education

My education work began with teaching competition math to elementary and middle-school students. Many years and winding turns later, I’m now 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 and interesting c: Some highlights below!

teaching

Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program

2025 · my syllabus

Interactive workshop series to teach students about evidence-based teaching techniques grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

reflections

KTCP was so fun. It was great being back in a setting where people are so focused on good pedagogy, class design, and lecture design. I 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 a course that aims to bridge the gap to econometric methods and research for undergrads, while simultaneously helping students think about how to have good discourse. I’m honestly quite proud of how this syllabus turned out, and it’s now being used by KTCP as an example for future students. If I end up going down the professor route, would truly be excited to make this class happen.

Head TA for 14.19 (Market Design)

2023

Intermediate theory class with 54 students; designed psets/exams, ran recitations/office hours, graded exams.

reflections

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 (as UG)

Intro macroeconomics class with 123 students; designed psets/exams, ran recitations/office hours.

reflections

While macroeconomics isn’t my main field of interest, I think that introductory macro courses have a unique place pedagogically in the economics curriculum — 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 as 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 (as UG)

Intermediate IO class with 35 students; designed/graded psets, ran recitations/office hours, provided personalized research feedback.

reflections

This was my first chance to teach economics in a meaningful capacity. At the time I TA’ed, MIT Economics TAs were typically graduate students, and I’ve since learned that me being a TA helped pave the way for the multitude of MEng/undergrad TAs that exist now. While I know my TAing wasn’t perfect (a few 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), and I certainly learned much from that experience. 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.

things i’ve made

There are 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

A presentation with my thoughts on clean code, presenting results, and presentations in general.

reflections

I have a lot of feelings about how things get communicated both internally (i.e., code) and externally, and I’m glad I finally collected lots of them into one place where others can read them. (Suspect that lots of these thoughts come from having been in the consulting sphere for a while, which I have … mixed feelings about.) 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

An explainer for Research Design Meets Market Design (Abdulkadiroğlu et al., 2017).

reflections

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 · github

A set of templates for memos, psets, papers, and slides.

reflections

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-adjacent

MIT Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid

Graduate Representative, 2025–2027 · committee page

Standing MIT Institute Committee to discuss issues affecting admissions processes and aid policies.

reflections

I’ve really enjoyed being a part of CUAFA, especially given my history of working with the MIT Admissions office through blogging. Beyond that, I’m glad that I can use my research in a setting where it’s directly relevant, and a setting that I care very personally about. Unfortunately I can’t share most things about our discussions, so this section will be a bit more empty than I’d like — but there’s so many things happening in the world of higher education right now…

Graduate RA in Burton-Conner

Burton 1, 2022–2027

Live-in residential advisor for 45 undergraduate students.

reflections

Ok, sure, it’s not “education” in the traditional classroom sense. But 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 deface my apartment, and the fanciest beverage from trader joseph’s — and to be there when students need an adult. It’s a joy to be able to be there for them, and I’ll dearly miss being a GRA once I graduate.

MIT Committee on the Undergraduate Program

Undergraduate Representative, 2020–2021 · committee page

Standing MIT Institute Committee to discuss policies governing the undergraduate academic program.

reflections

I served on CUP during my senior year of college, 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

Chair, Summer HSSP Director, Community Working Group Director, 2017–2021 · esp.mit.edu

Organization running extracurricular educational programs for over 3,000 middle and high school students every year.

reflections

ESP’s motto is “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

Alumni Volunteer, National Science Bowl, 2020– · Coordinator + Invitational Founder, MIT Science Bowl and NERMSSB, 2017–2021 · nsb · mit science bowl · press

Academic Jeopardy-style competition testing STEM knowledge for middle and high school students.

reflections

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!