Biography

I derive satisfaction from helping others realize their potential. Throughout my academic journey, I have experienced various environments: from competitive Bay Area schools to collaborative college classrooms. The key to success in any learning environment is to embrace a growth mindset, and I hope to impart this same attitude to students. I think challenging our ways of thinking makes us better understand our identities and the world we live in, which makes us lead more meaningful lives!

As a high school student at Homestead, I began helping my peers improve their French conversational skills and strengthen their writing. I am a dual-French citizen, so I enjoy sharing current events, music, and literature from the francophone world. It was not only rewarding to see my classmates excel during the AP French exam, but I saw that they acquired a cultural knowledge that had changed their worldview. After high school, I went to Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles, where I graduated summa cum laude in political science and French studies. My undergraduate studies have been driven by a desire to interact and learn from people who come from backgrounds different from my own. Being a double major allowed me to engage in interdisciplinary study. I was able to go abroad and learn political theory, history, and literature, at the Sorbonne in Paris. This experience not only allowed me to polish my French but exposed me to new scholarship that informed my research in Antillean literature and political philosophy.

While at Occidental, I continued to help students develop their French skills and I started helping peers revise essays and scholarship applications. I was also a tutor for an introductory statistics course. In this class, students came from diverse academic backgrounds. 1-1 tutoring was key to understanding students’ strengths, weaknesses, and interests. I believe any subject is learnable, as long as students see the relevance of the material to their own lives. One of my proudest moments in teaching was when I helped the class average increase one letter grade over the semester.

In my free time, I enjoy being active- playing tennis, running on the Stevens Creek Trail, and skiing in Olympic Valley. As a Sunnyvale native, I also like using Caltrain to explore the diverse restaurants and cultural events the Bay Area has to offer.