I was born with a low-income Hmong-American family who had no choice but to live in a cheap, dangerous neighborhood. I’ve never been discriminated due to my ethnicity, but I have been discriminated against for being a low-income student. Not being able to afford is extremely tough, but I know other students who have gone through worse; from homelessness to being involved in gang-violence. As I understand all the struggles, I always try to give as many resources and promote affordable high quality education to anyone in need. In addition, I have provided free calculus content that helped dozens of underrepresented students from many different countries to win calculus competitions, specifically integration bee.
I was always fascinated with foreign languages. When I first got my virtual reality headset, I went straight to exploring over 10 foreign communities in VR: South Korea, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and more. I’m not very good at picking up foreign languages quickly, but I made huge amounts of friends all over the world; visiting different parts of each country and learning about their modern cultures through VR. With this knowledge, I can better promote inclusion inside and outside of my classroom, welcoming more diverse students.
VR also helps over thousands of people in the LGBT community, specifically transgenders who suffer from dysphoria. I have suffered from dysphoria due to being stereotyped for being a nerd and body shamed for the lack of masculinity. In VR, you can dress up as any avatar you want to look like. Because of this feature, every student was able to learn comfortably and participate confidently without feeling insecure about their appearance. During my early graduate years, I have been involved with a transgender VR community who offers free services and fun courses to members, one of them being introduction to programming Python. Since a lot of students were computer science majors, I volunteered to help contribute by providing a helpful linear algebra course with computer science motivations and applications. In my class, I will always support the freedom of sexual orientation and learning without judgement.
Math has definitely helped me escape from discrimination and ethnocentrism. I always believed that mathematics helps gather us together as a community, no matter our race, gender, religion, or any other backgrounds. I know this because of the math olympiad community on the internet: from different countries helping each other solve difficult math problems, to female mathletes helping non-binaries and transgenders organize fun math contests and training sessions. It is a beautiful witness to see how mathematics and problem-solving naturally induces social justice. It is always the reason why I love to learn and teach students problem-solving in mathematics.