I am passionate about exploring new ideas and perspectives. I'm passionate about living purposefully, mindfully and compassionately. I'm passionate about making the most of my life and contributing as much as I can to making the world a better place.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I believe traveling should be about more than experiencing a new place. It's about expanding your mind, experiencing new perspectives. So the opportunity to connect with new people in a new place is every bit as valuable to me in that process as connecting with the place itself. Couchsurfing seems to be the perfect place to do just that.

Interests

Academically I'm exploring the intersections of education, positive psychology, and social entrepreneurship. I'm looking at ways to restructure our education systems to promote not only more effective learning, but also wellness, growth, civic engagement and innovation. My dream is to be a leader of a college which radically rebuilds higher education around the principles of what I call EPIC learning: Exploration, Purpose, Individualization & Collaboration. I'm also passionate about social justice and equity, so I'm regularly challenging people to think about how we can redesign these systems in a way that makes opportunity more equitable and more fully embraces diversity and rather than oppressing it. If you're interested to learn more I wrote a few thoughts about how to do that on a website, http://www.epiclearninginstitute.com/ & more recently on a blog post at http://www.bigthinkers.us/blog/2015/4/22/5-ways-to-transform-traditional-education.

Aside from these three big academic/career interests, I also love to discuss politics and futurism, learning about innovative architectural and urban designs, watching spoken word and thought-provoking videos (TED Talks FTW!) and having discussions that get at the core of who we are and where we should go, as individuals and as a part of humanity.

• education
• politics
• traveling
• socializing
• blogging
• spoken word
• teaching
• entrepreneurship
• psychology

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: my favorites are changing constantly, because I'm always drawn to things that are unlike anything I've seen or heard before! In general that means mostly electronic music with some hip-hop & and indie rock as long as it sounds new and interesting.

Movies: something moving and thought-provoking: that typically either means aesthetic powerhouses like Avatar or emotional heartstring-tuggers like Crash.

Books: The last couple books I've loved recently were "College (un)bound" by Jeffrey Selingo & "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. I don't have that much time to read outside of classes and leading my organization but if I did I'd be looking for anything that's written engagingly and takes a journalistic or empirically-based approach to challenging the way we think about life, education, or organizational leadership.

I'm always eager to hear suggestions for any of the above!

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I created a student organization at URI last fall called Big Thinkers. We explore the big questions common to us all and help students make a real impact on big problems in the world and in our community. In less than a year it's already grown into - according to our student union - the most active student organization on campus, and we're just getting started. You can learn more about us at http://www.bigthinkers.us/ . Also feel free to check out the video recording of our first meeting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi5g8SxOpxI (sorry for the awful cell phone recording!). We've come a long way since then but you'll at least learn a little more about me and what my organization's purpose is.

Teach, Learn, Share

I would love to learn about you: what moves you, what drives you, and what gives you a sense of purpose in your life. I'd also love to learn about your perspective of the city you live in: what you love about it, how it could improve, and your favorite places to go and things to do.

What I Can Share with Hosts

Assuming we have time: hopefully some great discussion about the world and our place in it, what we hope to get out of the rest of our lives and how we can get there. Also - and this is totally optional of course - if we have time and you're interested also love to learn about you and give you a platform to share your wisdom by "interviewing" you in the spirit of StoryCorps (http://storycorps.org/about/ / http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_isay_everyone_around_you_has_a_story_the_world_needs_to_hear). But even if we don't have time for deep discussions, I also hope that you find my positive and optimistic outlook about life infectious and uplifting.

Since I'm still living in college dorm I can't currently host any couchsurfers myself, however after graduating in December 2015 I'll finally be getting my own apartment in a major city (probably either New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, or Detroit), and at that time I'd love to start hosting. This seems like an awesome way to meet people from around the world so I'm looking forward to having a space soon where I can give back to the couchsurfing community!

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, England, France, Italy, Puerto Rico, Spain, Switzerland, Vatican City State