Teaching
I try to bring joy and empowerment to the front end of the classroom, while maintaining rigorous and thorough learning objectives behind the curtain. Every exercise in my classroom is aimed at a higher purpose, be it the attainment of knowledge, the expansion of critical thought, or the development of crucial quotidian professional skills like reading, writing, and public speaking. Students are responsive to my approach, as my teaching evaluations are consistently positive and above the department average (one notable exception is the student who left what is undoubtedly my favorite evaluation: “This man is a BS artist”).
Coding
Consider the Myth of Sisyphus: the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus used Sisyphus’s damnation to meaningless labor as a metaphor for the absurdity and monotony of modern professions. Zeus condemned Sisyphus to shove a boulder up a hill, watch it roll down, push it back up, and so on for eternity. Coding to me is as the damnation is to Sisyphus, the difference being that if Zeus absolved me of my punishment I would happily get right back to boulder-shoving. Through graduate school I learned the basics of R and Stata; my gluttony for punishment has led me to learn advanced statistical methods in R and Stata, webscraping in Python, web design (HTML, CSS, limited js), and interactive graphics with Shiny.
