I haven’t updated my website for a while, but thanks to the power outages, I have some time! I haven’t written about my experience at Freenome yet, but I think I’ll do that in a later post soon. A lot of stuff has been happening in school.
One of the big updates in the school year is that I’ve taken on the role of President for CalTTC this year. We’ve decided to also reschedule how the officer board is organized as well as we are pushing more on creating a social, interactive club that does not only meet during practice. However, our first struggle I had to deal with was getting more tables, since so many of our tables broke last semester. It was a lot more logistically challenging than I anticipated, communicating with the RSF and placing orders and finding times to get the tables to the RSF. We finally got everything there the day before our first event, which was extremely stressful, but at least a good start to the semester! It’s been a whirlwind of different (sometimes super hectic) responsibilities, some of which I had no idea I had to take care of. I am very happy with how the club is running these days, and it’s a good first step towards making a better system which we can improve upon. I’ve also learned a lot from being in this position about human interaction and being a leader. It’s been a very enlightening experience.
The other (school related) big responsibility I have is being a TA for CS170 (Algorithms). I teach discussion section once a week now to students as well as hold office hours and help design midterms. I thought that the first section was pretty rough since I didn’t have a standard to which to calibrate how discussion section should be run and how much I should prep and time management and basically everything, but ever since then, it’s been a very enjoyable experience being on the opposite side of a classroom. I always have some “inspirational” quote for every section as well as midterm and interview prep questions, and we play piano music in the background when we are working on the worksheet problems. I think my favorite moments are when students ask really good questions that I don’t know the answer to (either immediately or at all) and we have to work together to try to find the answer. Those questions are fun because I think they get to see how I think and I get to see how they think and this type of thinking is really what is important in an algorithms class. I really enjoy seeing the same students every week and I’m really grateful that they choose to spend one hour of their week with me because they feel like they get something out of discussion.
Sometimes discussion feels not interactive enough to me, as in I’m explaining concepts and then students work on problems and I give hints, which is why I enjoy those moments where we work together. One other thing is that being a TA does not feel very social at all sometimes, which I did not expect. As in I know my students’ names and random facts like how much fingers they would like to have or what size their pet rock would be, but we don’t really talk together? It’s more of me talking and them listening or asking questions? Whereas I felt as a reader where my main job was helping out at office hours and homework parties, that felt a lot more interactive because it would be a conversation about what confuses students or what help they needed specifically. It’s not something that I have a solution for and I think that section is going pretty well and there’s nothing I would drastically change, and I can only imagine how professors feel teaching hundreds/thousands of students.
Classes wise, its also kind of crazy, but I like to update classes after they are finished since I don’t have the whole picture yet. Hope everyone has an awesome week!