During my time at Northwestern, I have served a few times as an official Teaching Traineee and an unofficial advisor/mentor multiple times in two different undergraduate, project-based courses.

The first is the Practicum, an annual 300-level class offered by my advisor, Kris Hammond. The class is heavily project-based, where each student is put into a small group and then the group works the entire semester on a project. The class meets once a week, where the students give an update to the class about the progress they've made, and they receive feedback from Kris, myself, and the rest of the students. The course is a great chance for students to build experience doing research and working in a group, and a lot of the projects turn out really well. (News at Seven and Pivot both began life as a Practicum projects.) The Practicum has also been a great opportunity for me to work with undergraduates in more informal mentor/advisor role. Together, we have built prototypes of dialogue construction and dialogue generation systems for News at Seven, built an affect detection system, an automated rant generator, and improved a version of the ever-enigmatic Super Happy Fun Ball.

Software Engineering is another 300-level course that focuses on teaching different engineering paradigms like Scrum and Extreme Programming. The students apply the different methodologies they learn about in class to small-group projects they complete over the course of the quarter.