My First (Mini) Lecture
My most interesting connections are often made in the places I least expect it. The most recent of which, courtesy of Twitter, turned into my first teaching experience as a graduate student. Dr. Keith Williams had tweeted about a great accomplishment: winning the Trigon Engineering Society’s Thomas E. Hutchinson Award for “Outreach to students, enthusiastic lectures, obvious love of teaching, and contributions to the Engineering School,” and I expressed my admiration for the award and aspiration to win it someday. True to the award, he immediately reached out to me and our conversation led to an offer for me give a mini guest lecture in his class.
My current responsibilities do not include teaching, and I am eager to get experience. My goal is to earn a professorship someday, so I was elated when Dr. Williams explained that he was teaching a series on CAD and additive manufacturing in his Introduction to Engineering course, ENGR 1624, and that he would like to have me speak to his class on my professional experience with those exact things. I had a little under a week to prepare my presentation, and I got right to work.
I tried to focus on the things I would have liked to see when I was a first year engineering student, so I included a brief overview of my job as a design engineer, an example of a design I made for Team Penske that used various manufacturing methods, and then examples of how I still use CAD as a graduate student. All of these topics were connected by the central theme of “CAD as a communication tool”. Although this may be inherently obvious on a surface level, I didn’t realize the power and corresponding impact of this until I was a professional, so I thought this would be a meaningful overarching takeaway.
The class I was speaking to was in a large workspace-type room with approximately forty students. I had practiced giving my lecture to Laura the night before, but I was still quite nervous to get started. However, once I got into my talk the tension eased and I became more and more comfortable. This is an engineering topic that I know more than any other; I should be confident! The class was engaged and even laughed at some of my quips. I really enjoyed sharing what I know and talking about something that I enjoy. No one had any questions for me at the end of my talk, but once free work time began some students came out of their shells to ask me CAD and engineering questions.
This class was held at the same time as my Dynamical Systems class, so I made my goodbyes to the class and Dr. Williams and rushed back to my building. I was beaming. After giving this lecture I could really see myself doing this professionally! I am looking forward to my next opportunity to teach; perhaps it’ll be for my own advisor who teaches a manufacturing engineering course for mechanical engineers. Whatever form it takes, I am energized about the idea of being an educator, and I hope to have another opportunity to do something like this soon. Thanks again to Dr. Williams for taking a chance on having me give a mini-lecture to his class!