Teaching Experience & Philosophy
I served as a teaching fellow for four undergraduate courses, leading a total of eight discussion sections with 15-20 students each. Additionally, I have been a thesis adviser or mentor for four undergraduate students and held over 150 one-on-one sessions to tutor students on writing assignments as the Bok Writing Fellow for sociology. At the graduate level I designed and taught a workshop series on web scraping and Python and provide an annual tutorial for the required Sociological Research Design seminar on citation management tools for academics and research teams. In particular I enjoy teaching research methods courses that equip students with the critical thinking skills and analytical tools to evaluate arguments and data in the world around them. I also enjoy teaching a range of substantive subjects, including the sociology of organizations, culture, politics and development.
Having worked as a web designer and data scientist, I am extremely committed to making data management and analysis skills accessible to all graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences. “Big data" and “data science" are often pigeon-holed as elite subfields suitable for only a few. And training in data skills, if available, is often taught at levels inaccessible for beginners or inappropriate for social science applications. I firmly believe that all social scientists should have the opportunity and be encouraged to develop “data literacy", not only to benefit their own work but to remain in conversation with vital new empirical studies and emerging methods that are increasingly important in our discipline. One of my priorities as an educator is therefore to offer courses, workshops and mentorship to empower students in developing data skills.
SOC 186: Refugees in Global Perspective
Teaching Fellow for Dr. Danilo Mandić (2 sections, 2017)
SOC 25: Introduction to the Sociology of Organizations
Teaching Fellow for Dr. Peter Marsden (2 sections, 2017)
SOC 27: Introduction to Social Movements
Teaching Fellow for Dr. Jocelyn Viterna (2 sections, 2014)
SOC 128: Methods of Social Science Research
Teaching Fellow for Dr. Paul Chang (2 sections, 2013)
In 2017-2018 I served as the Bok Writing Fellow for the Department of Sociology. After receiving training in writing instruction from the Harvard College Writing Program, I assisted students with writing assignments for sociology courses in over 150 one-on-one sessions.
Much more than simply translating ideas into words, the process of writing is fundamental to clarifying, refining and communicating sociological thought. However, we rarely work with students to develop their skills as writers within the context of social science courses. This is why I have developed several writing-oriented “modules" that I teach in my undergraduate sections:
I also have experience as a guest teacher in undergraduate seminars, where I lead undergraduate students in two-hour interactive workshops on specific writing topics:
In spring 2017 I designed and taught a series of three workshops to over 15 sociology graduate students to introduce basic web scraping skills and provide a practical introduction to the Python language for those with no prior knowledge. The presentations below provide a sense of the workshop trajectory but do not include other materials used in the demonstrations, including Python notebooks, cheatsheets, data and graphics:
Workshop 1 Basic Tools for Scraping
Workshop 2 Scraping with Python
Workshop 3 Scraping Multiple Pages with Python (github)
Most importantly, my goal was to provide a safe and patient learning environment for graduate students unfamiliar with programming who are locked out of most “big data" methods courses that formally or effectively require programming ability. I strongly believe that data management and analysis skills should be made readily accessible to all graduate students, so my workshops started from the most basic level: helping participants download and configure the Anaconda Python distribution and explaining different ways to access and use Python.
Next, I introduced my pragmatic programming approach that emphasizes problem-solving over technical proficiency: concepts are key, syntax is secondary. This philosophy empowers researchers to use their analytical skills to first conceptualize discrete programming tasks and then learn the necessary syntax relevant to each task. Finally, in each workshop we completed an entire simple scraping program students could then use a working model for their own projects.
I have also developed materials for a tutorial piloted during the 2017 Institute for Computational Social Sciences at Princeton University on overcoming the difficulty task of installing and configuring Python:
Throughout my seven years of graduate school, I volunteered to design and teach an annual tutorial on citation management as part of the required graduate seminar on Sociological Research Design. It comes at a crucial time in graduate students’ development of skills to manage the large and lengthy projects they will undertake for Masters’ and PhD level work. This hands-on tutorial teaches students how to configure and use the open-source software Zotero in their search for relevant primary and second materials, conceptualizing and writing literature reviews and creating bibliographies. Features of Zotero suitable for note-taking as well as data storage and backup practices are also discussed. Finally, I offered one-on-one support to any students who encounter issues with the software during graduate school or want additional help setting up citation management systems, including integration with tablets or multiple computers.