About
I study how public institutions can work better for the people who depend on them.
I study sociology, humanities, and public policy at UT Austin, with a particular interest in how institutions shape access to opportunity. Outside the classroom, I spend much of my time working in research, student leadership, public service, and community-facing roles where those same questions become much less abstract.
Who I am
Humanities & Sociology
I am a Humanities and Sociology student at The University of Texas at Austin, with minors in Government and Rhetoric & Writing and a certificate in Public Policy. I expect to graduate in May 2028. Across those fields, I keep returning to one guiding question: what does government owe people when access to opportunity depends on navigating the institutions it creates? My coursework and research sit at the intersection of social policy, inequality, administrative burden, public institutions, and ethical leadership.
I maintain a 4.0 GPA and have been recognized as a Distinguished College Scholar and University Honors student, as well as an Eva Stevenson Woods Presidential Scholar, Bowden Fellow, and HSF Scholar. My developing Humanities thesis examines administrative burden and the design of social policy, with particular attention to the gap between a government's commitment to making programs accessible and the rules, procedures, and institutional structures people encounter in practice. I am developing this work with Dr. Kellen Kane and Dr. Elizabeth Bell.
- B.A. in Humanities & Sociology
- 4.0 GPA · University Honors · Distinguished College Scholar
- Eva Stevenson Woods Presidential Scholar · Bowden Fellow · HSF Scholar
- Humanities Thesis in Development
What I'm doing
Places and communities
Most of what I do outside class puts me somewhere between research, public service, and helping other students navigate institutions of their own.
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[2026 — present]
Texas Sociological Association · President & Founder
I founded the Texas Sociological Association to build the kind of undergraduate sociology community I wanted to see at UT: one that makes research, faculty mentorship, professional development, and the discipline itself more accessible to students. I lead a nine-member executive board and a growing membership of more than 25 students, working with the Department of Sociology to develop faculty programming, research opportunities, career exploration, and spaces for students to understand what sociology can look like beyond a single classroom. For me, TSA is an experiment in institution-building on a small scale: asking what makes a community genuinely useful, accessible, and worth participating in.
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[2025 — 2026]
Longhorn Orientation · Lead Orientation Advisor
Longhorn Orientation taught me what institutional access looks like at human scale. During the largest logistical redesign in the program's history, I helped lead a team of more than 100 Orientation Advisors serving roughly 12,000 incoming students and their families. I directly advised more than 350 students, trained and mentored other advisors, and helped students navigate everything from registration barriers to university resources and accommodations. The experience made something clear to me: even well-designed institutions can become inaccessible when people do not know how to navigate them, and ethical leadership often begins with making complicated systems understandable.
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[2026 — present]
Texas Promise Programs Project · Undergraduate Research Assistant
At the LBJ School of Public Affairs, I work with Dr. Elizabeth Bell on research examining college Promise programs across Texas. I have analyzed program eligibility requirements, maintained policy data, developed Stata tools, and authored policy briefs examining programs across the state. The work has given me a way to study one of my central interests empirically: a benefit can exist on paper and still remain difficult to reach because of eligibility rules, information gaps, paperwork, deadlines, or other administrative costs. That tension between policy intent and lived access now sits at the center of my academic work.
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[Current]
Public service, writing, and student advocacy
My other work keeps me connected to the people and institutions affected by the questions I study. As a College Student Commissioner for the City of Austin, I work on issues affecting students across the city, including housing affordability and tenant protections. As a University Writing Center Consultant, I work individually with writers across disciplines as they develop arguments and communicate complex ideas. I have also served as a Certified Application Counselor with Foundation Communities, helping community members navigate Affordable Care Act marketplace enrollment. Each role has shown me a different side of the same problem: institutions only work when people can actually understand, access, and use them.
Why this matters
Good policy is not enough if people cannot reach it.
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1
Access can disappear between a policy's promise and its implementation.
Governments create scholarships, health coverage, housing assistance, education programs, and other forms of support to expand opportunity. But participation often requires people to learn complicated rules, prove eligibility, complete paperwork, meet deadlines, and repeatedly interact with institutions that may not have been designed around their circumstances. These learning, compliance, and psychological costs can determine who ultimately receives the benefits a policy was created to provide.
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2
Public institutions can be designed around the people using them.
Administrative burden is not inevitable. Research on burden reduction, automatic eligibility, simplified applications, clearer communication, direct outreach, and human-centered administration shows that governments have tools for making programs easier to navigate. My own work with college access, health insurance enrollment, orientation, and student services has also shown me that seemingly small design decisions can dramatically change someone's experience with an institution.
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3
The harder problem is deciding what institutions are responsible for.
Many barriers persist not because governments lack the technical ability to reduce them, but because administrative choices reflect competing priorities, rules, incentives, assumptions, and definitions of responsibility. That makes accessibility an ethical leadership problem as much as a policy-design problem. Leaders must decide whether success means simply creating a benefit or ensuring that the people it was intended to serve can realistically obtain it.
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4
So I study the architecture behind access.
My developing thesis examines how administrative burden becomes embedded in social policy and how government efforts to reduce that burden translate—or fail to translate—into program design. Alongside that research, I work in organizations where people encounter institutional rules directly. Together, those experiences are helping me understand ethical public leadership not simply as making good decisions, but as building institutions whose procedures live up to their purposes.
Background
The rest of it
Before coming to UT Austin, I attended Boerne High School and studied at Angelo State University. Those experiences preceded a path at UT that has become increasingly interdisciplinary: I entered college interested broadly in public affairs and have since found myself moving between sociology, humanities, government, writing, research, and public service. Rather than pulling me in separate directions, those fields have given me different ways to ask the same questions about institutions, inequality, and opportunity.
A lot of my work also involves translating ideas between different audiences. I genuinely enjoy writing, research, visual communication, and building things from the ground up—whether that means developing a research project, creating an organization and its identity, designing materials, or helping someone turn a complicated idea into something understandable. That interest in communication is part of why I have gravitated toward both the University Writing Center and projects that let me combine research with design and public-facing work.
- Writing & communication
- Graphic and visual design
- Public history
- Vinyl record collecting
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