What do you do at LIDS?

I support Professors Berwick, Bresler, Ozdaglar, Shah, Tsitsiklis, and Wilson. The way I describe what I do at LIDS is I do all of the administrative things that help the faculty do their research. So I coordinate meetings and manage inboxes and get people reimbursed and sort of all of the "other tasks as assigned" that help the faculty and the grad students do their work. I’m also learning how to do some LIDS-wide work with our databases and account reporting.

Where did you work before coming to LIDS and MIT?

I worked at Bard Academy at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. I was a residence director there for two and a half years, working with 9th and 10th grade students — lived in the building with them, shared my dog, Rocky, with them, the whole thing. I was basically their parent in place, helping them get used to being in school away from their families. It was intense, but also a really unique and interesting way to live that didn’t necessarily feel like work all the time.

What brought you to MIT?

Working with those younger kids in the boarding school setting was a big dream for a while — I actually moved from L.A. to New England to do that. My partner came with me. He was also a residence director at Simon’s Rock. But what he always wanted to do was to focus more on DEI and identity resource work. So when a DEI program administrator position opened up at Tufts, he applied and got it, which was really exciting! I came with him to Boston and started looking for jobs in higher ed. A really close friend of mine did his bachelor’s and master’s at MIT, and I kept hearing about all the cool things that happen here, so I kept applying for positions until something came through.

What do you do outside of work?

I’m finishing up my bachelor’s of science in psychology at Northeastern, as a foundation to working in education and figuring out how to best work with students. My career in student services started very briefly at a therapeutic school — so working with students who had been to rehab or had been to wilderness therapy — and I realized that if the people that worked with them had a better understanding of what they were going through maybe things wouldn’t have been as hard. So I took that to heart when I chose my degree.

But when I’m not doing course work — I just have my capstone project left — I hang out with my dog and my partner. We’re still exploring Boston since we’ve only been here a few months. We’re really big on exploring for food, especially. We have our favorite Italian restaurant in the North End already, and keep looking for where the best of our favorite foods can be found.