Minh-Tu Van

Biography

Education has been a transformative part of my personal growth, helping to solidify my values and deeply informing the way I live. One of my primary 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 my earliest childhood. Although I changed my educational path a couple of times, my parents were wholly supportive of my transitions, and for that I am deeply grateful. I’ve always been interested in medicine 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 neuroscience graduate school nor medical school were what I wanted to do. However, I still wanted to be in school, so I went on to earn my M.A. in philosophy at Colorado State University.

After graduating from CSU, I began to tutor students of all ages in subjects such as reading, biology, and math. I then received a fellowship that allowed me to substitute teach at various K-12 schools. For most of an academic year, I was a long-term sub for a 4th grade class and essentially took on the role of their homeroom teacher. This experience was one of the hardest and most rewarding of my life. When it ended, I knew that I wanted to stay in education and decided to work one-to-one tutoring and supporting students in the subjects I love.

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