Teaching Assistant Personal Statement

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Teaching Assistant. I had been a teaching assistant at the Department of Chemistry, Oklahoma State University for several semesters. I was responsible for teaching General Chemistry Labs and tutoring students in their coursework problems. In addition, I also assisted Dr. L. M. Raff in the Physical Chemistry courses. During my teaching assistant time, Dr. Raff informed me the students’ comments that I was helpful to them in their coursework.
Instructor. Even though I finished my Ph.D. in Chemistry, I have a strong background in Physics. Therefore, most of my teaching involves Physics-related subjects. Since joining the Department of Materials Science, Vietnam National University in 2010, I have been the instructor for three courses at undergraduate and graduate levels: Quantum Chemistry/Quantum Mechanics (undergraduate), Introduction to Group Theory and Electronic Structure Calculations (graduate).
Mentoring Students. Besides teaching, I also hold training responsibility. Devoting efforts to promote undergraduate research, I supervised many senior undergraduate students for their directed research, which is mandatory for graduation. These undergraduate students are …show more content…

For higher-level courses, I usually assign a specific topic (involving material searching, reading, and solving real computational works) to each group of students. I believe that it is hard to digest the physical chemistry and computational chemistry materials, while Google search is a powerful tool which grants access to very specific problems. However, students are not motivated to perform Google search and look for the necessary materials. Therefore, by assigning real calculation problems, students are motivated to look for problem solving sites, such as ccl.net, researchgate.net. Eventually, they acquire the self-studying

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