My Teaching Assistantship

This past semester I was a Teaching Assistant for the Embedded Systems course at a university (located temporarily) inside my university ( Inception ? ) called IIIT-Delhi. I was lucky enough to work on a project there for sometime and now I had been offered this job by my professor. I went home and told this to my parents and their expression was the virtual equivalent of "LOL. What can you possibly teach anyone ? " .

This was exactly the question I asked myself before starting off. Technically, I was supposed to take Lab classes to teach 3rd year students programming and interfacing with AVR microcontrollers. Although , I would like to think I have reached an intermediate level in knowing these controllers but still I was worried as to how I would get my point across to students , given my general "awkwardness" and the worst timing with jokes ( cracking jokes when a girl is crying is not cool, NOW I KNOW ) .

So , I went for Day One. I thought I would dress all formal but decided against it (only because I woke up 10 minutes before the class ). Turned out to be a good decision , I think I might have freaked them out in formals and then I would have had to dress like that in every class. Anyway so there they were about 25-30 of them all looking at me eagerly and I am just staring with a marker in hand. Eventually I just decided to go with the flow and started going from the very basics like Bitwise Operations to the different features of the controller. As it was the first class , I knew I had to make this "exotic" course appeal to them. Exotic becuase these students were champs on the software side but had very little hardware experience. So , I wanted to make them enjoy the world of LED's , Resisitors , Capacitors etc (They would know later on how bad life is while debugging hardware problems :-) ).

I wrote a simple program on the board...went over each line explaining what each line did and what it corresponded in the physical world. And then I helped them setup their kit and in sometime I could see about 30 LED's blinking. I saw a few people excited about the first class...or maybe they were happy that class was over. Either way the first class was definitely fun. A new experience...one of many in my last semester.


The next couple of classes were more hardware oriented...we had an intro to Soldering for example. Basically , I tried to go over the things I had trouble with while learning things on my own from the internet or books here and there. So I wanted to make it a smooth transistion for them.

Another fun thing was grading the students :-). I now realized how the teacher feels while grading...and how stupidly nervous I am about the weirdest of things. Taking Demos and Vivas was fun. I could easily see which students matched some of my own friends in class...it was fun to be honest . I was also fair while grading..infact I was a little lenient :P . And at least this was the only thing I was proud of doing perfectly during my stint.

I don't know how the students liked me. I tried my best. Being just one year senior to them would have been weird for them...but I admire them for being patient with me. They would call me "Sir" while I would be drinking Coffee with a friend at the college cafe...I would get quite shy to be honest. If they ever saw me in my own class they would know how big a fool I am...I think some of them already know this :-).

At the end of the semester , I saw some of their projects....I was pretty amazed by the fact that it took them just 2 months to go from a completely new idea to implementation that too in their first experience with hardware. But the credit for that goes more to my professor than to me...but at least I helped someone learn something in this world. Hopefully, they would use this knowledge to make something completely awesome that helps a lot of people. I had a great time as a Teaching Assistant...helped me finance my dinners outside too :-)

P.S.- If you were one of the students who had to bear me... I apologize for the poor inventory management in the Lab. It will be much more professional in the coming years. I hope I wasn't too bad... :-)