Statement of Teaching Interest:
Statement of Teaching Interest
In teaching at the university level,
I have always been convinced that the crux is to entrust students
with the tools for obtaining knowledge, and to show them the
relevance of such knowledge, so that they are inspired to actively
seek out further insight themselves. To this end, I believe that
only through hands-on experience can theory be grounded and its
relevance understood. It is this belief that has guided me through
my past teaching and research.
Undergraduate
Teaching Experience:
Throughout my College and Graduate careers, I chose to TA in 10
courses and tutor in 3 more, all of which featured a significant
project portion. It is in these courses that I often heard students
commenting that they finally learned the purpose of the required EE
or CS courses. While these courses often consumed a majority of the
students’ time, it is also in them that they showed the most
excitement or even pride.
In my sophomore year, I took several
project courses that really motivated me to learn. At that time, mp3
chips had just been introduced, so we built a hard-drive based mp3
player and programmed its interface. Everyone, including the
teacher, was discovering the possibilities of this new project.
Through many sleepless nights, I not only learned the theory but
also implemented this embedded system. In recognition of my evident
passion, during my junior year at Caltech, I was selected as the
only undergraduate TA for Senior EE project courses (EE90, 91a,
91b). In these courses, each student was required to complete an
independent project, from idea to packaging, in an 11-week period.
As students had complete freedom over their own project, there was a
wide range of them, making it difficult for TAs to help the students
when needed. In order to curb the complaint that “the TAs know
nothing”, I started to meet with each student every other week to
learn about their projects. The students not only began to
appreciate such input but also learned to better communicate their
ideas. As a result, more students were able to complete their
project than in previous years, and I was appointed the head TA and
remained the only undergraduate TA for these courses during my
senior year. On top of that, I was also asked to TA two other
courses: digital circuit design (EE4) and the graduate level, VLSI
design (CS105). More rewardingly, with the reputation of TAs
improved, students started to undertake even more ambitious
projects, from 1kW switching power supplies to a TIVO-like recording
device. I felt they were better able to apply what they had learned
in analog/digital circuit classes, and motivated to challenge
themselves, which simply could not have been duplicated by a theory
course alone. While debugging with students a design centered around
a specialized chip only days before the deadline was still taxing,
the students’ “ah-ha” moment was worth every single sleep-deprived
hour. It is with this experience that I entered into Princeton
University’s graduate program.
Graduate Teaching
Experience:
Teaching Students to “Fish”:
I often find an answer given to the students’ questions a disservice
to them, while it is more important to guide them to find their own
answers. In Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering program,
there is one course that nearly everyone knows: ELE 302, or the “car
lab”. The course requires each student to design a car that follows
a line laid out on the floor. Having been established for some
years, this course is notoriously difficult both to take and to
teach, because it requires knowledge of both hardware/software
design and control theory. When TAing this course in my second and
third years, I often answered questions with questions, with which I
tried to guide the students to their own answers. To meet the
increasing interest in my hours, I added one office hour starting
midnight everyday. Soon my session became a must-go; even the
students without questions would come to the lab and work during
that hour. Many simply came to chat about their ideas for ELE302,
other classes, their research, or even their future plans, some even
brought in their own electronic devices to dissect and hack. In
particular, one student disassembled his new iPod to discuss with me
what he thought each part did. I later received the
Outstanding Teaching
Assistant Award for this course. When a class can invoke enough
interest for a student to take apart his iPod, you know you are
doing something right!
Future Teaching
Plans: I would like
to continue to provide the students an opportunity to understand the
relevance of their studies, and to inspire them to engage research
for their own curiosities. I am capable of teaching a variety of
courses, including but not restricted to
In the general courses, I will
infuse a strong hands-on portion so that students can obtain a good
understanding of the material. Introductory project courses would
assign each student a pre-defined, competitive project, similar in
spirit to the car lab, where they are offered an opportunity to
program and design toward a common goal while mutually motivated by
the course's competitive nature. The more advanced project courses
will give students an opportunity to conjure, design, implement, and
eventually present their own
projects, for which complete freedom is granted for the students to
explore whatever strikes their fancy, and grades given based on both
the ambition and completeness of the project. It is my hope that,
through their time in these courses, the students would also
appreciate the need for ideas to be grounded and their relevance
understood, regardless of their final careers
Interweaving
Research and Teaching:
This overall philosophy has not only guided my teaching, but also my
research experience. I sincerely believe that the ZebraNet Project
would not have achieved as great an impact but for the hardware
implementation and subsequent real-world deployments. All my
research has had both a theory part and an implementation part to
ground the theory into the realm of reality. For example, my work on
low-density collaborative localization in DTN is theoretical, in the
sense that it employs probabilistic density models and distributed
Markov decision making to combine and locate DTN nodes. However,
validation was car ied out via implementation in real hardware, as
well as large-scale simulations with parameters collected in those
implementations. This validation is more convincing, if only for me
to note the potential of my research in real deployments. It is this
feeling that I wish to pass onto my future students.
On commencement day last year, a
former 302 student came into my office to thank me and told me that
I was “the best TA” that he had ever had, who taught him “how to
fish”. It was the greatest moment in my life so far, a moment that I
hope to repeat.
List of Previous Teaching Experiences:
Head Teaching Assistant, Princeton University
ELE 302 System Design and Analysis (Car Lab)
Spring 2005
Teaching Assistant, Princeton University
ELE 302 System Design and Analysis (Car Lab)
Spring 2004
Head Teaching Assistant, California Institute
of Technology
EE 90 Analog Electronics Laboratory
Spring 2002
Head Teaching Assistant, California Institute
of Technology
EE 105 Application-Specific Computers
Spring 2002
Dean’s Tutor, California Institute of
Technology
EE/CS 52 Microprocessor Systems Laboratory.
Spring 2002
Head Teaching Assistant, California Institute
of Technology
EE 91b Experimental Projects in Electronic Circuits.
Winter 2001
Dean’s Tutor, California Institute of
Technology
EE/CS 51 Principles of Microprocessor Systems.
Winter 2001
Head Teaching Assistant, California Institute
of Technology
EE 91a Experimental Projects in Electronic Circuits.
Fall 2001
Dean’s Tutor, California Institute of
Technology
EE 50 Advanced Digital Design.
Fall 2001
Teaching Assistant, California Institute of
Technology
EE 4 Fundamentals of Digital Systems
Fall 2001
Teaching Assistant, California Institute of
Technology
EE 90 Analog Electronics Laboratory
Spring 2001
Teaching Assistant, California Institute of
Technology
EE 91b Experimental Projects in Electronic Circuits.
Winter 2000
Teaching Assistant, California Institute of
Technology
EE 91a Experimental Projects in Electronic Circuits.
Fall 2000
Pei Zhang
Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Olden Street, Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 356 - 2525
peizhang@princeton.edu