During my time with Team Read, I learned a lot about empathy and the value of helping other people! I was a reading coach for four years, including summers, and it was always a challenge to figure out how each new student learned best. I discovered it was important to get to know the person I’m working with, which has been very important both in school and professionally. My favorite memory of Team Read was one summer when I worked with a student who loved the Magic Tree House books. We didn’t have that series at our tutoring site, but I was able to find a couple and give them to her at the end of the summer, which was a very sweet moment!

After graduating high school, I attended the University of Washington and studied Computer Science, with a minor in Education. I want to eventually go back to graduate school to be a computer science teacher in middle schools, but for now I’m working as a software engineer for a start-up called Motivity Systems. We make an app for use in applied behavior analysis (ABA) clinics that help people with autism. I work as a full-stack software developer on our team, which means I can do anything from making sure the buttons are properly spaced to organizing all of the data we collect on the back-end.