A Quest for Empathy on a Path Less Traveled

Curiosity is creating a unique path for Kimberly Villard ’20. Compelled by cultures and people who make them, she is parsing the intricacies of empathy in a quest to create a world where human connection, meaningful change, and social progress intersect for the greater good.

Her research began in Upper School when Villard, who entered King School in Grade 7, followed by two siblings, created an independent study exploring language, substance abuse, and violence during the rise of hip-hop.

“Hip-hop is the most popular genre globally, and I wondered what that popularity said about the age we are living in and about Gen Z,” she said.

She also played a leadership role in the Milestones Club, King’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Club at the time. The meetings offered a safe space to discuss cultural shifts and topical events in art, athletics, and politics.

lot of people who were passionate about the same things that I was interested in,” Villard said.

She joined in several workshops, each with a different focus exploring how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics intersect. This created an identity dynamic that was new to Villard.

“You may be Black, but you’re also a woman, and maybe you’re disabled,” she said. “How these things interplay is so interesting, and I had not really thought about that before.”

Villard was struck by the power of listening and its potential to lead to deeper understanding. She took this knowledge when she left King for the University of Southern California (USC), where she planned to follow a pre-law track to a career in social justice. Soon after arriving in California, she had second thoughts.

“I began to think of that work as more reactive than proactive,” she said. “I struggled with the notion of achieving true justice for those who had been wronged because if true justice exists, then injustice could never occur in the first place.”

At USC, she served as a tour guide, which deepened her appreciation for the higher education environment. She also loved the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of the people she was meeting.

“I loved connecting with students and their families,” she said. “I enjoyed highlighting the importance of how a college degree can be life-changing for some folks, especially first-generation college students or those who come from low-income situations.”

These interactions nurtured her desire to explore empathetic dispositions through academic research. Though USC did not have an exact fit for her desired course of study, the school was interested in

These experiences laid the foundation for the most resonant experience of Villard’s upper school career: the National Student Diversity Leadership Conference, which King attends annually. As a student, she attended conferences in Anaheim, California, and Nashville, Tennessee.

“The conferences were some of the first times that I was in an environment with a the work she proposed. Through the interdisciplinary major program, she developed her own major focused on the importance of emotion and reason in the context of academic environments.

“In essence, it is investigating the science of human goodness,” she said. “I am using what we know about evolutionary biology and the brain’s anatomy to learn how we shape the minds of young people to be more caring and empathetic.”

On this track, she will study writing and its effect on cultivating empathy.

“I am one of just a handful of students to create their own major at USC,” said Villard, who hopes to remain in academia and make empathy a core component of higher learning. “I realized that in education, though I may not be working in a courtroom myself, I can shape the minds of people who do. In this way, my work can be as meaningful as a career in justice might have been.”

To deepen her studies, Villard served as a research assistant at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in New Haven and completed a project internship remotely at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in Chicago.

Villard is particularly interested in college-age students who are developing a sense of identity. She acknowledges fundamental questions as the guides to their exploration: Who am I? Who do I want to be in this world? What do I stand for? The same questions are central to King’s inquiry-based approach to learning.

“There is a lot of literature on socialemotional development for K-12, but I am interested in developing those competencies in ‘emerging adults’ like myself,” she said. “How do we shape the hearts and minds of college students?”