The Office Hours
Advisory Team

My background spans K–12 education, university teaching & research, and educational research — I see my students as developing scholars, not just applicants. I'm currently a Ph.D. candidate in Language and Literacy at UC Berkeley. I hold dual bachelor's degrees in English and Linguistics from Berkeley, completed a literacy fellowship at the University of Oxford, and earned a Master of Science in Learning Sciences and Human Development. She serves as a Graduate Student Instructor and Researcher at UC Berkeley's School of Education, teaching undergraduate literacy and education courses alongside Professors Laura Sterponi and Glynda Hull.

Over the past five years, I've guided students into admission at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and others. But outcomes aren't really the point — what I care about most is helping students develop a clear sense of intellectual identity, purpose, and fit.

She's currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, where her research sits at the intersection of biodiversity conservation, agricultural development, and climate adaptation in forest and Indigenous communities. Before Cambridge, she spent years in partnership with the Global Diversity Foundation studying how traditional biocultural practices in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains have held up against the pressures of climate change and modernization. That work led her into the Global Environments Network, a fellowship connecting environmental and social leaders from around the world.

Her academic path is a study in how one question leads to the next. She earned her Honours BSc at the University of Toronto — recognized with the Gordon Cressy Award in 2016 for her contributions beyond the classroom — then went on to an MSc in Ethnobotany at the University of Kent, training in part at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London.

That instinct — to look for the relationships between things rather than treating any one factor in isolation — is exactly what she brings to her students. She approaches academic mentorship and college placement the same way she approaches a research question: by asking what environment, what fit, is actually going to let a particular student think clearly and do their best work. Students working with her get someone who has spent her whole career studying complex systems up close, and who genuinely enjoys helping a young person figure out where they belong within one.

Hans specializes in English and writing instruction. He has taught a wide range of ages and abilities, from undergraduates in writing courses in the University of California system, to private one-on-one lessons with elementary and post-secondary aged students. At the core of Hans's teaching philosophy is the belief that every learner has compelling truths to tell, and that the teacher's attention, mindfulness, and generosity are of utmost importance in bringing them to articulation.

Hans has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from UC Davis's Department of English. He received his BA from the University of Minnesota with a major in Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature and a minor in Biology, and studied Spanish literature at La Fundación Ortega y Gasset in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

His writing has recently appeared in New American Writing and Air/Light, and critical essays are forthcoming in Caesura Magazine. He has received multiple fellowships for writing at UC Davis and is currently at work on his fifth book.

Sonia graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology and a minor in Comparative Literature. She went on to work as a cartographer for Save the Redwoods League, mapping the redwood range and studying how a single tree's health is really a story about its whole surrounding environment.

That same lens is what she brings to her students. A young person's growth isn't just about talent or work ethic in isolation — it's about whether the environment around them is actually letting them take root. Sonia sees a student the way she'd see a plant struggling in the wrong soil: not as lacking potential, but as needing a place that's actually suited to how they grow.

Tutoring found her almost by accident. She started out volunteering in San Francisco's Mission district, helping eighth graders put together their applications to the city's independent schools. Watching several of them land at their top-choice schools, she realized what she loved wasn't the outcome so much as the process — helping a student find the version of their story that was actually theirs to tell, in their own voice.

Outside of work, Sonia is an avid reader with a book club, a cookbook club, and a movie club all going at once — and if you can't find her at any of them, she's probably out swimming in the San Francisco Bay.