Teaching
Philosophy
I owe a large debt to the wonderful professors I had as an undergraduate at La Salle University, without whom I would not have made it to graduate school. I strive to pay that forward through teaching and mentorship. I love economics, and am committed to creating a safe and inclusive atmosphere where students from all different backgrounds can explore the disipline (and hopefully fall in love with it themselves!).
Teaching assistantships
I have served as a TA for several courses while a graduate student at JHU. In Fall 2023, I was TA for Elements of Microecomics for Professor Muhammad Husain; the materials I prepared for my section can be found here. In Fall 2024 I was TA for Professor Yujung Hwang’s upper-level course on “Race, Gender, and Culture”, where I learned a tremendous amount about how to foster active discussion amongst a small group of students, often on hot-button issues such as gender discrimination or cultural assimilation in immigrant communities.
My favorite part of teaching is helping students find intuition in technical material and connect economics to their everyday lives, something I think our discipline often struggles to do. For this reason, I am particularly fond of serving as a TA for econometrics, which I have done in Spring 2024 (Jonathan Wright; supplementary materials are here), Spring 2025 (Elena Krasnokutskaya), and Fall 2025 (Lixiong Li).
I have received positive evaluations as a TA, which have resulted in winning the department undergraduate teaching award for 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. My average scores (with averages for the department and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (KSAS) for comparison) have been:
| Class | Semester | Me | Dept. | KSAS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elements of Microeconomics | Fall 2023 | 4.32 | 3.85 | 4.2 |
| Econometrics | Spring 2024 | 4.75 | 3.98 | 4.24 |
| Race, Gender, and Culture | Fall 2024 | 4.44 | 3.79 | 4.25 |
| Econometrics | Spring 2025 | 4.6 |
Mentorship
In Fall 2024 I participated in a JHU program called “Teaching K-Ph.D.”, where I gave a guest lesson to an AP Economics class at Baltimore Polytechnic High School. The lecture was a gentle introduction to Labor Economics (with a dash of econometrics), structured around the work of Claudia Goldin (who had just won the Nobel prize). Those materials (slides and a Jupyter Notebook) can be found here.
My dissertation involves survey work at a Maryland community college. As part of this partnership, I have mentored several students from the community college as they pursue independent research using some data from my survey. In addition, I am currently serving as graduate student advisor for an undergraduate honors thesis.