Civic action:

Our lack of a coherent, shared civic education is increasingly visible. I started re:FOUNDING, a civic-education initiative that pairs primary sources from American political thought with contemporary TikToks and Tweets and pilots these curricula in K–12 classrooms. I am speaking at the Jack Miller Center’s National Summit on Civic Education this May to expand this work. My essay about the importance of this kind of education in the university won the Buckley National Undergraduate Essay Contest.

Beyond the classroom, I raised $31,000 and mobilized more than 170,000 signatures to oppose a Texas bill that would have removed racial history from K–12 civics curricula, an effort covered by USA TODAYand awarded Top 10 Changemakers Under 25 by Change.org. I believe thoughtful writing can help reform the character of institutions and have used investigative reporting toward that end: for Newsweek on a scammy Texas water agency run by billionaires ahead of a major court case; for The New York Times on the slipperiness of Pell Grant funding; for Slateon the hyper-competitive spirit of the high school science fair; and for Teen Vogueon College Board’s ideological bias.

I have spent some time in national partisan politics, too: I wrote talking points about Biden-era policies in the federal government (in an agency that has now been DOGE’d) and persuaded across divides in battleground states on a presidential campaign (that lost).

I am an MS3 and Squad Leader in The Paul Revere Battalion, Army ROTC’s 2nd Brigade; I anticipate service in the Reserves.