PhD student aims to improve how engineering is taught

Teaching others had always been something I was involved in, even in middle school where I would tutor my peers and underclassmen. As an international student at UC, I experienced a diverse range of teaching styles, especially compared to my undergraduate degree in India. One of the aims in engineering education is to equip higher education faculty with tools so they can teach better. This is particularly important because in engineering we spend a large part of our early career doing research and don’t get a chance to improve our teaching. When I first heard about engineering education as a discipline, I really got hooked on this idea of “how do we make teaching better.” 

I feel like I have found my place in my professional life. It has been enlightening to learn about research in a whole new light that sometimes is in stark contrast with research I did in my aerospace engineering master’s program. It was exciting to take classes in how people learn, what are different ways to teach engineering and how to design a course for specific populations. Taking courses in social science research methods as an engineer has been a fascinating ride.

Engineering education is still growing as a discipline and new knowledge is being created every day. It really excites me to learn a new teaching technique or a new finding about how students learn best.

My broad research interests lie in preparing engineering graduate students to become better teachers when they join a college of engineering as faculty. For my dissertation, I am exploring what teaching training they receive and how this impacts their confidence as an instructor. The goal is to augment their graduate education, so they are better prepared to take on the multi-faceted role of a higher education professor which includes both teaching and research.

My passion lies in teaching and making sure no student struggles to gain knowledge because their communication style didn’t align with the teacher’s. I figured the place to start is early on with graduate students themselves, so no one has to go through the hurdle of a steep learning curve early in their academic career. Graduate students also serve as teaching assistants, which makes them vital to the impact the class has on students. I also am using tools I learned in aerospace engineering and applying them in engineering education to help instructors form teams in classrooms.

I am hoping to start my career as a faculty member in a department of engineering education. Besides teaching foundational engineering courses, I am also hoping to further research on graduate student teaching development. I am really hoping to see programs like Preparing Future Faculty become more ubiquitous in STEM disciplines, and I want my research to contribute to a more structured graduate student professional development program across the nation.