Courses Taught

Awards

Teaching Statement

I believe that an effective teacher must excel in three areas: (1) presenting inspiring and challenging problems, being responsive, and providing continuous feedback to students, (2) preparing students for their later jobs by keeping up-to-date and incorporating practical business problem, (3) organizing content in a well-structured manner and breaking down complex problems into smaller and easier to understand sub-problems.

Intriguing problems, responsiveness, and continuous feedback

I believe in the importance of a student-centered approach to teaching, which engages students and helps them in developing their intellectual potential. Teaching the computer programming course provided me with the opportunity to create such a highly student-centered learning environment. Students are engaged by solving short programming exercises every day, which become part of their final grade. By reviewing the solutions to these exercises daily, I am able to continuously gain feedback about the progress of each individual student as well as the class as a whole, and immediately clarify areas where students have difficulties. If problems and questions arise I assist and advise the respective students so that they are able to catch up with the class. It is very important to me to be accessible to students and respond to questions quickly.

Providing relevant and practical problems

A key responsibility of a teacher is to prepare students well for their future careers. During my three years as an IT consultant for Arthur Andersen and Deloitte, I gained practical experience in developing information systems solutions throughout the systems development lifecycle. Specifically, I worked on the analysis, design, and implementation of business intelligence systems (e.g., OLAP database Hyperion Essbase, spreadsheet based planning systems, MS Access with VBA front-ends). My prior work allows me to bring theory to life and provide relevant and practical problems through drawing on those experiences.

Well-structured courses that break down complex problems

A well-structured course, with precise and clear goals, and logically consecutive learning steps facilitates the learning process for students. One of the challenges of teaching technical courses such as programming is to break down complex concepts into small basic components. Since those components generally built on each other, it is essential to ensure that each student understands them before moving to more complex problems. Homework and repetitions of the content learned in the previous lecture at the beginning of each class help deepen what the student learns.

Conclusion

And above all, I believe that an effective teacher is passionate about the topics they teach and really cares about their students. In the future, I want to further develop my teaching skills and contribute to students’ skills and intellectual development in my new role as a faculty member.