Brief Biographical Sketch:

I am a freshman at MIT pursuing a major in Brain and Cognitive Sciences on a pre-med track, with the hope of eventually becoming a psychiatrist. In all four years of high school, I taught a weekly competition math course for children in my Chinese community by myself. Amidst those four years of teaching, I had to quickly adapt to COVID-19 by holding lessons on Zoom rather than in person for some time. I designed my own lessons and assigned weekly homework. My dedication to my job was recognized by my Chinese community, as I was awarded its prestigious CCC Chinese School scholarship in only my second year of teaching. Though I am currently studying cognitive science, languages and linguistics have held a special place in my heart for a while. I took a condensed college “Introduction to Linguistics” course and ranked in the top third of a class of college students despite being only a sophomore in high school, interned with a linguistics professor trying to create an online dictionary for the endangered Kashaya language, worked as a linguistics intern at a nonprofit organization focused on indigenous language revitalization, founded and led the linguistics interest group at my high school, and ranked in the top twenty in the nation on the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition (“NACLO” for short) as a high school junior. I am so excited to help people understand what this fascinating— and frankly underrated— field is!

Past Classes