Teaching Assistantships
Teaching assistantships are a common way that many graduate students pay for school. The department will pay the student in exchange for the student helping a professor teach a specific course. Usual responsibilities include grading assignments and holding office hours, however, duties may extend to attending class and even leading various lectures or labs.
While TA appointments take away from research time, they are worth it for the financial security they provide the student. Additionally, these assistantships offer the student the chance to see the perspective of the teacher. This is a valuable opportunity to reflect on one's own teaching preferences and abilities. Teaching and learning are two skills they continue throughout life. Taking time to reflect on how one can better his or herself in each of these is valuable, regardless of career path.
ME 430: Introduction to Combustion,
August 2018 - December 2018
Students: 95 TA's: 2
ME 430 is your basic "all about combustion" course. I took this course during my first semester of my MS. Topics covered include overviews of the energy network, balancing lean, rich, and stoichiometric equations, pollutant analysis, flame speed, and enthalpy analysis. New to my TA semester was the addition of the Cantera software for combustion analysis. My responsibilities for this class included grading assignments and holding two office hours a week.
ME 431: Modeling of Internal Combustion Engines, January 2018 - April 2018
Students: 75 TA's: 1
This course combined principles of combustion with the physical dynamics of an internal combustion engine. Topics discussed included Otto cycle, Diesel cycle, dual cycle, Weibe function, forced induction via superchargers and turbo chargers, and throttling. All assignments were completed in MATLAB where students had to utilize double "for" loops, find functions, and integrating functions to model how the previously mentioned characteristics affected the work and efficiency of the engine. Student's would have to use their codes to produce PV diagrams, work plots, and efficiency plots. My responsibilities included attending class, grading homework assignments, holding two office hours a week, and proctoring exams.
I learned a lot about engine modeling from this course as well as applied combustion practices. I will be using these skills for my own modeling purposes in an upcoming section of this website.