I am writing this from my apartment in the Philippines, three months into my Science Corps fellowship at CVIF-DLS. The rainy season has finally given way to cooler, clearer days, and I have been spending evenings on my balcony, reading and reflecting on the first half of this experience.
When I applied to Science Corps, I told myself that I was doing something meaningful for others — bringing my scientific training to students who might not otherwise encounter a PhD scientist. What I did not fully appreciate was how much this fellowship would challenge and expand me.
What I Have Been Teaching
In the first three months, I have taught units on biology (cell biology and genetics), chemistry (reactions and states of matter), and — most recently — an introduction to scientific thinking and experimental design. That last unit has been, unexpectedly, my favorite to teach.
Watching students who have never done open-ended science work grapple with the question "what do you want to find out?" is an extraordinary thing. They are not used to being given freedom in a science class. The CVIF-DLS philosophy, from what I have come to understand, is that you have to trust students to be scientists — to be curious, to make mistakes, to iterate. That philosophy aligns deeply with everything I know about how science actually works, and I feel grateful to be in an environment that takes it seriously.
Learning From the Students
One of the things that has surprised me most is how much the students already know — not about formal science, but about observation and the natural world. Several of my students have grown up near rice fields, fishing villages, and forests. They notice things. They have intuitions about how living systems work that I — raised in a city, trained in a laboratory — simply do not have.
A student named Paolo spent fifteen minutes one afternoon explaining to me how you can tell the health of a coral reef by the behavior of the fish near it. He had learned this from his grandfather. It was not in any biology textbook I have ever read, but it was scientifically astute. I ended up incorporating his observation into our unit on ecosystems.
What Is Hard
I want to be honest: this fellowship is hard in ways I did not expect. The pace is relentless — I teach every day, prepare materials every evening, and am constantly adapting to students' needs in real time. There are days when I feel underprepared and overwhelmed. There are days when a lesson I spent hours designing falls flat, and I have to figure out why and how to fix it for the next class.
The loneliness of being far from home is also real. My support network — my family, my PhD cohort, my friends — are all in different time zones. The fellowship is immersive in a way that is both wonderful and isolating.
But then something happens — a student makes a connection, a lesson clicks, a conversation goes somewhere unexpected — and I am reminded of exactly why I came.
Looking Ahead
I have three months left in my fellowship. I am thinking about legacy: what materials can I leave behind that will serve these students after I am gone? I am working on a series of low-resource laboratory activities — experiments that can be done with materials available locally, without specialized equipment — that the school can use for years to come. My co-fellow An Tran is doing something similar from the chemistry and materials science side.
I am also thinking about what I will bring back with me. Not just memories, but a fundamentally changed understanding of what science education can and should look like.