Teaching

Mills College Guest Lecturer: Lead a class session of Search for Life seminar course. Instructed undergraduates on extrasolar planets.

Astro 160: Junior-level stars. I led a homework-help discussion section and a general discussion section, and gave several lectures in the professor’s absence.

Astro 10, Head GSI: A class of 840 students includes a huge amount of administrative overhead, and the Head Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) handles that. In charge of a team of 11 GSIs and 8 homework graders, I coordinated star parties and homework help sessions, administered and graded midterm and final exams, confronted student cheating, and lectured to hundreds in the professor’s absence. The job required a tremendous amount of attention to detail, multitasking, and confident authority, and I loved every minute of it (except maybe the student cheating). For my work that semester I won the Outstanding GSI and Teaching Effectiveness awards. Here’s the essay I wrote for the Teaching Effectiveness Award.

Astro 7B: As a GSI for the introductory class for physical science majors, I led a weekly discussion section, homework help session, and helped create and grade exams. For the discussion section, my co-GSI, Linda Strubbe, and I created thought-provoking worksheets that built on the students’ lecture knowledge and prepared them for the homework. Those worksheets are still used by Astro 7 GSIs. At the end of the semester, I gave a full lecture of my own design, on epoch of reionization absorption features in quasar spectra.

Astro 10: In my first time teaching this course I led two discussion sections, designing activities and fielding student questions.

High School Teaching: During the 2002–2003 academic year, I taught ninth-grade girls at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. I created a course in astronomy and an independent study in modern physics. I also taught three sections of Conceptual Physics and one section of Algebra 1. And I led extracurricular groups, field trips, and acted as a sometime dorm parent. Major highlight: holding a pancake weekend in the dorm with fresh Connecticut maple syrup.

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant: As an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College I was a TA for the Astronomy 101 labs from my first year through graduation. I also graded homework for an assortment of physics classes, from introductory to junior-level courses.

Outreach

Public Lectures: In July 2008, I gave two joint lectures with my colleagues Joshua Peek and Karin Sandstrom, at the Chabot Space & Science Center. The connected lectures were titled “This Galactic Life,” and we each gave one twenty-minute “act” in each lecture. In the first “episode,” I followed an atom from its inception in the Big Bang through its nucelosynthetic history to become a gold atom in the nugget from Sutter’s Mill. In the second, I gave an observational overview of the current status of Galactic center research.

Project ASTRO/Girls Inc.: In the 2006–07 and 2007–08 academic years, I worked with Project ASTRO to lead astronomy activities for 4th and 5th grade students in Girls Inc. Alameda County after-school sessions.

Expanding Your Horizons: An annual one-day workshop aimed at inspiring middle school girls to pursue science, I have participated in the Bay Area Expanding Your Horizons each year since 2006, helping plan and facilitate the UCB Daytime Astronomy session.

Public Observing: As an undergraduate I occasionally led stargazing evenings using historic 8" Clark refractor at Mount Holyoke College.