Empathy

Students often share personal circumstances with their teaching assistant when they are struggling. Every quarter, I had students dealing with demanding circumstances: students with family in the hospital, students commuting or working, and students with children. Seeing the diversity of student experiences, it was important for me to be supportive of others by being graceful and flexible in accommodating people individually.

For instance, I had one student who I rarely saw and who missed most of his assignments. He did not ask for support, but in noticing this trend, I reached out to him to ask how I could help him in the course. He shared with me that medical problems had been making it challenging for him to make it to class, so we made a plan for him to catch up, found times to meet for one-on-one support, and extended deadlines for all his assignments. By being empathetic and reaching out to a student who otherwise might not have asked for help, I was able to support his academic success.

As a leader, I believe it is important for me to be empathetic in order to be able to create bonds with those I’m working with, to be able to support them as individuals, and to be able to communicate more personally.

Empowerment

For many students, this was their first coding class. This made it challenging for many students and could even cause self-doubt. This was especially true for students from non-technical majors: these students were taking the class in order to develop skills that can be applied to their own field, but it is totally new to them. This was also common for women taking the class: programming is a male-dominated field and imposter syndrome is common.

For all my students but especially doubtful students, I helped them develop self-confidence by encouraging them to take risks. For instance, if they asked, “is this the right code to do this?” I encouraged them to run it themselves and they were often right! This helped them develop independence in being able to test their own code.

In addition, I made sure to provide positive affirmation when they’re successful. I also regularly put into context all the things they have learned this quarter since the course covers a lot.

Evaluation

I facilitated a weekly lab section for 25 students where the material to cover and the exercises to complete was totally at my discretion. This made it important for me to consider the new material the students had covered and upcoming material that could pose a challenge to determine what the lab section should cover. This was especially important because attendance was not mandatory, so students would not come if the content was not valuable.

Given that I was a TA for multiple quarters, I had an understanding of what students struggled the most with. I used that knowledge to design useful lab sections. I looked at the upcoming assignments, prepared materials that served as a useful review or cheat sheet, created a demo that is relevant to an assignment, and finally designed an exercise that is basically a smaller version of the homework so students can practice those skills.

Writing

When creating slides for lectures or lab sections, I had an objective of making reference slides so that students could look back at them later as “cheat sheets” for their homework. This required being able to explain technical concepts in writing in understandable ways.

For instance, I taught students a tool called Git. I used a labelled visual explanation of the process that gives them a high-level explanation of how it works, along with a cheatsheet table of commands so they knew how to use it.

Another example is when I taught students a function called join. I used examples and visuals to help students be able to develop an intuition for how it works and why it’s useful, and examples of how to use them along with short explanations to communicate the technical details.

Personal Values

Parallel to being a TA, I was working in Residential Life. In both of these roles, my work reflected my personal values in how I helped students navigate the complicated and stressful university environment beyond my job responsibilities. I accomplished this in a number of ways. I shared resources including the Counseling Center and the CLUE academic support program broadly through course-wide email announcements and in-person lab section announcements. I also shared career opportunities including relevant job openings and career fairs.

Beyond the large-group, I spoke with students one-on-one to understand their interests and help them navigate opportunities. I discussed the Informatics major with multiple interested students individually to provide context on the program, application tips, and application feedback. I encouraged two of my students to become TAs for UW programming courses by recognizing their interest in teaching and providing application feedback.

I believe that it is important for my personal values to be reflected in all the leadership roles I pursue, and I am proud of the impact this approach has had on my students, especially who went on to be Informatics majors, TAs, or successful in their individual goals.