Mentoring
I sincerely think that mentoring is one of my favorite things to do (academic or otherwise)! I’ve been lucky to have been able to mentor both graduate and undergraduate students (see below) who have gone on to join master’s, PhD, and industry positions, and I’m incredibly proud of them! One of the ways I did this was creating an interest form for our lab to join and advertised to our undergraduate students (no experience required!). This got a ton of undergrads to join our lab (and I got a couple of great minds this way), and I hope to keep doing this in the future. It’s really important to me to also include people who may not have all the experience and be totally “good-on-paper” because once upon a time I was ALSO a student who wasn’t totally “good-on-paper.” Someone took a chance on me (shoutout to the incredible, owe-a-lot-to Julia Hirschberg) and changed my academic life for the better, and I want to do the same for many other students.
I have mentored students through official channels like UCSD Early Research Scholars Program and the UCSD OAR2 Graduate Research Affinity Group, as well as through unofficial channels where I would hold open help hours to undergraduate students to just come in and ask any sort of question (see more in the Diversity page)!
Here is a list of students I have mentored, apologies to those who I have mentored and have not updated this page:
Graduate Students
- Audria Montalvo (BS and PhD)
- Marlyn Arque Rupa (BS and MS)
- Jeannie Kim (BS and MS)
- Kayla Hom (MS)
- Qi Qi (MS)
- Amith Panuganti (MS)
- Jiarui Chen (MS)
- Mohana Kannan Ravikumar (MS)
- Desiree Handley (MS/PhD)
- Hanxin Zheng (MS)
Undergraduate Students
- Josue Martinez ⎮ Now a SWE @ GE Aerospace
- Nawab Mulla
- Ethan Perez
- Korey Ray
- Roxanna Ferrer Rios
- Miguel Castillo
- Zaide Pasion
- Ginger Smith ⎮ Now a Ph.D. at CMU
- Apollo Larragoitia
Teaching Assistant Mentoring
UCSD has a great TA mentoring program where all first-time mentors have a training course (CSE 599) to make sure they are implementing best practices when they help students. One of the aspects of the course is that you meet with an experienced TA to go through different scenarios you may find yourself in (e.g., a student who is constantly trying to coax the answer out of you rather than focus on learning goals), ask them questions about the last week, and to discuss the topic of the week on how to be an effective TA. I am happy to say that I have taken this course and have served as the experienced TA several times to support new educators!