03Teach

Intro programming, one stuck student at a time

I spent two years as a TA on Temple's intro Python course — labs, office hours, grading, and a lot of reading other people's half-working programs.

The course

Introduction to Problem Solving and Programming

I ran lab sessions, held office hours, graded labs and exams, and gave feedback on student code for Introduction to Problem Solving and Programming in the College of Science and Technology. Most of the work was reading a half-working program and finding the one wrong assumption underneath it, rather than the dozen symptoms sitting on top.

Office hours

Where people decide whether they belong here

Intro CS is where a lot of students quietly decide the major isn't for them, and that decision usually gets made alone at 11pm with something not compiling. A lot of office hours was just being visibly unbothered by a broken program.

Workshops

Hands-on, mixed skill levels, no console experience assumed

Through TUDev I designed and ran build-along workshops on web development, Git and GitHub, SQL, AWS, Linux and AI-assisted coding. One took a room from an empty AWS console to a working visitor counter across EC2, S3 and RDS, with starter code and speaker notes I wrote myself. Some attendees had shipped projects and some had never opened a terminal. Slowing the whole room down doesn't fix that; walking the room so nobody sits stuck without saying anything does.

Why it matters to me

Explaining it is how I find out whether I know it

Explaining something to a first-year is a reasonable test of whether I understand it myself. Every time I couldn't do it cleanly, my own model turned out to be fuzzier than I'd assumed.

Where I've done this

August 2024 — May 2026
Teaching Assistant
Temple University
TA for Introduction to Problem Solving and Programming using Python in the College of Science and Technology. I assisted during lab sessions, held office hours, graded labs and exams, and gave students feedback on their code and programming projects.
August 2025 — May 2026
STEM Leadership Fellow
Temple College of Science & Technology
Selected to a small cohort recognized for leadership and academic performance in STEM. I provided peer tutoring and instructional support for introductory programming coursework (CIS 1068), building learning materials and walking students through problem solving.

Full work history

Work that shows it

Community·2024