I did not enter into graduate school considering a career in teaching. As an undergraduate, I served as a peer tutor, professional student organization leader, resident assistant, and more. These various roles gave me so much joy. Helping others better understand course material, navigate their professional opportunities, and learn how to set themselves up to be successful in college serendipitously became sources of fulfillment for me . While at Duke, I have come to realize that though I also love working on interesting and important engineering problems, I feel drawn to aid others in finding a similar passion through teaching and mentoring within the field of engineering.

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In graduate school, various opportunities have led me to believe that my ideal career involves teaching or mentoring. These opportunities have included being a teaching assistant (TA), summer pre-college instructor-of-record (IOR), and the recipient of a few teaching-focused fellowships. My TA and IOR opportunities have been in electrical engineering courses such as Random Signals and Noise, Signals and Systems, and Digital Signal Processing.  Particularly in my experience as an instructor, I would say that some of my favorite memories involve witnessing the educational "aha" moments. Being a part of the moment in which a student connects new material to purpose or other bits of knowledge that give course material a whole new meaning is simply an honor. The high applicability of signal processing, my area of focus, causes these moments to often coincide with students understanding why we study the topics of these "aha" moments. Since I believe learning should stem from intrinsic motivation like a desire to metaphorically add to our toolbelt for engineering problem solving, I believe these moments of connection are of the utmost importance. The desire to help others have these moments and make their careers more meaningful and successful is the fundamental reason I desire to teach. 

 

As a soon-to-be Ph.D. graduate, however, I do also desire to put my engineering toolbelt to work. I wish to gain further experience in my field either before or in tandem with finding a role in which teaching/mentoring is a primary responsibility. Looking back through my own educational experience, I find that the most impactful instructors that I have learned from all brought unique research or industry experience to the classroom outside of their dissertation work. The clarity and relatedness that these professors brought to the classroom is largely what I wish to emulate.

I strongly believe that a good engineer is a curious engineer. In my opinion, engineers should constantly be curious about how they can make a positive impact using their unique set of technical problem-solving skills. A good engineering educator should encourage and develop this curiosity. When I teach, I aim to demonstrate this curiosity and provide an environment in which students feel free to wonder.  

 

Specific ways that I demonstrate and encourage curiosity, is by focusing on open-ended problems, asking "what if" questions during class, and incorporating authentic assessment. When I taught Applications of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) for Duke's Pre-College program, this was exemplified through the culminating project in which students researched an application of DSP and were asked to consider ways to innovate either by (1) using DSP techniques common to their application in a different space or (2) using different DSP techniques within their chosen application.

 

This mindset also means that I value the process of making mistakes because making mistakes triggers new ways of thinking. I worry that too many engineers avoid trying out solutions that might pose great potential due to a fear of being wrong. I find it important to provide space and time for students to get comfortable making mistakes in order to further their learning.

As a female in electrical engineering, I have been in courses where I felt like my view on the material and world in general differed from the majority of the class. I have seen how this can be advantageous, so I have since taken opportunities to show others that having a differing perspective can in fact be a good thing in engineering. 

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During the 2021/22 academic year, I had the opportunity to explore ways to foster an inclusive learning environment for multiple types of diversities (academic, cultural, etc.). These opportunities began when I received the Bass Digital Education Fellowship. As a fellow, I was able to join a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) that looked at making assessment in quantitative fields like engineering more inclusive. We spent the year researching, discussing, and exploring how we could help students who seemed to perform significantly worse on assessments than they were expected to based on their perceived effort and assumed true understanding. Root causes such as unhealthy amounts of anxiety, stereotype threat, and being disadvantaged due to hidden curriculum were considered. These discussions often reached beyond assessment as we all had the overall goal of creating a more inclusive learning environment and helping more students to be successful.

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This unique experience in this education-focused fellowship provided me the opportunity to discuss ways to foster inclusion in the digital education realm as a panelist for two TA seminars (Effective Use of Video in Teaching and Learning , 9/16/2021 and Facilitating an Inclusive Online Discussion, 9/23/2021). In March of 2021, I also guest lectured for Duke's Digital Pedagogy course, GS 762, where I discussed various ways to make online teaching more inclusive. Additionally in June of 2021, I guest lectured for the summer Grad Academy version of GS 762 about the findings of the FLC from the previous academic year.

When it comes down to it, I think most everyone craves a career that builds on their strengths and also allows them to accomplish things that they think have some greater meaning. Traditionally, the college experience is meant to allow students to not only gain some amount of accreditation but also ask the deeper life questions that can allow them to get on a career path that truly satisfies them. I recognize that other factors play a role in choosing how we spend our time, but I know its always worthwhile to aim for simultaneously building a career purposefully. In my teaching experiences, I always make time to connect topics to how they are used in current technology and research. I believe that students are best off when they grasp the kind of impact that their discipline's work can have on their communities.

 

In a fellowship I gratefully received in the  spring of 2022, I became part of a cohort of graduate students who equally felt compelled to discuss how we can make our teaching purposeful. Within the Teaching on Purpose cohort, we looked at how we can better understand our students, adapt our courses to the goals of our students, make more time for showing how our material relates to the world at large, and share how certain passions along with our course material can lead to future opportunities. By teaching on purpose, we argue that we can help students more easily discover their purpose. As I develop as a teacher and mentor, I will work to constantly connect my course material and/or engineering projects to its purpose. My first experience in doing so was in my Duke Pre-College course where we began each session by looking at current technology that used the signal processing techniques we would be covering in class. I called this portion of the day "Tech Highlights". Course reviews suggested that this was a favored component of the course, and I could clearly see the motivation of the students rising as we discussed technologies ranging from acoustic levitators to wireless phone chargers.

Engineers, myself included, can get swept away in the excitement of discovery and innovation. As I have mentioned, this excitement for problem solving and the curiosity it entails is something I try to foster in my teaching. The reach of modern technology, however, does also require engineers to consider the ethics behind all that they develop. Though ABET-accredited universities require ethics to be a component of the engineering curriculum, I do believe the nuances that modern tech brings about could be better covered by some programs.

 

After having stumbled upon a number of courses that consider the relationship between science, technology, society, law, and policy in my graduate studies, I have grown passionate about incorporating more ethics into my teaching for engineering. In my field of study in particular, signal processing, we often find that machine learning algorithms (extended to Deep Learning if you wish) compete against traditional signal processing methods when developing solutions for modern and complex digital analysis problems. These algorithms, though often highly effective, can be inexplainable, lacking in transparency, and trained on potentially biased data. To train an engineer to simply use all the tools in their toolbelt when solving a problem is simply not enough. We must also share the downfalls and benefits of the tools. We must contemplate whether the tools we choose to use are justified. Furthermore, we also must use ethics in choosing the problems we aim to solve and the solution we choose to pursue.