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_pages/mentoring.md

@@ -15,19 +15,17 @@ First is fostering an environment of inclusivity. Individuals should feel unimpe
 
 Inclusivity from the broadest perspective refers to creating environments where individuals feel that they are valued inherently for who they are, which I regard as a necessary precursor to any meaningful intellectual exchange. I intend to foster inclusivity in several ways. First, I model intellectual humility by engaging in a kind of “Socratic monologue”, expressing frequently what I do and do not know, and interrogating my own certainty in views I hold. Thus, I typically preface my teaching by discussing the value of asking questions to clarify material, emphasizing that no one should ever feel ashamed of asking any question. I enjoy offering anecdotes from past experiences as both student and teacher, divulging times when I did not know seemingly obvious material and how essential getting clarification was to my learning. I also delve into times when I chose not to speak up when I didn’t understand something, and how that hurt my development.
 
-Second, I reach out to those from historically marginalized groups to enter the fray of intellectual interchange through deliberate and thoughtful communication both inside and outside the classroom. In my fourth year in graduate school, I took a half-day training course designed to understand issues of gender identity. What stuck with me the most was a simple act a teacher made that had the most powerful of effects. We heard a story of an individual express how difficult it was to be called by the professor by their birth name which they no longer identified with. Doing so exposed they were transitioning, and the stigma and shame that ensued was heartbreaking to hear about. This was followed up by their telling our group how impactful it was for a teacher to simply reach out before the semester started to request from their students their preferred names and pronouns. It is truly astonishing how much suffering can be reduced by simple acts such as this, which hopefully will be commonplace in all teaching soon.
 
-Inspired by what I learned, I became involved in a mentoring program called Cientifico Latino, an organization devoted to helping marginalized groups gain access to professional development resources at various career stages in academic science. For the past academic year, I have helped mentor directly an aspiring Latinx undergraduate student through all the steps of the graduate school application process: finding schools, reaching out to professors, and tailoring all application materials to each program. I vividly recall our first meeting, sorting through initial questions she had regarding what to say when reaching out to professors, and what key differences there were between psychology graduate programs she was considering. She was clearly so talented and excited to embark on the graduate school experience, but what stuck with me the most was the gratitude she expressed in my helping her navigate these unclear, peripheral aspects of applying to graduate school. She said she had learned more in our 50 minute Zoom meeting than in hours scouring the internet for answers. It again made me realize the easy power I had to impact that lives of students from marginalized groups, given my prior experience and success, and how it is a responsibility to use the expertise I’ve cultivated to help others in similar circumstances.
-
-# flexibly adjusting to mentees’ ways of thinking
+# adjusting our mental models in dialogue
 
 Creating a vibrant classroom community requires that a teacher take the perspective of their students. For example, in class, I endeavour to temporarily let go of my mental model of some idea the group is discussing and try to understand how a student has constructed their own mental model. Doing this is a great example of mutual learning. When I try to understand how the student is thinking, I force myself to stretch my understanding to new terrain, and ask the student to do the same through clarifying for themselves and the class what they mean. This frequently involves drawing diagrams, offering analogies, or working through metaphors, in order to find a common ground for understanding. Doing this out loud with a group tends to illuminate various points of confusion, and invites others that may be taking unique perspectives on a new idea.
 
 In addition to facilitating mutual learning, perspective taking tends to facilitate students’ connection with the material, which has myriad benefits. When students feel comfortable expressing how the course material resonates with their own experiences, it is more likely they will retain the material, and consolidate their new knowledge in ways that can be used creatively in the future. The more a student can integrate the course material with enduring bodies of knowledge they know well, the greater potential there is for creative expression.
 
-Fostering scientific creativity
-With the pillars of inclusivity and flexibility in place, students are poised to use their incipient knowledge in creative ways as they avail themselves of the scientific method. It is my job to ensure students have the tools to critically evaluate their new hypotheses. This involves exposing them to philosophies of science regarding how to corroborate or falsify one’s hypotheses, tools to measure key variables in their hypotheses, and statistical methods to determine the level of credibility they should re-assign to their hypotheses after collecting data.
+
+# learning through experience in projects
+
+It is my job to ensure students have the tools to critically evaluate their new hypotheses. This involves exposing them to philosophies of science regarding how to corroborate or falsify one’s hypotheses, tools to measure key variables in their hypotheses, and statistical methods to determine the level of credibility they should re-assign to their hypotheses after collecting data.
 
 Fostering scientific creativity is best achieved through a project-oriented approach. This begins with the way I present material. For instance, when I ran a year-long seminar for graduate students who wanted to learn how to code in Python, we frequently would move between discussing an idea briefly and doing exercises in class. Using tools like Jupyter Notebooks, which allows students to go through course material with interactive coding tools embedded within the lecture’s narrative, is one such way the material becomes alive for students. I like to devote time for students to play around with these embedded algorithms, tweaking parameters to see what happens to the output, which ultimately allows them to learn via their own curiosity.
 
-It is also necessary to develop out of class projects that allow individuals the flexibility to pursue genuine intrinsic interests, while maintaining the bounds of the given teaching goal. For instance, when I taught the Python course, the lessons we went through to organize data structures and preprocess data were designed to be flexible enough to be applied to each class member’s dataset (these were graduate students that all had neuroimaging datasets). In a similar vein, when I was lead instructor of the Abnormal Psychology course at Illinois, I allowed students the freedom to choose one of several “big questions” about the nature of psychopathology, and required them to take a stand on which side of the argument they fell.

_pages/publications.md

@@ -2,7 +2,6 @@
 layout: page
 permalink: /publications/
 title: publications
-description: publications by categories in reversed chronological order. generated by jekyll-scholar.
 nav: true
 nav_order: 5
 ---

_projects/1_project.md

@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ category: work
 
 The purpose of the following study was to design a cognitive task with optimal starting points for planning in order to model how we infer when to initiate planning. In the task, participants learned the cognitive map displayed below by randomly starting at a specific image (e.g., car) and being instructed to take a specific action (left or right). This action deterministically transitioned them to a subsequent image, reflected in the black arrows. Participants learned these 1-step transitions and were quizzed on them. They were told they could then use this knowledge to plan and win money in a later phase of the task. Note, all variations of this experiment presented here are pilot studies (Study 1 with time pressure n=14; Study 2 without time pressure n=16; Study 3 n=10).
 
-![im1](../assets/img/4steptask.png "4stepTask")
+![im1](../../assets/img/4steptask.png "4stepTask")
 
 ## Planning depth determines when to start planning