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, which through a series of winding turns, got me much more interested in expanding educational opportunities and educational policy. Of course, I still really, really enjoy teaching, and always try to find outlets to get people excited about things I think are cool c:

teachingPermalink

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” 🧡

Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program, 2025

This program was so fun. It was great being back in a setting where people are so focused on good pedagogy, class design, and lecture design. Definitely learned a lot about course design, how to think about assessments, and more. The big “deliverable” of this program is a completely fleshed-out syllabus for a class you might want to teach as a professor. I ended up creating one that aims to bridge the gap to econometric methods and research for undergrads, while simultaneously helping students think about how to have good discourse. If I end up going down the professor route, would truly be excited to make this class happen.

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 education.

things i’ve madePermalink

There’s a few teaching-related things that i’ve put out into the world, things that hopefully will do good for at least one person. A collection of these resources below! Feedback on any of them happily taken.

as clear as mud (presentation here)

This is a presentation I first gave to Blueprint RAs during year 4 of grad school, with some of my thoughts on clean code, presenting data, and presentations in general. These are topics I generally have a lot of feelings about, and it felt nice to finally put them down all on one page so that hopefully others can implement it into their own work. I suspect that this presentation will be a perpetual work-in-progress, but I’ll try to keep the latest version up at all times.

an mdrd primer (blog post here)

MDRD is probably the single paper that I know best. For both my own understanding, and helping the understanding of various people in the Blueprint ecosystem, I’ve put my own reading of MDRD1 into blog post format. It reads much like my “lecture style” — focusing on intuition and whys, building up to things as we go along, and hopefully doing so in an approachable way.

padajar-templates (blog post here, github here)

Every time I make a $\LaTeX$ document, I find myself copy-pasting the same boilerplate every time. Eventually, I got tired enough of this, and decided to create a set of templates that has a consistent graphic identity throughout (and one that passes through to my website and CV). There’s no point in me keeping this to myself, so now it’s out in the world :)

teaching-adjacentPermalink

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 an adult.

MIT Committee on the Undergraduate Program (link)

Student Representative, 2020–2021

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 Program (link)

Chair, Summer HSSP Director, Community Working Group Director, 2017–2021

ESP puts on giant educational programs for middle and high school students with the motto “Teach Anything, Learn Anything”. While of course, I enjoyed teaching for ESP (with classes like Hacking your memory, All 2 Letter Scrabble Words in 5 Minutes, and Quick Mafs), I learned so much from just being in the club and trying to run these programs. 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!)

National Science Bowl (link1, link2)

Alumni Volunteer, National Science Bowl, 2020–

Coordinator, Northeast Regional Middle School Science Bowl, 2017–2021

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!