Hillary + Brendan
Brendan and Hillary first met when they were ten years old, at a prep school (补习班) in Flushing, New York. Although one student outperformed the other, they found themselves attending the same middle school (high school): Hunter. In fact, they were in the same seventh grade homeroom, and apparently sat next to each other in math class (probably because their last names start with the same letter. Or maybe not). Brendan and Hillary got closer in senior year (the infamous 2019-2020 year), performing a dance together for Hunter’s annual Asian Cultural Society (ACS) show and helping to organize the Asian American Leadership Forum for Youth (AALFY). It was largely radio silent for the four years that they were at college, but they reconnected after both moving back to the city where they grew up post-grad.
Beyond sharing a passion for preserving critical thinking in the age of AI, Brendan and Hillary also both dedicate significant amounts of time to activities that most adults regard as “hobbies” and condense into a single line on their professional resume: Pokémon (Brendan) and volleyball (Hillary). There’s a lot of shared history, but the sections below detail just a bit more about Brendan and Hillary as individuals.
Hillary attended Georgetown University, pursuing a joint degree in Business and Global Affairs. Although she never considered herself particularly academic during high school, she discovered a passion for learning in college. Soon, she became enamored with education broadly as an opportunity for personal growth, empowerment, and impact. While at Georgetown, Hillary immersed herself in spaces where she worked with other students as a mentor. She was a Consultant at the Georgetown Writing Center, meeting with hundreds of students over her three-year tenure. A bit different from the one-on-one tutoring interactions she facilitated as a Writing Center tutor, Hillary also served as a Teacher’s Assistant for the gateway course for her major. In this role, she got a bit more exposure to teaching from a classroom perspective and learned more about the role of evaluation in the academic experience. After a wonderful four years at Georgetown, Hillary worked in forensics and litigation consulting for a year and eight months. She is currently working on this project and others full-time, and is relieved to be re-entering an academic environment (law school) come Fall 2026.
Brendan first became conscious of the power of education in high school. Having found most of his academic success in STEM environments, he had a transformative experience junior year in his eleventh grade English class. Through a mastery of pedagogy and unwavering patience, his teacher excelled at helping students build luminous ideas out of even the most undeveloped concepts. Brendan felt a unique energy permeate the classroom, an excitement shared by many of his classmates. Inspired, he knew that fostering educational growth in others would be part of his future. Brendan went on to graduate from Cornell University with a degree in Computer Science, where he had formative experiences as both a tutor and a teaching assistant. He currently works full-time as a software engineer and seeks to bring together his technical abilities and his passion for teaching through this project.