Last year at the beginning of the lock downs, I had a privilege to take part in organization of Neuromatch Conferences and Neuromatch Academy. For the first time ever, I had a chance to connect with diverse group of computational neuroscientists from all over the world and had a chance to teach within an amazing international summer school. You can read past years reflections here.

This year I joined to help student application reviews at first. Until the last minute, I was not planning to join as a TA, I was dreaming of a quiet, calm and lazy summer, instead. But I realized that forcing myself to teach important topics of computational neuroscience, would definitely increase my confidence of working independently on my research. Because I was in the period of questioning what I have learned, what I know, what is my purpose, what is the point of life and so forth. After some period of self-struggle, at the almost last minute, I applied as a TA. Meanwhile during the planning I did very minor tasks in NMA like translating flyers, sending emails to people/organizations that I am familiar with.

One of the things that I really like about volunteering for the organization of NMA is there is a toleration and understanding for mistakes. I have failed at helping for setting and updating DataStudio dashboard from last years to this year. There are some personal reasons behind it (anxiety & distraction/not being able to focus under time pressure). I stepped back and moved on the things that I feel more confident such as reviewing content prepared by content creators and sharing my feedback to make content more easy to follow. I should admit that while reviewing content, I got addicted to reviewing thanks to the process created by Tara van Viegen. It was simple as reading/running Jupyter books or watching videos and filling the relevant forms. My previous TA experience helped me to provide estimations about leveling the content. To me, content reviewing is one of the efficient ways of preparing for teaching, since it requires a careful mind to check all the building blocks of the daily lectures. I took part in reviewing chapter of “Hidden Dynamics”, you can reach jupyter book of all content as a book here. Isn’t it amazing to have everything in book format available all the time!

And the day has arrived! I was selected as a lead TA, before TA training I started to process material on my own in a slow pace to ensure fluency of teaching. Even though NMA is a student-driven summer school and it is not necessary for TAs to deliberately teach in traditional sense of teaching, to be able to answer possible questions and provide a comprehensive guide, I prepared myself before the TA training week.

TA training week

It is always exciting to meet fellow enthusiastic TAs before the course. I admired the organization of the TA team and how it scaled from last year to accommodate increasing number of TAs. In addition to major information about running the summer school with matched student groups, I believe that DEI training was also very useful, especially considering the first time TAs, gaining experience on how to provide a safe online space for equal learning is a priceless life skill. TA training provided enough tools / guidelines about how to tackle possible problems during the summer school, helped me to boost my energy to get ready to teach.

Week 0

Every aspect of NM is very diverse, CN course is one of the highest peaks of diversity from the teaching point of view. There might be students who have solid neuroscience background but lacking necessary programming & math skills for the course, to compensate such difference there is an optional pre-pod training for the matched student groups (pods) with assigned TAs. This is also a chance for TAs to prepare themselves for teaching before the actual summer school within a relatively easy subject in a casual way. Additionally it is an opportunity for lead TAs to test their ability to aid their peers. Almost half of the pods are attending to pre-pod which creates a challenge: low number of students per TAs. For my megapod we had 6 students per 2 TAs so I merged students into 3 main zoom rooms and assigned TAs in my megapod to days/daily topics of content according to their preferences. In this setting each TA had almost full “classroom of students” (about 8 to 10). and each TA worked full 1 day at most. Since it is a voluntary part of the course I chose to compensate for them when needed. Pre-pod attendance is creating familiarization about the format of the course and TAs can turn this to an advantage of peer-teaching too. This is one of the incredible properties of NMA.

Week 1 of NMA-CN : Modelling & Intro to Machine Learning

Modelling & Intro to Machine Learning

Week 2 of NMA-CN : Dynamical Systems

Week 3 of NMA-CN : Stochastic Processes

Voluntary Support Service

Last words and thanks

Timing was a little bit hectic to me due to top surgery. I decided to go under surgery a week before the starting day of the NMA CN course. I was at the hospital during TA training times. Since top surgery is a one that would limit my ability to move and sitting in front of the computer would not be an additional sedentary period.