Advocacy

I have led a number of initiatives—both curricular and extracurricular—that create resilient and supportive student communities that value mental health.


Courses

CS290A & CS290B @ Harvard: Effective Research Practices & Academic Culture (Fall 2021 - Spring 2023).

  • I created a new syllabus that focuses on skill building (e.g. how to read research papers), soft-skill building (e.g. managing advising relationships, how to support your peers), and academic culture (e.g. mental health in academia, normalizing and de-stigmatizing of mental health needs, discussion of power dynamics in scientific communities).
  • Find out more in our SIGCSE paper.
  • CS290’s complete teaching materials can be found here.


Talks & Workshops

  • I developed and co-organized a workshop “Everything I wish I knew as I navigated the Ph.D.” for NYU’s Center for Data Science (Spring 2023) and CMU’s Machine Learning / Computer Science Departments (Fall 2023). The workshop builds community via discussion and reflection about how academic culture and mental health are intertwined. The workshop was used to jump-start a student well-being advocacy groups.
  • I developed and ran a workshop about inclusive teaching for CS181’s teaching fellow retreat (Spring 2023). The workshop highlights the way societal misconceptions shape students’ expectations and negatively impact the learning environment in technical computer science classes and especially in AI.
  • I created and ran a workshop, “The Art and Science of Struggle” (Fall 2022), for the Master’s program at Harvard’s Institute of Applied Computational Sciences. The workshop is about productive vs. unproductive struggle, how our misconceptions of science lead to unproductive struggle and systemically hinder us from building a supportive and inclusive communities, and how to support our peers.
  • I created and organized a workshop for first-year Ph.D. students at Harvard SEAS, called How to make the most out of your Ph.D: a guide from current to incoming students (Fall 2020). The workshop is about exposing the “hidden curriculum” of doctoral programs.


Leadership

  • I served as a co-leader of (Spring 2022 - Fall 2022) and peer mentor (Spring 2021 - Spring 2023) in InTouch, a peer-to-peer support network for graduate students at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
  • I was nominated to represent Harvard’s SEAS on the Student Wellbeing Council (Fall 2022 - Spring 2023).


Outreach

  • I served as a mentor for a Ph.D. Working Group at Harvard (Fall 2021 - Fall 2023), where I helped students write personal statements, CVs, and practice interviewing. I also helped debunk common myths about Ph.D. programs that often provoke imposter syndrome / cause students to self-filter during the application process.
  • I was a mentor for the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Cambridge datathon workshop (2019 and 2020).