TAing CS15
I TAed for both courses in Brown's intro sequence, CS15 and CS16 (now CS200!)
TAing CS15 was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. My good friend Anabelle and I were “Socially Responsible Computing” TAs; we’d lecture for five minutes each class about topics related to technology and society. I’m incredibly proud of the work we did. Here's links to videos of all of my mini-lectures:
- Intro Lecture (9/14/21)
- Virality, Misinformation, and Section 230 (9/16/21)
- Startups and Venture Capital (9/23/21)
- Government and Antitrust (9/30/21)
- Autonomous Vehicles and Algorithmic Decisionmaking (10/7/21)
- Privacy and Surveillance I (10/12/21)
- Privacy and Surveillance II (10/14/21)
- Privacy and Surveillance III (10/19/21)
- Artificial Intelligence (10/26/21)
- Labor II (11/4/21)
- CS For Social Change, Part I - Forensic Architecture (11/9/21)
- CS For Social Good, Part II (11/11/21)
- "What You Can Do" (11/16/21)
I found this work incredibly fulfilling. CS15 remains the most popular introductory CS course (2021 enrollment: 328), and I felt we could shape how an entire class of Brown CS students thinks through technology. The students seemed to love it too; if you’ll indulge me, I cut a few of my favorite responses to our end of year survey together:
The course, too, is a blast. There are ~50 undergrads who TA it each year, including explicit “humor” TAs who plan skits in lecture.
Because my work involved lecturing, I'd meet with Andy, often a few times a week, to discuss our content. We became fast friends while teaching, arguing late into the evenings about Edward Snowden or antitrust or AI. He quickly became my advisor, and one of my most important mentors at Brown.
He also pushed me, a lot, intellectually. I often felt like a bit of a black sheep among the SRC TAs, in how much I really love technology. Andy loves technology too, and I think his pushes, perhaps more than anything else, helped me to work through a lot of my own views about tech: to be optimistic about new developments but sober about wild claims and to call a spade a spade.
I think there were many regrettable trends at Brown while I was there; against rigor, towards lower standards, adjacency to “quiet quitting” or imagining a life clocking in and out at a 9-5. More than almost anyone else, Andy pushed against this, toward excellence and rigor. His eye for detail was nuts: I quickly learned to make sure we had no orphaned text, that every claim was cited, that there was no ambiguity in any claim we made, knowing he'd spot it during our reviews. Andy's high standards made the whole endeavor all the more rewarding: it made it clear that we respected the students enough to do a damn good job, in ways that made it feel easy to devote lots of my time to the course.
Andy embodies, I think, what it means to "live to work" versus "work to live." I worked with him when he was nearly 85, and was still taken aback by his work ethic; we'd often meet on Zoom at 11pm, something I learned he did with our Head TAs too.
While TAing I also took his second course, Hypertext/Hypermedia: The Web Was Not The End, essentially a computing history course focused. It was wild to see firsthand: much of it happened in Andy's lab, including the first hypertext system and many early graphics experiments. He's sort of a legend at Brown—he has the second ever computer science PhD in the country, founded our computer science department, and, because because many of his graphics students went to work at Pixar, Andy from Toy Story after him.
I always knew I wanted to study computer science, but seeing this up close endeared me to the discipline in ways I couldn't have predicted. Computer science, I came to conclude, was such a powerful discipline because it was interdisciplinary from its founding, functioning as a tool applicable to nearly every other domain. In essence, computer science could encompass my other curiosities: how cool to see a field that could hold graphics, hypertext literature, animation, VFX, and so much more alongside algorithms, systems, and ML!
He's one of the professors I've managed to keep closest touch with from school. He offered to take me mountain biking for the first time last spring, and mentioned a trip he’s been running with former TAs for almost 20 years. In October, I went with 10 of them to Burke, Vermont for three days of biking, and again this summer in Bellingham, Washington.
I'm grateful to know him, and so glad I stumbled on TAing his course!