Teaching and Mentoring

Some of the most useful parts of my time at university happened outside my own coursework: teaching, mentoring, and running a club. I learned about as much from the people I taught as they did from me.

Teaching assistant

Digital Signal Processing and Laboratory

The first time I walked in as a teaching assistant for Digital Signal Processing and Laboratory, I was excited and nervous. I was comfortable with MATLAB by then, but I didn’t know how to help other people get comfortable with it. Over the semester I helped students with their image restoration projects: planning them, debugging MATLAB code, and working through the math.

I liked watching students go from being stuck on an unfamiliar algorithm to implementing denoising methods on their own. The hours of preparation felt worth it.

Calculus

Calculus was harder to teach. For four semesters I gave 10 extra lectures per semester and helped students with problem sets. Explaining abstract ideas to a room of people who learn in different ways was a challenge, and it was always satisfying when something finally clicked for someone.

President of Ewha Electrical Innovation, a research club

As president of our research club, I managed project schedules, gave feedback, and helped members get unstuck on technical problems. The club worked on robotics, deep learning, and programming.

I also prepared and gave lectures on machine learning, Arduino programming, and Bluetooth communication. Summer and fall were the busiest seasons, with exhibitions and joint projects.

I was president during the pandemic, so I didn’t get to meet many members in person, which I regret. I learned a lot from our executive team, though, and we ran several activities online.

Mentoring in my major

For two years I mentored first- and second-year students. We talked about how to study, how to manage projects, and sometimes about personal difficulties.

As head mentor, I designed a program to track progress and check that mentor-mentee pairs were working well. The learning went both ways. In one calculus session, a student solved a problem in a way I hadn’t thought of, and it changed how I explained that topic afterward. Teaching turned out to be as much about listening as about explaining.

What stayed with me

I learned to adjust how I explain things to the person in front of me and to let people learn at their own pace. I also learned that a group learns best when everyone feels free to speak up, including the people who are supposed to be learning.

I want to keep doing this as a researcher: mentoring students, and working on problems like environmental monitoring where the results matter to people outside the lab.