FAQs about me
What is your background and how did you end up working in Education?
I have formal training in Industrial Product and Visual Communication Design, which I pursued during my undergraduate studies. However, by my third year in design school, I started to question the role of a designer in addressing society’s most pressing challenges. After graduation, I worked with several socially-driven design practices, creating solutions for low-income communities in New Delhi. During this time, I noticed a critical issue across all these communities: a lack of access to quality education. Realizing I wanted to do more than just design artefacts and publications, I decided to leave design behind and spent two years teaching in a classroom to better understand education at a systemic level. I fell in love with teaching, especially reading out stories to my students and fully embraced the philosophy: “Once a teacher, always a teacher” With this my journey in Education began officially.
Why did you decide to pursue the Learning, Design, and Technology master’s program at Stanford University?
Convinced to pursue Education full-time, I joined the Teach For India fellowship in 2021. During the time I started teaching, COVID-19 had hit the hardest confining classrooms to digital screens. I was excited to teach in a real classroom with fingertips covered in chalkdust and here I was helping my students make sense of the buttons on Zoom. This made me reimagine my approach and question the way children will learn in a post-COVID world. Finding opportunities to make learning fun and relevant for my students, I began experimenting with digital tools for learning. Some of my favourites were math manipulatives and free reading resources from StoryWeaver. However, I quickly realized that many of these tools were disconnected from the contexts and lived experiences of my students and did not create opportunities for parents to be involved. I wanted to learn how these tools are built and then learn to build them better. This opened up an opportunity to pursue further studies and I enrolled in the LDT program to design better ed-tech tools, especially in the language and literacy development space.
What are you working on right now?
Through my master’s program, I continued to pursue my passion for designing learning tools that facilitate language and literacy development in young children especially and advance parents’ role in this journey. When I began speaking with parents in the U.S. they shared their struggles with sustaining their native languages as their children begin school and getting increasingly exposed to English. In particular, they have started forgetting to use language altogether or do not have ideas to integrate language practice into daily conversations. Along with a colleague at LDT, we decided to develop a tool to help parents to get unlimited ideas for language practice as prompts that seamlessly tie to their daily schedules. Lo and Behold: Hi! Langee was born an AI-powered web app that sends personalized prompts to parents to help them practice their native languages with their children. Since we’re leveraging AI to produce the ideas, I am learning everything about Prompt Engineering and continuously improving the System Prompt to produce better ideas for parents!
Curious to learn more about Hi! Langee? Visit the website here: https://hilangee.com/
Image from productboard
What are your next steps after Stanford?
Stanford presented a ton of opportunities across its various schools, and I took full advantage by exploring courses in Computer Science and Business alongside Education. Through this experience, I discovered my passion for Product Management. I envision myself as someone who thrives at the centre of the action, coordinating efforts and bringing out the best in teams across complex organizations, something I’ve gained insight into through my diverse roles. I'm excited to grow as a Product Leader, particularly with organizations focused on designing learning experiences for students struggling with literacy today. My goal is to help these students become tomorrow’s leaders by delivering products that meet them where they are and support their journey toward success.
What are you reading these days?
I haven’t had much time to read a book cover-to-cover lately, thanks to grad school, where speed-reading dense research papers and offering perspectives on them takes priority. But recently, I picked up Uneducated by Christopher Zara and have been enjoying it. The book questions the value of higher education, which stands in contrast to my career trajectory. It reinforces the idea that people find their path, regardless of their background. A few months ago, I read Educated by Tara Westover, just before moving to the U.S. It's a deeply moving memoir that made me reflect on what it truly means to learn, and whether learning follows any kind of neat timeline. This resonates with my identity as a continuous learner, always eager to discover something new. Lately, I've been diving into Python, learning it with a friend!