The Institution Seen from Every Angle

Most CS education researchers arrive at questions about student success from the outside — from data, from literature, from the lab. I arrived at them from inside the institution, from five different roles in which I watched the same students encounter the same invisible structural barriers from completely different vantage points.

I am a first-generation college student, an independent CS education researcher, and a PhD applicant for Fall 2026. I work on the CVC-OEI Application Support team at Foothill–De Anza, where I help keep the systems running across financial aid, counseling, tutoring, and learning-community programs. Before that, I spent years inside those same programs as a staff member. The research questions I'm pursuing are not abstractions. They are formalized versions of things I watched happen to real students.

Five Roles, One Insight

• Financial Aid

  Watched students withdraw from STEM not from lack of ability but because financial precarity made any obstacle feel final. A student with a 3.4 GPA in calculus withdrew from her CS sequence because a $400 textbook cost arrived the same week as a rent increase. That kind of departure doesn't show up in academic data — it shows up in financial aid offices. I learned that structural interventions outperform individual counseling every time.

  → Grounds the equity focus of Q1 and Q3

• Academic Counseling

  Heard students articulate fixed beliefs about their own mathematical ability — beliefs formed from curricula that never established why the material mattered. I was introduced to Harel's necessity principle not from theory but from watching what happened when it was violated: students concluded they were incapable when in fact the curriculum had given them no reason to persist.

  → Motivational structure: Q2 and Q4

• Teaching & Learning Center

  Tutored students navigating content their course objectives barely required. Began asking: how much of what students are struggling with is actually necessary for where they are trying to go? This question — which became the kernel of the "minimum viable curriculum" idea — shapes Q2 directly.

  → Curriculum structure: Q2

• Learning Communities

  Saw peer context transform students' relationship to difficulty. A student who believes they are uniquely confused is fragile. A student who learns that confusion is shared and structural becomes resilient. This is the mechanism behind help-seeking suppression that Q1 aims to measure.

  → Help-seeking behavior: Q1

• Affinity Groups

  Worked with students told in both explicit and subtle ways that STEM was not for them. Saw how belonging-based interventions changed persistence more reliably than content-based ones. This experience grounds the Seymour & Hunter replication in Q3 and the belonging measurement in P5.

  → STEM departure: Q3 and P5

The research isn't despite the student services work. The research is the student services work, made formal. I do not come to this research with the most advanced technical portfolio in my cohort. What I bring is an unusually complete picture of how students actually move through institutions — and an unusually strong conviction that the problems are structural, solvable, and worth a career.

My intellectual touchstones: Seymour & Hunter's Talking About Leaving Revisited, Jeff Anderson's applied linear algebra curriculum and twelve modeling criteria, Papert's Mindstorms, Ko's Critically Conscious Computing, and the SIGCSE community's sustained attention to who CS education is actually designed for.

This work is dedicated to Jeff Anderson, my mentor, whose textbook and teaching practice are evidence that the problem is solvable — that you can design curriculum around student need rather than disciplinary convention — and that solving it is worth a career. His antiracist learning science, ungrading framework, and five learner-centered objectives are the foundation of every curriculum I design.

The Curriculum Practice

In parallel with this research, I design introductory CS and mathematics curriculum for community colleges. The curriculum is not separate from the research — it's the intervention side of the same question. I design courses intended to address the structural problems the research documents, and those courses are meant to become the sites where I study whether the fixes work.

The courses are built on three principles: derive before compute (Harel's necessity principle), build before import (Papert's constructionism), and equity as design (Ko, Freire, hooks). Assessment is portfolio-based with student-proposed grades (Anderson's ungrading). The signature project — Build a Computer from Scratch — is a 20-week team build of a working 8-bit breadboard computer that bridges five STEM disciplines.

See the full curriculum page or visit the curriculum site.

Details

Last updated: April 2026