro courses have a unique place pedagogically in the economics curriculum, since it’s taken by both students who want to develop macroeconomic literacy and those that are exploring economics as a major. I spent much time thinking about how to be as helpful to students to possible. In subject evaluations, my recitation received a 6.5/7 for “Instructor supported learning”, and some students specifically commented on my intuitive explanations, question-answering, and patience c:

TA for 14.27 (Economics and E-Commerce), 2019

This was my first chance to teach economics in a meaningful capacity. MIT Economics TAs are typically graduate students, and to my knowledge I’m one of only two undergraduate TAs for the department in recent memory. While my TAing wasn’t perfect (making mistakes in office hours, imperfect recitation timing), I’d like to think I did a fairly good job in terms of helping students (overall rating 5.5/7). The most fun I had here was getting to design recitations to introduce students to game theory, and creating problems that related to my research.

Other past teaching

• MIT Global Teaching Labs — Italy, 2019. I taught several week-long courses on relativity and statistics to high schoolers in Rozzano! Read more reflections here.

• Cybermath Academy/Star League Programs — Boston, 2016–2018. I started teaching at these camps in high school; they were my first experience with planning lessons, delivering lectures, and managing classrooms. Importantly, they helped me find my own teaching style (engaging + enthusiastic, empathetic, and using intuition) that I keep today and set me down the path of educatoin.

Serious classes taught at ESP Programs

Quick Mafs

Hacking your memory

We Are What We Speak: How We Make Language and Language Makes Us

Who Gets What and Why

Redesigning Education

Advanced Math for Middle School Students

Learning about Teaching

Not-so-serious classes taught at ESP Programs

Appreciation for any juice that is not Ruby Red

Science Bowl

All 2 Letter Scrabble Words in 5 Minutes

The Music of Neil Cicierega

teaching-adjacent

Graduate RA in Burton-Conner

Burton 1, 2022–

While not “education” in the traditional classroom sense, as a GRA, I run events to help students de-stress, help students navigate the maze that is MIT, and provide support in times of need. Being a GRA lets me put some part of my brainpower just towards caring for others and figuring out the right ways to be a person for my students — a headspace that, to me, feels just like teaching. It’s a joy to both run fun study breaks — like Taskmaster, decorate my apartment, and the fanciest beverage from trader joseph’s — and to be there when students need someone.

MIT Committee on the Undergraduate Program, 2020-2021 (website)

I served on CUP my senior year of undergrad, which was a very fun look into how academic policy gets made. As one of four student representatives, our biggest impact was helping implement changes to first-year credit policies after a number of years of experiments! You can read more about that all here.

MIT Educational Studies Programs, 2017-2021 (website)

Chair, Summer HSSP Director, Community Working Group Director

ESP runs giant educational programs for middle and high school students with the motto “Teach Anything, Learn Anything” (see below for some examples). ESP thinks constantly about how to create better programs, make better systems of doing things, and be good for its members. More importantly, ESP introduced me to some of the most wonderful people I’ve met at MIT, people who care about keeping organizations running well, the state of education in the world, and just life in general. By far the most impactful space I’ve existed in. (I wrote my undergrad thesis about ESP!)

Northeast Regional Middle School Science Bowl, 2017-2022 (website)

Coordinator

I loved science bowl in middle and high school. During college, I was coordinator for the Northeast Regional Middle School Science Bowl, and helped start the MIT Science Bowl Invitational for high school students. Doing this gave me a chance to reflect on the nature of academic competitions, and more broadly, how I want my personal work to balance challenging advanced students and benefitting all students. While I’m not as involved in organizing anymore, you can always find me volunteering at the MIT invitational/regional and the National Science Bowl Finals!