A few weeks ago, I wrapped a year serving as a program co-director for the Master of Data Science and Analytics. It was a position I grew to enjoy in a challenging year, especially with the fantastic team I got to work with, and notably my co-director, Matthew Greenberg. The position put me into contact with more people across the university and in the community than ever, and this was something I really appreciated given the last couple of years we’ve had.
The variety of tasks that we’re responsible for is something that I really enjoyed. It is however (no surprise), time-consuming for significant chunks of the week.
That being said, I think this year I was able to add more maturity to my teaching practice. I actually produced some assignments I was really excited to put in front of my students, and the teaching feels much more natural. I am currently revamping my teaching philosophy to reflect everything that’s changed in two years of pandemic teaching.
We also had a great Technovation season this year, as I was able to bring on more help for the admin parts, and worked with more teams over Zoom. We ended up with two Calgary teams, a junior and a senior team, placing in the Semi-Finals. Looking forward to bigger and better things next year as we get to move more of the program in-person.
Some other highlights from the year:
- Teaching. One more course than what I would ordinarily take on, and courses assigned for both Spring and Summer, adding up to seven courses in 12 months. Two of these were taught in-person, my first in-person teaching since March 2020, and yes, it definitely took some adjustment again.
- We graduated our first cohort of students with a Master’s of Data Science and Analytics. One of them, Adrian Mitchell, was featured in a UToday article. It was great to see this come together, since we did meet regularly to discuss his internship project.
- Extremely brief media hit, courtesy of Global News. Nice to see I still have room to grow.
- In-person events with my colleagues. There have a been a few of these over the last couple of months. Good to finally get to interact with many more people.
- Getting to be an educator-nerd. I’m working on a couple of projects, one which is digging into the current state of academic integrity in Computer Science (TL;DR: It’s complicated), and another which resulted in a University of Calgary Teaching and Learning Grant (though I am not the one doing most of the work here!). I am looking forward to growing this part of what I do.
