Supervised Teaching

Figure 1: Connor McCurley lecturing on Eigen-decomposition to a graduate-level machine learning class at the University of Florida, Fall 2018.

I had the opportunity to participate as a Supervised Teaching Assistant (STA) during my time in the Ph.D. program at the University of Florida. The STA program allowed me to spend two semesters teaching in both graduate and undergraduate level machine learning courses under the supervision of my advisor, Dr. Alina Zare. The undergraduate course contained around 25 students, while the graduate course included over 170. Wow!

As a STA, I learned valuable skills in developing and managing courses, planning and delivering highly-technical lectures, creating and grading assignments and projects, running effective office hours, and practicing professional academic communication. Additionally, I had opportunities to deliver lectures on Fisher’s Linear Discriminant Analysis, Eigen-Decomposition and Backpropagation in Artificial Neural Networks, as well as lead detailed homework reviews on Random Forests, Support Vector Machines and normalization techniques.

Figure 2: Connor McCurley teaching Fisher's Discriminant Analysis to a graduate-level machine learning class at the University of Florida, Fall 2018.

The experiences I had as a teaching assistant were great opportunities to practice sharing my own knowledge of Machine Learning. While those semesters revealed the grueling demands put on professors, they made me excited for future teaching opportunities!

To see a more complete list of subjects taught in these courses, check out the graduate and undergraduate syllabi.