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My favorite play activity when I was a kid was teaching my stuffed animals. I would create elaborate lesson schedules, packed full of every subject I could think of, and absolutely loved writing on my whiteboard and in any journal I could find. I did this at home, on vacation — anywhere I could. When I got older, I would write up detailed homework for my stepmom based on what I was learning in my own classes. This became so fun for me that it occupied most of my time that I probably should have been spending on my own homework.

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Age 4-17: My Accident & Real Schooling Experience

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Age 4-17: My Accident & Real Schooling Experience

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Just before kindergarten, I was in a very traumatic accident that left me with many emotional and physical injuries including losing my mother and suffering brain, eye, and hip injuries that left lasting effects for my entire life. All of these made my schooling experience very different than my peers'. Not only was I treated differently based on my outward differences but I looked at the world very differently, and thus felt deeply invested in the protection of anyone with differences.

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When I was in college, I took a job working at my college's Writing Center as a peer tutor. I fell in love with the personal connections I made and the rush of joy I got when my clients felt much more relieved at the end of just an hour-long session. I thought, if I can do all that in one hour, imagine how much I could do with a whole year.

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Age 19-21: Education Courses & Student Teaching

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Age 19-21: Education Courses & Student Teaching

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I began to take a variety of education courses in college, some of which involved student teaching. Going into real classrooms and interacting with actual human children who were bright and energetic became the best part of my weeks. I also became very interested in the issues I was learning about in my courses and wanted to explore them on a larger scale, like in graduate school. During my senior year, I was enrolled in a small eight-person capstone course for the education minor and heard about all the other students' acceptances into teaching grad schools, including Columbia, and wished that was me.

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I got a job as a teaching aide at a special education preschool right when I graduated college to make sure teaching was something I wanted to do, and it was. Just like when I began tutoring, I fell in love with the work I was doing. The children I was developing longterm relationships with introduced a new sense of fulfillment that I knew would make my life whole and satisfying when I pursued it as a career.