Teaching Assistant Assignment

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Teaching is one of the most satisfying aspects of an academic career. Enabling students to fulfill their potential is immensely gratifying. My goal as a teacher is to help students understand, appreciate and create fascinating concepts and methodologies in computer science. I believe, teaching is largely an interactive process where both students and teachers can learn from each other. For me, two of the most important aspects of teaching is motivating students to stay engaged and challenging them with problems that require critical thinking. Specifically, the process of thinking creatively about a problem and asking questions is much more vital than simply acquiring knowledge. Therefore, one of the key skills that I look forward to developing…show more content…
These courses include undergraduate courses such as discrete mathematics to advanced graduate level courses such as information retrieval, probabilistic graphical models and machine learning. I conducted office hours, graded homework and helped students with their projects. Apart from several talks in seminar courses, I have also substituted for the instructors in machine learning and information retrieval course a few times. During my appointment as a teaching assistant, I helped several students from non-computer science backgrounds understand both the theoretical and programming aspects of computer science. I found it extremely satisfying when many of these students grew in confidence as the course progressed. In the machine learning course, I have used an online question answering platform (Piazza) where students could interact with each other. I found this to be a particularly helpful tool as students who are sometimes shy to speak up in class are much more forthcoming in an online forum. I think it impoverishes the learning environment if students do not interact. Piazza makes it very easy to get a discussion going and this really helped the students gain a lot more out of the course. Apart from my teaching experience, I also mentored an undergraduate student in his undergraduate research for past two years. As a result, I was able to get him excited about the theoretical aspect of our…show more content…
These experiences have made me well-prepared to handle a number of courses both basic as well as advanced. I am extremely interested in teaching a number of undergraduate courses like Introductory Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning, Data Structures and Algorithms, Discrete Mathematics and Database Management Systems. For graduate level, I am excited about teaching advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning courses which cover more advanced concepts and also focus on recent research developments in the area. Further, I would like to teach a specialized course in Probabilistic Graphical Models (e.g., Bayesian networks, Markov networks etc.) since this area is almost synonymous with most practical applications of AI (e.g., NLP, vision, robotics, etc.). I also envision more advanced seminar/project-based courses on specialized areas such as Statistical Relational Learning and Deep Learning. In these courses, students learn to read, understand and present recent research developments. These courses will expose students to research-oriented projects that can potentially lead to research
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