About Me

From a young age I’ve always enjoyed the school setting. My mom homeschooled me for pre-school, I played school with all my stuffed animals, and played school with my cousins and younger brother. And I took playing school pretty seriously. I would make worksheets with answer keys, have my students raise their hands and sit criss-cross applesauce, and every school session had a detailed teacher’s plan made ahead of time. So, starting in fifth grade, if anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say very proudly that I wanted to be a teacher. I wasn’t sure exactly what grade or what subject I wanted to focus on, but my goal to teach was clear from the beginning.

In high school I spent a lot of my time in classes explaining things to my peers, and I invested the majority of my extracurricular time in marching band. While it wasn’t a traditional classroom setting, I was still able to teach as a section leader. Whether it was how to march, play music, or memorize things I played an active role in teachership through leadership. It helped me gain a lot of confidence speaking in front of larger crowd, making decisions that benefited the group, and working on a team with other leaders. These were skills that I continued to develop in college marching band where I, along with 3 others, was responsible for planning, teaching, and troubleshooting band camp.

Outside of extracurriculars in college, I quickly found a way to continue teaching by working as a private tutor and supplemental instructor. I really enjoyed helping students and coming up with new ways to explain material. Finding the right fit and seeing the information “click” after a long struggle was always extremely gratifying. Additionally, after a year of undergraduate research, I had the opportunity to act as a mentor in the lab to the new members. It was a very different from the classroom setting in that it had a unique combination of hands-on demonstrations, conversational instruction, and lecture-style lessons. Being able to coach a student through experimental techniques and background knowledge to the point that they had two scientific publications was an experience that I decided I wanted to continue in my career.

The combination of these experiences solidified my desire to pursue a PhD so that I can teach at the university level. I’m currently on track to attend graduate school in the fall where I’ll be able to grow my base knowledge and my repertoire of laboratory techniques. This will allow me to conduct my own research in the future and gain more teaching experience through graduate assistantships and mentoring undergraduates.

I didn’t go to pre-school. Instead, my mom ordered some workbooks, and she homeschooled me. We had English, math, science, history, art, music, and P.E. time every day, and I loved every second of it. Obsessed with my mom (rightfully so), I decided that I wanted to be a doctor like her. So, when “When I Grow Up” Day rolled around in kindergarten, my mom tailored some of her old scrubs and made me mini scrubs so that I could go to school dressed like the doctor I dreamt of being.

Fast forward to high school, it was time to start thinking about colleges and start shadowing doctors and volunteer at a hospital and think about becoming a medical scribe and go to pre-med summer camps. I was feeling a lot more reluctant than younger me would have expected, and I chalked it up to not wanting to put myself out there just to find out I wasn’t good enough. So, I put everything off for a couple years. I did well in school and focused more on clubs. Junior year, I worked at UNC Rex Hospital under the VolunTEEN program and went to a summer medicine camp at Wake Forest. By senior year, I realized the thought of going to medical school and patient care wasn’t appealing at all.

Senior year was also when I took AP Literature, AP Computer Science, and biology at a community college. I loved all of them. The deep analysis of lit, problem solving in comp sci, and fundamental understanding of the world in bio. Coming into college I was faced with two decisions: (1) Should I still be pre-med? And (2) what major should I choose? In what felt like a rush and with the influence of my grandma whispering “just choose medicine” in my ear, I decided to be a pre-med science major. And by my sophomore year I was panicking about dropping pre-med. I felt like I had wasted so much time, effort, and money by being a science major if I wasn’t going into medicine. But by my junior year I stopped viewing my major as a prerequisite for medical school and fell back in love with science.

Once I revamped my motivation and curiosity, I realized that instead of being a doctor like my mom, I’ve wanted to be a teacher like my mom from the beginning. I’m not 100% sure that the path I’m on leads to a career I’ll still want to do five, ten, or fifteen years later. However, thinking back on my childhood, the best thing my mom has ever given me was the time she spent homeschooling me. She never gave me the answers and was obsessed with putting me in situations that allowed me to figure things out for myself. She never got mad at me when I got things wrong, and she always emphasized understanding why something was wrong, so I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. So, whether I dive deeper into medicine, computer science, teaching, biology, English, or any of the millions of fields out there, I’ll always carry the curiosity, love for learning, and resilience instilled in me by my mom.

Both my continuous and discontinuous life stories contain elements of my childhood and school experiences that build the narrative of how I decided what career I want to pursue. They end with the same conclusion, but the continuous life story tends to gloss over the bumps in the road that make the discontinuous story authentic. In the continuous life story, I built a narrative of teaching and learning being present from childhood, shaping my desire to pursue a PhD. In contrast, the discontinuous story contains examples of doubts, mistakes, and hesitation that display the difficulties and/or uncertainties in the decisions I have made and experiences I have had. However, it is through these difficulties that I have developed personal characteristics which explain why I might have been drawn to particular things throughout my life. Opposed to having a narrative in the canonical form where the “end is contained in the beginning”, sitting in the discomfort of the discontinuity helped to “[discover] threads of continuity”. In other words, the development of these personal characteristics in the beginning supports the ending, but they are not in themselves the ending.

Despite living through these stories, I would say that I don’t typically tell myself either one. Through my experience with the events and artifacts listed, I tend to see and ruminate on the difficulties from the discontinuous story in a continuous manner. Because the discontinuous story is more accurate to my timeline of thoughts and events, it’s what’s housed in my head, but I don’t necessarily have the self-reflective conclusions of thematic patterns accompanying the narrative. However, these conclusions are accessible through active reflection like journaling or self-talk.

The process of writing applications for graduate school and other related fellowships has also been very helpful in recognizing those patterns. And after several hours of contemplation debating how to best display who I am to admissions committees, I can say without a doubt that I prefer the discontinuous story. Even though it has aspects of my academic and career journey of which I’m not the most secure, they give the narrative a human essence and make it a “reflection of [my] life as it [has] really [been] lived”. In addition to being more relatable and realistic to any audience reading my story, the act of writing it helped me to better understand both myself and my intrinsic motivators. In contrast, the continuous story doesn’t have room for character development because there are no challenges to overcome when the story is required to build to a predetermined happy ending.

Because the purpose of the ePortfolio is to display who I am as a person outside the accomplishments on my resume, I think the discontinuous story is a more advantageous representation. While I composed my life story retrospectively, I think that the arrangement and reflection of selected works on the ePortfolio should be prospective. In other words, I think the best way to communicate how sections of the ePortfolio and artifacts within them connect to my discontinuous life story is to reflect on how they contribute to where I would like them to take my story in the future, as well as how I can already see their impact.