What it means to me
I always wanted to be a teacher. Just like kids play house, I used to play classroom and pretend to be a teacher. I even made my parents buy me a small blackboard, chalk and duster when I was 7.
I am grateful to have and to have had the opportunity to teach. I love the process of coming up with simple, intuitive ways of explaining tough concepts. It gives me great joy in helping students and peers understand and work their way through the challenges and difficulties they face. I try to focus on interactivity in the classroom and encourage class participation.
I follow the philosophies:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”
&
“Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Teaching at Radboud
At Radboud University I have had plenty of opportunity to design and teach courses as well as to supervise students in their research projects. The topics that I dealt with included Cognitive Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, Mental Load and Stress, Cognitive Neuroscience and the formats I taught have ranged from workgroups to lectures.
List of teaching acitvities at Radboud:
| Course | Format | Responsibilities |
| Brain for AI | Workgroups & presentations | – Led the workgroups, – Course Development: contrbution to conceptualisation & implementation of teaching & assessing materials grading of exams & presentations |
| Brain & Cognition I: Introduction | Workgroups & presentations | – Led the workgroups, – Course Development: revision of course materials & exams, grading of exams & presentations |
| Brain & Cognition II: Clinical Neuropsychology | Workgroups | – Led the workgroups – Graded exams |
| Brain & Cognition III | Lectures | – Delivered lectures – Re-design of course materials, – Exam design |
| Mental Load & Stress | Lectures, re-design of c | – Delivered lectures – Re-design of course materials, – Exam design – Exam grading |
| Bachelor’s honours research project | Supervision of research project | – Supervision of end to end research project |
| Master Thesis | Supervision |
I am currently working towards the Basis Kwalificatie Onderwijs (BKO) or the University Teaching Qualification.
Initiatives
Since I have explored different fields in my professional career, I am often looking at what aspects of the experience, skills and knowledge I have gained so far that I can apply to the current situation and help the people around me
Best Coding Practices
My workshop on Best Coding Practices in R, aimed at scientists and academics, is an endeavour to help researchers and academics, many of whom lack formal programming training or experience improve readability, reliability and transparency of their code. The larger aim of this workshop was to contribute to open, transparent and reproducible practices in scientific research. I used the know-how I gathered during my 3 year work experience as a software developer to show scientists how they could develop coding practices that can give them reliable results, as well as allow them to share their work more easily.
For anyone interested, I have made the slides openly available here. I have designed the slides to be self-explanatory. However, if you would like me to deliver this or a similar workshop at your organisation, get in touch with me through the contact page.
Rhetorics for Cognitive Science Students
During my masters in Cognitive Science, along with a fellow cognitive science student, I designed and conducted a workshop called Rhetorics for Cognitive Science Students, with the intention of helping them become better presenters. During our classes together, we had seen many of our hardworking peers fall behind due to sub-optimal presentation skills and this workshop was a way for us to help them out. The workshop focused on a lot of different aspects of giving presentations, including preparation, narrative building, voice and speech use, body language, stage fright, as well as giving and receiving feedback.
Other experience
While I was studying in German, I taught English as a second language to German working professionals, who needed the language as part of their jobs.
Before I started working as a software developer, I also briefly worked as an English teacher at a coaching institute in India that prepares students for competitive exams at the post-graduate level.