Following graduation from the University of North Carolina in 2000, she established Habitat for Humanity college chapters in Australia and New Zealand, the first in the Pacific. She has travelled extensively throughout Meso- and South America and is fluent in Spanish. While travelling and living in Asia, she worked with preschool-aged children in a Thailand orphanage. She received her law degree at Northeastern University in 2007, having interned at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She is currently an asylum attorney at Greater Boston Legal, whose client base is largely from Mesoamerica.