I grew up in Singapore and have spent time studying and working in various countries, including South Korea, France, and Sweden. I enjoy working with people, discussing ideas, and exploring new concepts. While I had a strong science and math background in high school, I decided to pursue my interests in international affairs and foreign policy during my college years. After graduation, I spent a year in Washington DC on a research fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and I have now returned to Princeton to pursue a PhD. Yet, the skills of critical thinking and analytical inquiry have been highly translatable across fields, and I hope to put this into practice as a tutor. Even in political science, we increasingly work at the intersections of area expertise and mathematical modeling! In the future, I hope to work at an intersection of another sort – to bridge the gap between academia and policy.
Rather than teaching students passively, I enjoy engaging with them and bringing them through the process of learning and mastering the relevant content and skills. I believe that my versatile background in science, social sciences and the humanities provides me with an edge as a tutor, allowing me to introduce interdisciplinary ways of learning and teaching. I have worked as a curriculum development intern at a tuition center in Singapore, designing and writing pedagogical materials to teach science in an innovative and engaging way. Completing several science research projects at university laboratories during my middle and high school years, as well as achieving honors in various science competitions, has been a fundamental part of my learning process and has thereby influenced my approach to tutoring. My work experience at various organizations, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and as an editor and writer for a number of magazines, has also honed my ability to think critically and write effectively, all skills important for writing and verbal skills. For me it is hard to beat that sense of reward from sharing knowledge and provoking discussion as a form of learning with others, a pedagogy of mutual exchange that I plan to use as your tutor.