Tutoring Experience

Teaching and Mentoring Experience
Teaching has been a fundamental component of my academic training. I have been actively involved in teaching, tutoring, and mentoring high school and undergraduate research students throughout my doctoral and postdoctoral work at the City University of New York (CUNY). I taught General Chemistry (I & II) laboratory courses and recitation sections at CUNY for four years. I volunteered as a physical chemistry tutor for undergraduate students from CUNY. At St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, my teaching assignment included a General Chemistry Laboratory course that also involved a synergistic approach to conducting several laboratory sessions guided simultaneously by two instructors.
Along with
Early on, I realized the need for multifaceted teaching approaches in order to make productive connections with diverse groups of students. My involvement in curriculum development gave me valuable insights and experience in laying out a course structure systematically. The one-to-one tutoring experience helped me consider how incorporating and adapting a talk-and-tweak approach could improve a teaching method. I organized group activities among students to build a natural setting for collaborative learning and reciprocal teaching. Mentoring high school and undergraduate students for interdisciplinary research projects ranging from bionanotechnology to applications of NMR in biophysics impressed upon me the value of cultivating independent thinking and the significance of designing a focused route to apply students’ skills and expand their knowledge. Most of my students, whom I mentored, are women and/or members of the groups traditionally underrepresented in physical sciences, as well as first-generation college students. As a leading public and urban university, CUNY has offered me a unique avenue to comprehend how I can contribute to diversity through research, teaching, and mentoring, by realizing students’
Depending on available infrastructure I will impart a flavor of contemporary experimental techniques along with a conceivable connection to computational studies and encourage student creativity by undertaking original research teamwork-based projects. I will boost the level of interactive discussion on course topics via online forums and web-based programs such as Blackboard and e-portfolio, thus helping students to grasp extracurricular and challenging topics. Using hybrid teaching strategies, I will engage students in learning and help them digest complicated concepts. Effective classroom teaching counts on setting specific learning goals, designing systematic lectures, responding to students’ questions with proper attention and respect, and framing reasonable questions to examine the students’ understanding of a topic. Accordingly, I will make sure that the evaluation of students’ performance is fair and consistent. My personal experience as an international student and researcher in a foreign country underscores that sincere faculty-student interaction assists in developing a cordial and supportive social structure that encourages students toward learning and promotes the growth of