Teaching and Mentoring

My goal as a teacher is to help students learn how to think critically and sociologically about the world around them, to engage in debate with others, and to clearly communicate ideas through writing and speaking. I’ve taught a number of different courses during my time as a postdoc and in graduate school, each requiring different teaching skills. This experience prepared me to teach students not only how to understand research and social theory, but also to conduct their own research and effectively communicate its importance.

I’ve taught courses in political sociology, fiscal sociology, public opinion, public policy, sociological theory, undergraduate honors sociology, sociology of work and occupations, undergraduate, law and society, and the introductory survey into sociology. I’ve been a TA for social statistics, sociological theory, and intro to sociology. I’ve also supervised a number of independent studies, an interdisciplinary honors thesis, and a sociology undergraduate honors thesis. Further, my research experience gives me the knowledge to teach courses in environmental sociology/politics, comparative politics, fiscal sociology, economic sociology, statistics, and the statistical programming language R.

I also teach workshops and tutorials in quantitative methods and statistical programming, both at novice and more advanced levels. In the research practicum and honors courses, I teach undergraduate students how to clean and manipulate data, fit statistical models (linear, logistic, multilevel and panel), and visualize inferential and descriptive statistics (ggplot2). I have research experience with various R packages used for data manipulation, visualization, counterfactual estimations, table creation (including model output), spatial data (dealing with maps, shapefiles, and areal weighted interpolation), statistical modelling (OLS, GLM, multilevel, time series, Bayesian), survey data, and text analysis (structural topic models). While most of my experience is in R, I also have experience with teaching undergraduate students SPSS, Stata, and SQL.