Ismael Villegas Molina

Ismael Villegas Molina

he/him/el

Ph.D. Candidate @ UCSD | Computer Science Education | U.S. Latines in Computing

Service and Mentoring

Contributions to Diversity

UCSD CSE Graduate Award: Excellence in Contributions to Diversity (2024)

Recognizing meaningful efforts to advance equity, inclusion, and diversity within the department and broader STEM community. This award honors sustained contributions such as mentorship, outreach, advocacy, or leadership that foster a more inclusive and supportive environment in computer science and engineering.

Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellow (Spring 2024 - Spring 2026)

This program is absolutely incredible, and I highly (HIGHLY) suggest that any of you reading this consider joining a cohort of fellows. It’s a 2-year 2-phases fellowship (no funding provided or required). In the first phase, there are many readings and discussions with people nationwide that delve into social topics (e.g., identity, intersecctionality, bias) and how they relate to our acadmeic environment. In the second phase (where I currently am in), you create a project based off what we learned in Phase 1. The idea is that these projects are not just one-off implementations and we pat ourselves on the back and say “we fixed it all”, rather it’s supposed to be a sustainable project where your home institution could actively keep for many years after you propose it. More information on the program is found here: 3C website

I am completing the program in Cohort 5! We are in the second phase of the fellowship, and we’re tinkering with a couple of different ideas.

UCSD CSE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee (2023-2024)

The CSE DEI Community is a group of dedicated faculty, students and staff working on promoting and supporting diversity and inclusion efforts across the department. I’ve helped with lots of different things, including creating and hosting a weekly drop-in help hour for undergrads to come in and ask grad students anything at all! I also helped coordinate transportation/lodging for students from my hometown to come to TritonHacks (hackathon at UCSD) to participate! Even though it’s around a 2 hour drive from the university, it was such an important thing for me to bring people from my hometown (a primarily underserved community) to see what hackathons look like (and one of the teams we sent won an award too!!).

Mentoring

Student Research 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.

Here is a list of students I have mentored, apologies to those who I have mentored and have not updated this page:

Graduate Students

Undergraduate Students

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!

Conference Reviewing