Experience Summary
My undergraduate experience can be summarized by what Aldous Huxley once said, "Learn something about everything, and everything about something." I have a Bachelor degree in Biology, and the research and laboratory-intensive courses it covered, including several independent projects and a Senior Thesis, have helped me develop strong analytical skills. Moreover, I have excellent spoken and written skills that have been polished over four years of writing papers in a diversity of literary and scientific topics. I also have had experience tutoring students in Chemistry, being a laboratory teaching assistant in a chemistry laboratory, and mentoring/volunteering at local elementary schools in Portland through Biology Outreach Program.
Teaching Style
I have noticed first-hand that teaching is not a one-way street where the teacher transfers knowledge to students strictly from the syllabus. I feel that teaching involves a constant quid pro quo between the teacher and the students – the teacher learns as much from the student as the student does from the teacher. I am a firm believer of a very practical approach to teaching, especially the sciences, that emphasizes ‘learning by doing’, a method that I myself as a student loved and have seen work in students I have interacted with over the years. The outmoded form of classroom milieu, where the teacher stands in an active teaching role and the student sits in a passive learning role is long gone - teaching is interactive, integrative, involving wider latitude of issues that stretches beyond the subject matter, combines theory with practice, and is capable of connecting individual thought to the global perceptions of learning.