Teaching

Experience:

Assistant Teaching Professor of Physics at Villanova University (June 2023 – Present)

I will fill this out using my faculty evaluation tracking of accomplishments one of these days! I love my job too much to worry about spending time on a CV style teaching experience description 😉

Visiting Lecturer of Physics at Claremont Mckenna College, Scripps College, and Pitzer College (July 2022 – May 2023)

I was hired for the following Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics position for a one-year appointment. This past semester I had the pleasure of teaching: PHYS 033L, Principles of Physics — an integrated lecture and lab introductory course for physics majors (as well as students whose major requires calculus-based physics) on classical mechanics and thermodynamics; as well as PHYS 101, Classical Mechanics with Computational Applications — a senior-level classical mechanics course for physics majors on the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms. My syllabi for both 033 and 101 are available for viewing. Both of my courses’ exams, homeworks, and any other course material are available upon request. I will update this entry with links to student evaluations as soon as they have been published. In the meantime, here are constructive criticisms and positive comments I solicit (via extra credit) from students throughout the semester to make changes to my pedagogy on-the-fly, as well as some informal midterm evaluations for both 033 and 101. Next semester I will be teaching PHYS 031L, General Physics for the Life Sciences — a larger lecture class for non-majors (though still calculus-based) on electromagnetism, waves, and modern physics; as well as multiple sections of the lab associated with PHYS 031. Since arriving in this position, apart from my primary duties teaching these two courses, I have:

assisted fellow incoming faculty member (Professor Tiziana Di Luccio — our new experimental physics educational specialist) with organizing and improving introductory physics lab curriculum;
sat in on the department’s 3-2 economics-engineering advising session;
assisted Scripps College and Pitzer College’s fellowship advisors (Deans Jennifer Armstrong and Nigel Boyle respectively) with information sessions for the Fulbright Scholarship; completed 7 campus committee interviews and evaluation (CCE) forms for students applying for the Fulbright at Scripps and Pitzer, assisted a student of mine with all aspects of her Fulbright application aimed at doing condensed matter theory research in Hungary; assisted 2 additional students at Pitzer (who were not in my campus committee evaluation batch) with their applications;
attended Pitzer College, Keck science department, and Keck’s physics discipline faculty meetings — where the Keck science department meeting in particular gave me great insight into the administrative side of running a complex department — one across multiple disciplines and multiple colleges
participated in the department’s weekly informal physics student-faculty lunches — chatting with students and/or colleagues as well as presenting my research topics;
held open office hours every week for any student in the department to ask questions about applying to graduate school;
gave a talk on general relativity and my research to students and faculty of the Claremont Colleges through the following seminar series [5],
developed two thermodynamics labs to make up for a lack of lab experiments on that topic in the department given that the PHYS 033 class is designed to have a 2/3 classical mechanics and 1/3 thermodynamics split,
in addition to having my classes occasionally observed by peers/supervisors, I observed their classes to take in as much pedagogy expertise as possible, and
graded senior thesis poster presentations for the department.

Teaching Assistant at Stony Brook University (August 2020 – May 2022)

I was a graduate TA (lead instructor) for the Physics 133 and 134 lab courses in the fall and spring of 2020-2021 respectively. 133 covered experiments in mechanics (projectile motion, conservation laws, angular momentum, waves) and thermodynamics, while 134 covered experiments in electricity and magnetism (EM fields, Lorentz force, circuits) and optics. Further details on the courses can be found on the 133 webpage, and 134 webpage. The students were responsible for performing, analyzing, and communicating the results of our experiments every week. Some of the novel aspects of experimental science my students learned in theses courses include: quantifying uncertainty, using LoggerPro software, using an oscilloscope, and creating electric circuits. Apart from the standard learning goals, my altered rubric facilitated the learning of the following: writing scientific abstracts, formatting mathematical formulae and even entire lab reports in LaTeX typesetting, and making scientific figures in softwares like Inkscape or Sketchpad.io. I kept the following documentation of the course: my rubric, my supplementary teaching materials in the form of intro Zoom videos recorded for the students prior to lab, LaTeX tutorials and write-ups of any derivations students struggled with, my Blackboard announcements, frequency distributions I made to inform my grading, and my students’ anonymous mid-semester and end-of-semester feedback on my teaching. I have also written 3 letters of recommendation for pre-med students of mine, an example being the following. COVID social distancing practices (two classrooms, plastic dividers between lab partners) were maintained in the course.

I taught the Physics 121 lab course in the fall 2021 semester, which is an algebra-based version of the calculus-based Physics 133 that I taught last year. I specifically requested this course to be challenged to teach the same material to a different demographic of students. My blackboard announcements mirror the style of my previous year’s announcements, and my intro videos on Zoom at the beginning of class do as well. My students’ anonymous course feedback is also available.

I taught the fully online version of the Physics 134 lab course over the summer of 2021. I am currently teaching this again in the spring of 2022 but now have access to the ioLab device needed for the course thanks to a previous student of mine sharing theirs. This will allow me to expand my role beyond what I was confined to last summer to include doing all the labs myself, just like with my in-person instruction. The intro videos with this equipment are included in my 134 YouTube playlist (which include videos from previously mentioned classes above and from the following mentioned tutoring below).

CSTEP Tutor at Stony Brook University (June 2021 – August 2021)

The Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP) aims to support historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged Stony Brook University students who want to enter into science/technology through tutoring, advising, and research/internships. As a tutor, I met weekly with a student in the program who was taking the introductory physics courses 131 and 132. I prepped solutions to homework/exam problems the student struggled with, and then we walked through them together over Zoom, the latter half of which can be viewed in my 134 YouTube playlist.

WISE High School Mentor at Stony Brook University (August 2021 – May 2022)

Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program aims to increase the number of women in science, math and engineering fields. The WISE high school program brings local high schoolers to campus for labs, experiments, and other projects twice a month during the academic year. As a mentor, I craft lesson plans (conducive to the virtual nature of the program due to covid during the fall semester) based on physics simulations that focus on mechanics, thermodynamics, and electrodynamics. Created by the Nobel Prize winner Carl Weimann (who recently spoke virtually at Stony Brook about the perception of talent and disparities in science) PhET is a collection of interactive simulations that give students the abilities to work through physics experiments by controlling all the aspects of an experiment from their Internet browsers. In order for the students to have at least one “real” lab, I organized a pendulum lab material kit to be sent to the students’ homes in the fall semester, and an electric field plotting kit this spring semester. My fall and spring lesson plans and session notes include precisely what was covered.