About me

My first foray into childcare and teaching was coaching little league basketball for third graders when I was fifteen years old. Every Saturday, I would go to the upper west side where a co-coach and I would get the girls excited about basketball as we built their skills through drills, played team-building games, and organized scrimmages. I had so much fun keeping up with their high energy levels and facilitating the social dynamic within the group.
My next experience with childcare was with a younger crowd, to say the least, in a much higher acuity setting. During the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I volunteered in the neonatal intensive care unit at Weill Cornell Medical Center. My responsibilities included holding and feeding the babies as well as changing their diapers. Sometimes I would sit in a rocking chair with one in my arms for hours, delighting in telling them all sorts of fairy tales and stories and explaining them, even though they had no idea what I was saying. Two summers later I continued to shadow and volunteer, but instead of just spending time at the NICU, I shadowed with pediatric intensive care teams that treated patients up to nineteen years of age. Here I learned a lot about how children behave and communicate in settings that may be unfamiliar and scary to them.
My teaching skills were bolstered in college through two mediums. My first experience occurred during the winter term of my sophomore year when a roommate and I taught a course at an after school program entitled Greek Myths and More! at Williamstown Elementary school. Once a week, we explored various themes of Greek myths and culture using multi-disciplinary techniques such as acting out stories, making “offerings” to the gods using art and food, participating in athletic competitions in the form of a modified Olympics, and doing our own creative writing by crafting our own myths.
My second and main tutoring experience was in the form of a Williams writing workshop fellow. In addition to organizing the peer-editing academic resource for Williams students, I worked as a tutor who would help peers strengthen their papers. In my work as a tutor, I practiced providing constructive feedback in a warm and supportive fashion. The joy of knowing you helped someone understand something that made them so confused before, is a really special and satisfying feeling.
I’ve always loved kids and I love teaching and learning so any occupation that would allow me to combine all those elements would really bring out all my strongest qualities.