Minh-Tu Van

Biography

Education has been a transformative part of my personal growth and has made me so much more assured of my values of how/why I want to live my life the way I do. One of my main reasons for working in education is my hope to impart a similar experience to other students! For this, I am extremely thankful and excited to be tutoring at AJ.

I come from a family of Vietnamese immigrants, and their emphasis and care towards my education was evident from a young age. I changed my educational path a couple of times and my parents were wholly supportive of my transitions; this is something I am deeply grateful for. I was interested in medicine (and still am!) for years and started my college trajectory studying neuroscience at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. While I was a freshman there, I took my first philosophy course called, ‘Knowledge and Society’. I became enamored with how philosophy supplemented my thinking and ended up adding a philosophy major to my neuroscience B.S. After being in a neuroscience research lab and taking the MCAT, I came to the conclusion that neither of these paths (i.e., neuroscience graduate school and medical school) were what I wanted to do. However, I still wanted to be in school, and so I got my M.A. in philosophy at Colorado State University.

In the last year, I began to tutor students around my area of various ages/subjects (e.g., reading, biology, and math). I was also in a fellowship this past year that allowed me to substitute teach at various K-12 schools. From November 2025-June 2026, I was a long-term sub for a 4th grade class and essentially took on the role as their homeroom teacher. This experience was one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences of my life and, after it, I knew I wanted to stay in education in some capacity. 

Outside of education, I am a huge fan of mushroom foraging and making art/crafts! I also play music with my friends in a band, and I try to make time to read as much as I can.