Annie started her work in education as an English teacher in Japan right after graduating from college. When she returned to the U.S., before starting her work as a teaching assistant at USC, she had the chance to work for the Digital Kids research project, exploring the ways that gameplay and fun can be mobilized for learning. In graduate school, her teaching experience was primarily in a classroom. She taught film and media courses such as Postmodern Cinema and Race, Class, and Culture, learning how to communicate complex concepts to students in a meaningful way. After spending several years in the classroom, she started one-on-one tutoring as a favor to a friend and found the experience much more effective and rewarding than lecturing to large groups. From there, she started specializing more and more in standardized test preparation, which has been her primary focus over the last ten years. 

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Annie feels that education is at its best when it can be tailored to each individual student’s needs and interests. This is what makes preparing students for standardized testing especially challenging and necessary. Considering that standardized tests from the ACT/SAT to all of the APs are, by necessity, designed for consistency, they present students with a “one-size-fits-all” experience that may not suit every student. Annie works closely with her students to identify strategies that can help mitigate test-taking anxiety and other challenges, with the primary goal of helping people to recognize their strengths and lean into them. 

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