Do I look like a grad student?
posted by: aslabbek
Want an ultimate example of science community? I was in the middle of transferring my laundry from the washer to the dryer at the laundromat the other day. A man walks in to do the same, sees me, we exchange casual smiles, and then he kinda starts hanging around like he wants to start a conversation….awkward. Finally he decides to ask “What school do you go to?”
Umm… how does he know I’m a student? I don’t think I look that young anymore for an undergrad, which is what most people would assume! Upon further questions and conversation I find that he had immediately assumed I was a grad student just by looking at me >.<”
Irregardless of all that, this man is a professor at IUSB, Dr. Nair. He is a computational biologist who is super excited about his field: “Biology is the most exciting field to be in! The applications are amazing!” (paraphrasing) Dr. Nair is searching for creative ways to get his students excited for and engaged in the materials they are learning/using. He invited me to come speak in his classroom in the fall to represent a graduate student in the sciences with the purpose of relating to the students what is available in the field, what a graduate student does, etc.
I will also be emailing him about Dr. Eric Mazur who gave the peer-teaching workshop a little while ago at ND. That was an awesome workshop to attend! It was extremely engaging and he had data from multiple courses of his own at Harvard to signify the effects of peer-based teaching.
June 11th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Aranda,
The IUSB opportunity with Dr. Nair’s class is a nice development. For undergraduates at IUSB to get a window into graduate student life and work is very important. Thanks for taking the initiative. I will be interested to see what Dr. Nair’s response to the Mazur e-mail is. Thanks, Pat