Biography

I had the good fortune of being born on the San Francisco Peninsula, and into the Silicon Valley. My elementary school was Trinity School, Crystal Springs Uplands was my middle and high school, and Menlo Park has always been my beloved home. I finally left the area when I went away to Carleton College in Minnesota, but even then I had chosen to get out of California precisely because I knew I’d be back. Sure enough, after I earned my undergrad degree I returned to the Bay Area, moved to San Francisco, and began working in the Admission and then Development Office of my former elementary school.

At the same time, I began taking accounting and finance classes at UC Berkeley Extension. I then decided to earn an MBA in Sustainable Management, which I did at the Presidio Graduate School. After Presidio, I found work in Brazil with a company that later had me working out of Mexico and Colombia as well.

But all the while, I worked as a tutor. Indeed, tutoring and mentoring has been a thread that runs through more than half of my life. While in high school I volunteered with Project READ to teach literacy skills. In college I mentored first- and second-generation students, while also TA’ing Spanish classes. After college, I had engagements with a number of local educational nonprofits, such as the AVID Program, Music@Menlo, the San Mateo Community Colleges Foundation, and Art in Action. At Presidio, I was a teaching assistant for both the micro- and macroeconomics classes. While working in Latin America, I worked with high schoolers and adults in improving their English skills as well as their preparation for tests such as the SAT and ACT, the GRE, and the GMAT.

Since I’ve been working with AJ Tutoring, I’ve deeply enjoyed the process of taking my overall mentoring skills to the next level. Across the years of my work with clients, I have slowly accumulated increasing mastery over an ever-larger portfolio of subjects and exams. Indeed, the training and ongoing support we receive at AJTutoring is phenomenal, which has enabled me to take my long-term engagements with my students to the next level – as a College Counselor.

The effect of these engagements with students is deeply gratifying, because together we become highly capable of making substantial, positive differences in not only how our students succeed in school, but also in life. This is because not only are AJ tutors superb at simply guiding students through difficult material on a weekly basis, but we enable our students to demonstrate – to themselves – that they fully can take on truly difficult and daunting projects, and then succeed at them, all at a level they would never have anticipated!

I love my work because I help my students see that they can accomplish absolutely anything they want to. And I love working at AJ Tutoring because we work with 1 student at a time, so we can discover and unearth the very best from within each student.

It’s enormously rewarding work.