Since October 2025, I’ve been intentionally setting aside time to learn again. Not because I’m worried about being out-skilled by a computer, but because I had missed that feeling of learning.

When I was a kid, learning came easily to me, especially at school. I loved lectures and I memorized content easily. I still listen to podcasts to learn about obscure, complex stories; and I still love to read wikipedia for the factual deep dive.

When I got into college at NYU, learning became harder. For one, there were way less lectures and way more of everything else that was interesting. I started becoming a visual and experiential learner as I went to more art museums… and started interning. As many of us know by now, there’s no job which actually trains you. You learn by doing.

There were still some classes which really tickled my brain though - a class about the history of disease, or about Italian Futurism and fascism. And those classes were the first foray into learning by discussion, passing thoughts back and forth until we had explored all nooks and crannies of a sentence, and decided to move on.

Starting last October, I began training as a docent at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It truly feels like an honor to do this. I have been a fan of the Whitney ever since I moved to New York in 2019, where it felt like every other weekend, I was making a trip to a new museum I hadn’t been to (shoutout to the New Museum).

As a docent at the Whitney, I’ve been trained to give “guided close-looking” tours to groups of up to 25 people. The tours are conversational in structure but the objective of it is to create moments of empathy, using the modern art as a facilitator for that conversation. That might sound like a bit of a reach, but let me take you through this.

There is an outstanding portrait by Alice Neel of the one and only, Andy Warhol. When I start by asking my participants to describe what they see, I get words like, sickly, vulnerable, elderly, meditative, peaceful. And as we come to unravel the celebrity from the person that Andy Warhol was, my participants share more about themselves.

“He put on such a put-together facade, but he must have been so scared after that attack…”

“I wonder if maybe that’s his brave face… how he’s coping with this painting being done of him. It’s not a flattering one…”

Or when we go to Racing Thoughts by Jasper Johns, and we talk about the anxiety of living in New York through the AIDS epidemic, and watching the people of your community fall ill…

“I’m coming into my later years myself, and I feel like he’s painting about that feeling of knowing you’re getting old…”

“He’s included so many of his friends and colleagues in this work, I wonder how it feels to have watched so many of them pass away by now…”

It’s a beautiful thing to watch people come to understand a work and its artist. It is surprisingly uplifting to see strangers come into conversation with each other. Just a few months ago, I don’t think I would have been able to hold this kind of space. But something that’s great about volunteering for the community this way, is that I get so much practice.

I learn about how to involve children in the conversation. I learn how to redirect and guide a group of older participants into the reflection phase of the discussion. I learn about learning again, when I do all the research the week before, and spend hours planning how I want to reveal important context for the maximum effect.

This kind of learning by teaching is new to me, but it’s been captivating. I love giving these tours, meeting these strangers, and showing them my favorite works in the galleries. It is magical to experience it with them.