I earned a bachelor's degree with High Honors in Literature at Harvard, where I was a humor writer for The Harvard Lampoon, the world’s oldest and perhaps most famous humor magazine. Afterward, I earned master's degrees in French literature from both Oxford and Yale. At Yale, I was awarded a two-year University Fellowship (to cover all tuition and living expenses). At Oxford, I graduated with Distinction and won the Gerard Davis Prize (for the best dissertation on a topic in French literary studies).
Now I'm writing novels and publishing fiction and humor in CollegeHumor, Splitsider, and elsewhere. I've given university lectures on academic topics ranging from medieval autobiography to modern legal theory at Princeton, Yale, New York University, University of Paris, Rutgers, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and other universities. But I also have extensive experience teaching at the middle and high school levels.
I've been tutoring for several years, and I specialize in literary subjects: reading, writing, and grammar, as well as American, English, and European literature. During one summer, I was a Writing Tutor at the Harvard Writing Center for sixteen hours each week, tutoring Harvard undergraduates and Harvard Summer School students, many of whom were still in high school, by teaching them how to improve their writing, the clarity of their arguments, and their research skills.
I have also been a private tutor of writing, literature, history, French, and standardized tests for high school students at Choate Rosemary Hall, a co-ed boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut.
As Graduate Affiliate Coordinator at Trumbull College at Yale, I was head of the eighteen graduate students affiliated with the College, and one of my main responsibilities was being Mentoring Director. That involved managing the mentoring of the undergraduates by graduate students, in addition to mentoring undergraduates myself, giving them advice as they made difficult decisions, such as choosing classes and extracurricular activities and applying for jobs and graduate school.
Because one of my primary goals is to empower students, to make them self-sufficient, I convey difficult concepts in terms my students can understand and teach them how to think through ideas that seem, at first glance, outside the reach of their knowledge. Each of my sessions is professional and organized so that my students get the most out of my tutoring, but I temper the seriousness by being sympathetic, encouraging, and humorous to make the lessons enjoyable and fun.