Teaching Statement

I have always enjoyed mentoring. During my undergraduate years, I often found myself giving suggestions to other fellow students about their academics and career paths. After applying to graduate schools in the U.S, I continued to help many aspiring students by sharing my own experience in blog articles about how to approach U.S graduate schools admission process systematically1. However, my actual passion for teaching came about only after I taught an undergraduate Natural Language Processing (NLP) course at BRAC University as a co-instructor. In that NLP course, Professor Mumit Khan taught the theoretical part which was fifty percent of the course. And I was in charge of teaching the other half, which was allocated for research projects. After the students successfully completed the course, we were able to retain their interests in NLP and engaged them to expand on their research projects over the summer. As a result, I co-authored six papers with seven students [1-6] which were presented at various international conferences. This success was a product of our well-planned course that Professor Mumit Khan and I crafted. Some of the essential components of this course, which made it a success, were: • A significant percentage of the course was allocated for hands on learning – projects. • Giving students a list of specific problems to get started and giving them the option to pick a problem o