Vaasavi U

I’m an economics Ph.D. student at Ohio State University with a passion for understanding how our day-to-day choices can affect broader economic outcomes. While I’m from Ohio originally, I’ve been lucky to attend schools across the globe, including Bocconi University in Milan and Carnegie Mellon University, as well as do interesting policy work at the Federal Reserve Board and Yale University. In my free time, you can catch me playing around with my film camera, baking, writing, and playing a variety of sports at an almost-adequate level.

I’ve taught subjects like microeconomics, macroeconomics, and financial literacy at various universities and schools. At Ohio State, I teach Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, and I previously co-developed a financial literacy course at Carnegie Mellon that is still offered today. To me, any student can excel; I’ve helped students with learning disabilities to earn the top scores in the class as well as challenged my most curious students to excel beyond their expectations, opening opportunities for them to work directly with tenured faculty.

I believe that the relationship between teaching and mentorship is strongly intertwined. I prioritize a holistic approach to economics and mathematics, helping students contextualize the subject amongst their existing passions (from YouTube to college football) and providing real-world examples to make economics relevant and engaging. The most important element for me is building an intuition for the subject, giving students the agency to solve problems they may not have seen before and confidence to conquer new frontiers as they move further in their field.