Meet the New Tutors: Joshua Lo (’12)

Growing up in Dallas and Houston, Texas, Joshua Lo (’12) nurtured dreams of becoming a concert cellist. Yet he reconsidered those dreams when he enrolled at Thomas Aquinas College in 2008. “I loved it,” he says. “I wanted to continue thinking about these matters for the rest of my life.”

The first matters that Mr. Lo thought about after graduating were the two subjects that gave him the most difficulty as a student. “Some of my weak points were languages and logic,” he says. “I worked hard to rectify those after TAC, which paved my graduate and postgraduate studies.”

After earning a master’s degree in philosophy at Boston College, he brushed up on his languages by serving as a teacher’s assistant at the Accademia Vivarium Novum, a Latin and Ancient Greek immersion program in Rome. And he is now in the process of completing his doctorate from Boston University as he finalizes his dissertation, “On Aristotle’s Inductive Syllogism in Prior Analytics II.23.”

“There’s a fresh zeal here, which I imagine was at the very founding of Thomas Aquinas College.”

Having thus rectified any lingering deficiencies in language and logic, Mr. Lo continued his New England academic journey by accepting a position as an instructor at the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts (TMC) in 2019, the same year that Thomas Aquinas College opened the doors of its Northfield, Massachusetts, campus. With multiple friends on the College’s faculty, and with TMC only 90 minutes away, he paid several visits to TAC-New England over the years. When the opportunity arose to teach at his alma mater, he could not let it pass.

“I very much enjoyed working at Thomas More,” Mr. Lo explains, but he missed the College’s integrated curriculum, in which tutors teach across the disciplines, so as to help students better make the connections between them. “One of the things that drew me back to TAC was the opportunity to teach math and the sciences again,” he adds. For his first year at the College, however, he is teaching Freshman Philosophy and Sophomore Language, delving into the two disciplines on which he focused as a graduate student. Relying on even further past expertise as a cellist, he is also teaching music to the juniors.

Taking a position at the College’s New England campus was both a relief — being able to continue his academic career without leaving a region that he has come to call home — as well as an opportunity, allowing him to contribute to a pioneering moment in the College’s history. “There’s a fresh zeal here, which I imagine was at the very founding of Thomas Aquinas College,” he says. “I am happy to be part of the new adventure here.”

In addition to this academic adventure, Mr. Lo has been living another adventure since the summer of 2022, when he married his wife, Jackie. With the newlyweds welcoming their first child earlier this year, they are overjoyed to join so many friends on the TAC faculty, many of whom are parents to young children of their own.