Academics | Teaching experience

I have had the chance to be actively involved in teaching over the past 9 years of my graduate education, and even beyond that, during my undergraduate and high school years.

For the last 7 years, I have been actively involved in teaching freshman level college chemistry courses. For a period of 4 semesters, I have taught General Freshman Chemistry (Chem 112), and General Freshman Chemistry II (Chem 114) for one semester, to our undergraduate students, where I had the chance to perform the laboratory experiments, have regular discussion sessions and meet with them for office hours. Among these, discussion sessions have been my favorite for interacting with my students. I have had chance to experiment several different approaches, for different groups of students, to be able to be most beneficial to them. For example, during Spring 2004 semester, students in my sections were mainly from non-biology majors, i.e. engineering, and it was really important for us to establish the communication between them. Therefore, I requested my students, total of 20, to work in groups of 4, and assigned each group 4 questions, which they had to work on during the first 10 minutes of the discussion session. After 10 minutes, each student would write the solution of one of the questions (out of the 4 assigned to that group) on the board, and explain the solution to the other students in the class. My active participation in groups' discussions while working on the problems, enabled me to pinpoint each group's and student's needs, and work with them.

In addition to that, for the last 13 semesters of my graduate education, I have been assigned as the General Chemistry Laboratory Coordinator, where I had the chance to work with 4 to 5 different professors each semester (teaching Freshman Chemistry I - Chem112, Freshman  Chemistry II - Chem114, Freshman Chemistry I for Honor’s college - Chem116 or Freshman Chemistry II for Honor’s college - Chem118 courses), and 20-30 teaching assistants working with these professors, and eventually with students in those sections. My main responsibilities included managing the organization of the laboratory experiments, provision of manual and supplementary teaching materials for lab experiments to professors, teaching assistants, and students, training and supervision of teaching assistants with their teaching requirements, and maintenance of safety rules and regulations in our laboratory sessions, working with students for adapting our laboratory sessions to their needs and progress for enhanced learning experience. 

In addition to those above mentioned, I was also working closely with our department’s General Chemistry Coordinator, Prof. Richard Burns, for improvement of our laboratory experiments, and with all of the professors teaching the courses to direct the teaching assistants so that the courses and laboratory sessions are performed in harmony.

Prior to that, I taught General Biology and Genetics courses in Bilkent University, Turkey, which involved similar responsibilities to my teaching assistantship at University of Illinois at Chicago.

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