My path to becoming a world-class storyteller began with connecting the dots in my own life.
My passion for storytelling began with my upbringing in culturally rich Opelousas, Louisiana. My parents supported my curiosity in everything that was available to me: basketball, volleyball, softball, ballet, piano, pageants, mock trial, student council, multiple civic youth councils (the list goes on). I loved each of these seemingly disparate activities and the diverse community that I developed as a result. Once I embraced being multi-hyphenate thinker and doer, I discovered that my curiosity is exactly what gives me my superpower: connecting ideas and people across barriers, whether real or imagined.
My intellectual liberation continued when I discovered philosophy at Princeton University. Philosophy encouraged me ask the “big picture” questions, and I could study the “philosophy of” anything. This foundation has given me the tools to not just solve problems, but to solve the right problems by asking better questions. This was integral to my experience as a Writing Consultant at the Princeton Writing Center for 3.5 years, where I was challenged to unearth and reframe students’ complex ideas with precise argumentation and captivating language. The most fulfilling aspect of this work? Bringing out powerful narratives and insights implicit in each student’s own thinking.
During an intimate philosophy seminar at Humboldt University in Berlin, I latched onto aesthetics, logic, and ethics. As these are the 3 core elements to narratives that withstand time, I was determined to leverage my wide-ranging interests to create beautiful, empowering stories that others cannot help joining. This propelled me toward a position at Google as marketing solutions and customer experience intern, where I helped SMB advertisers and marketing agency representatives to optimize their AdWords account performance. Despite clients consistently contacting my team from a place of frustration, I led all North American interns with a 100% customer satisfaction score over the course of the 3-month internship.
My story continued to unfold in the Eastern Hemisphere when I was awarded the 2017-2018 Henry Luce Scholarship, a national fellowship that supports a year of professional placement in Asia for a select group of young American professionals. That’s when I became the first Creative Director at Asian Boss—a venture-backed MediaTech startup in Seoul, South Korea—where I oversaw video production at HQ in Seoul and the satellite teams I personally built in New Delhi, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Meanwhile, I began admissions consulting and collaborated with international students to determine their personal profiles and maximize their candidacy for highly selective undergraduate, MBA, and PhD programs.
Determined to fuse design thinking principles with diversity and inclusion, I was awarded the 2018-2019 Public Diplomacy Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. I used this grant to create and teach a course titled “Designing Diversity, Innovating Inclusion” at the American Center Korea to an audience of Korean nationals from otherwise diverse backgrounds. Some of my entrepreneurial creative endeavors for the remaining two years in Seoul included producing Mo’s Creole, a monthly Louisiana-inspired food and beverage pop-up experience; hosting Wordsmiths, Seoul’s leading spoken word poetry and musical performance showcase; and serving as a private tutor for Korean students attending academically rigorous international schools. I even danced professionally once or twice.
Not without a little trial and error, mastering the cultural cues of sometimes segregated, diverse settings, has made me the storyteller and experience architect I am today.