Teaching experience

This page lists some of my teaching experience and participation in educational activities. I had relatively limited involvement in teaching activities while working on my PhD, but since graduating have fully shifted my career into education. Where applicable, this page also links to further resources related to each activity.

Scientist at Brilliant.org

I write content for Brilliant.org, a website offering interactive, online STEM education. I've worked on courses and challenges covering a wide range of topics. The first course I wrote explored solar energy technologies: you can try some of the activities yourself by following this link. The most recent course I've worked on (as of this writing) takes a look at how cryptocurrencies work.

Tutor for Signet Education

I work as a subject tutor for Signet Education, covering a variety of technical subjects including math, chemistry, physics, and engineering. While one-on-one tutoring doesn't easily scale up to reach as many students as the other educational projects I work on, it's nice to have the chance to directly connect with students and see them react to my teaching in real time.

Production Lead for Principles of Manufacturing MicroMasters

I helped facilitate and develop the Manufacturing Process Control and Management in Engineering courses for the Principles of Manufacturing MicroMasters program. This program delivers the first semester of MIT's residential Manufacturing Master's degree online via the edX platform. Students who complete the entire MicroMasters can skip this first semester of classes if they are admitted to the residential program.

TAing Graduate Heat Transfer

I was a teaching assistant (TA) for 2.55 at MIT during the Spring 2016 term. The official course title is "Advanced Heat and Mass Transfer" but colloquially it is the graduate level heat transfer survey class, covering conduction, convection, radiation, phase change, and mass transfer. My primary responsibilities as TA were to lead recitation sessions (for which I typically wrote original problems) and to host review sessions before exams. Teaching this course was also a more exciting opportunity than normal because the instructor team had no faculty members, so there was a good deal of learning happening on both sides of the classroom.

At some point I would like to post some of the recitation problems that I prepared for this class, but they are not ready to be posted here as is.

Mentoring for MITxplore

MITxplore is a math outreach program at MIT that was started by three of my friends and fellow grad students in 2012. It specifically seeks to encourage growth in ways separate from the traditional math curriculum in the US; MITxplore focuses on exploring interesting problems, emphasizing process over product, and nurturing a passion for math in the students. This is achieved through extended programs which consist of hour-long weekly sessions and all-day "Math Day" events, for which I've helped mentor students and develop lesson content.

Some of my favorite lessons that I've developed include:

A long term project for MITxplore is to document and organize our lesson plans to make them easy to share, so hopefully at some point I'll be able to link to the plans from here.

MIT K12 Videos

There is a program at MIT called K12 videos, that produces STEM outreach videos targeted at middle school students (they originally intended to produce videos for students from kindergarten through 12th grade, hence the "K12"). The videos from MIT K12 Videos are now professionally produced and very polished, but when it was first getting off the ground the videos were produced by the students and had a much more homemade feel. I made a few K12 videos along with some friends back before the professional producers got involved, which are available to view on YouTube:

Buoyancy:

The Square-Cube Law:

Harnessing Solar Energy:

Education Minor

One of the requirements for earning a PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT is to complete a minor, consisting of three courses in a subject that is separate from your primary research focus; I chose to minor in education. Three courses is nowhere near enough to make me an expert (especially since none of them involved any formal teaching practice), but it was still valuable in providing a foundation of academic understanding of the topic. The three courses I took were: