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Brains, Black Holes, and Beyond (B Cubed) is a collaborative project between The Daily Princetonian and Princeton Insights. The show releases 3 episodes monthly: one longer episode as part of the Insights partnership, and two shorter episodes independently created by the 'Prince.' This show is produced by Senna Aldoubosh '25 under the 147th Board of the 'Prince.' Insights producers are Crystal Lee, Addie Minerva, and Thiago Tarraf Varella. This show is a reimagined version of the show formerly produced as Princeton Insights: The Highlights under the 145th Board of the 'Prince.'
Please direct pitches and questions to podcast@dailyprincetonian.com, and any corrections to corrections@dailyprincetonian.com.
Noelle Kim 0:14
Hi, everyone. Welcome to B^3 – a collaboration podcast between Princeton Insights and the Daily Princetonian. From the Prince, my name is Noelle Kim. Today's episode is in honor of the Prince’s special issue about ‘who runs Princeton’. For this episode, we wanted to highlight the work that stem TAs do for their students. We (Senna Aldoubosh, Lina Kim and Noelle Kim) interviewed three stem TAs in chemistry, computer science and mathematics to get an idea of how TAs balance their TA jobs with their research. Enjoy.
Senna Aldoubosh 0:44
Hey, everyone, my name is Senna, and I'm sitting here with Rish Raghu. Welcome to the show.
Rish Raghu 0:48
Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Senna Aldoubosh 0:50
So if you'd lik, you could start off by introducing yourself, what you're studying, and what class you TA.
Rish Raghu 0:57
Yeah, so I am a second year Master's student here in the computer science department. I'm mostly interested in computational biology. I also did my undergrad here, by the way, and currently I'm TA-ing COS126. But during my past two semesters here, I've also TA-d COS226 as well as COS343.
Senna Aldoubosh 1:16
Awesome. So that answers my next question, actually, about how long you've been TA-ing. But I guess one question I have for you is like, what are some struggles that you face being a TA? And what are some, like rewarding components of it?
Rish Raghu 1:29
Sure. Yeah. So I guess I'll start with rewards, I'll say so the first class, it was COS226. And as I said, I did my undergrad here. And actually coming in as a freshman here, I knew I was BSC, but I really thought I didn't want to do COS. But after taking 226, that really changed my mind, I really loved vector programming. And I really saw how applicable COS would be to other fields, and so I ended up majoring in COS because of 226. And so as a result, I think it was really rewarding for me to be able to, you know, four or five years later, teach that same course. And, you know, in my experience teaching, like, you know, there a lot of students who are sort of in a similar position, maybe coming in with maybe less background in computer science, or maybe not so interested in computer science. But over the course of the semester, there are really some students who you can connect with and help out a lot, who ended up you know, growing a lot, both in terms of their skill set in COS, as well as their interests. So I think that's really rewarding to look at, having sort of been through it myself. Struggles, I think, you know, especially with intro courses, because I teach intro courses, like there's just such a wide range of backgrounds that people come in with. A lot of people have been coding for years in high school, other people have no experience at all. So part of the challenge, I think, is being able to run your precepts in a way where you can connect with both those types of students. And I think the other challenge is that also, you know, as a master student, like we do have other responsibilities, right, in terms of classes and research. And so being able to balance all those things is also something that I have to work out. But yeah, I'm happy to talk about any of those more in depth.
Senna Aldoubosh 3:06
Yeah, I'd love for you to talk actually about, you know, like how you were able to balance like your responsibilities, being a TA with, you know, doing your research and like maintaining your commitments outside of being a TA.
Rish Raghu 3:20
Yeah, yeah. So I think on a practical level, I think it's just part of it just setting aside like schedule time for each right. I think both research and teaching are things that you sort of have to potentially work on every day and can take up a lot of headspace. And so part of it is just somewhat creating a regular schedule of saying, okay, like, these days are like these times, like, I'm just gonna, like focus on my research and not look at other stuff, or vice versa, right. I'm just going to prepare for my teaching responsibilities and put other things aside. But also I think mentally, it helps to help me to sort of shift my mindset. Instead of thinking about teaching as something that's like, orthogonal to my research responsibilities, instead thinking of it as like, just part of my academic training, right. First of all, in terms of like, just giving back to the academic community that that built me up over the years. But also, you do learn so many skills teaching, right, like the leading a precept or like doing office hours, even, like teaches you how to be a better science communicator, you know, even think like simple things like grading can teach you about how to give effective feedback. So all of those things are like really useful skills. And so I think, yeah, just thinking of it as a part of the overall education process. Yeah.
Senna Aldoubosh 4:43
Yeah, that’s so awesome. And I love also hearing about the fact that like that part about giving back is so important and like, it's awesome to see that not only you're helping students, like learn and grow as COS students, but you're also yourself learning from the experience, and I guess like to segue on to my next question is like, do you think being a TA has modified or changed any future goals? Like do you have like, for example, a goal of being a mentor professor in the future? Or is it more so like, a point in your life where you're gaining a lot of life skills for the future, but not necessarily like, looking for a teaching role long term?
Rish Raghu 5:18
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think, to be honest, I'm not still completely sure what my future goals are. I will say, I think it's made me more comfortable in team setting. So I think that obviously was applicable wherever you go. But I think it has made me more open to academia, I don't want to say necessarily that, that's where I want to go. But it does seem to be like rewarding to either, like teach a class and have a set of students or even if you're just like doing research, like, like having your own lab and then mentoring students in that regard by running your own group. All of those do seem to be very rewarding pats. So yeah, well, I'm not exactly sure where I'll go, I'm definitely more open to some sort of teaching or mentoring responsibilities down the line.
Senna Aldoubosh 6:08
Awesome. And then, so B^3, which is this podcast is a lot of times more of a research focused podcast. This is a special episode where we're like, looking at, you know, people who build Princeton or who make Princeton Princeton, like TAs are such an integral and underrated part of that, that we really want to highlight that here. But I would also like to open up the opportunity for you to talk about, you know, what your research topic is, like, what you're specifically looking for, etc, if you'd like to.
Rish Raghu 6:38
Sure yeah, so I work with Ellen Zhong, in the computer science department. So our lab is broadly focused on applying machine learning methods towards problems in structural biology. So the physical structures of molecules, proteins, cells. Specifically, right now we focus on cryo electron imaging. So there's a technique called cryo electron microscopy. So if there's some protein that I'm interested in, I can take a purified sample of that protein, freeze it and image it under an electron microscope to get out hundreds or 1000s, or millions of 2D images of that protein. More recently, there's also like an analogous method you can use to image entire like sections of cells. But what our lab mainly does is develop tools to go from all those 2D images of proteins to their 3D structures. And in fact, going beyond that, and answering other structural questions like, you know, how does this protein - does the protein exists in different sort of states? Are there domains of the protein that like move around? And how do those domains move around? And how, what proteins interact with each other? So generally, like any sort of question you can think of that’s sort of like structural in nature, about biological molecules we're interested in. My research specifically is on segmentation. So basically, if you have one of these, like, 3D reconstructions of a cell, for example, we might be interested in picking out like, you know, each membrane or like each structure organelle within that cell. And right now, this is still like a very labor intensive process, like Some labs will do it manually, like they'll sit there going image by image, like circling each one. There are like other automated tools, but they're still like, very semi-automated, so you still have to, like, give it a lot of the human input. And they don't those models don't like generalize well between different images, since every cell is so different. So I mainly work on like, sort of generalizable models for picking out the structures in biological images.
Senna Aldoubosh 8:35
Awesome. That's really cool. But I guess, before I get to my last question, is there anything I missed or anything that you also want to include about your research, about being a TA?
Rish Raghu 8:46
Um, I think that that covers most of it. I think my only thing would be like, yeah, like for anyone who is interested in research or TA-ing, like Princeton has a lot of opportunities to get involved with that, like very early on in your career, you know, even as a first year, second year. So yeah, definitely get involved if you’re interested in that.
Senna Aldoubosh 9:09
Yeah, and I think that touches on my last question a little bit, but like, what advice would you give like other grad students who are TA-ing or postdocs that are TA-ing? Slash, what advice do you give to your students or just students in general, who let's say are like struggling in a class or who feel intimidated, like intimidated to go to office hours or to a TA?
Rish Raghu 9:32
Yeah, I think the advice to students is that like, they're like everyone wants you to succeed. I think especially with like intro COS classes. There's just so many support resources, right, like between TAs and undergrad lab TAs and McGraw like they - everyone wants you to succeed and like, like all of us, even those of us who are grad student TAs have also sort of been through the process. We've also been undergrads and so yeah, it can be daunting when people come in at different experience levels, but just understanding that, like, everyone wants you to succeed and like, you just shouldn't be scared to reach out for help. And yeah, I guess on the grad student level, on the TA level, just I guess, even if your research focused, just like embracing it, right, like you'll have all your life to do research. But I think it's a valuable experience teaching and so just embracing that.
Senna Aldoubosh 10:26
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. And I've learned a lot from like just talking with you about, like, being a TA and everything. So thank you so much for like joining.
Rish Raghu 10:39
Yeah, this was really fun. Thank you for having
Noelle Kim 10:42
Hi everyone. Welcome to brains black holes and beyond. From the Prince, my name is Noelle. Today I'm here with Ben Zenker, a senior in the mathematics department from New York City. In the past, Ben has been a UCA – an undergraduate course assistant – for MAT216 and MAT218. Two math courses that are genuinely taken by first year students. Additionally, Ben is currently a UCA for MAT377. Outside of academics, Ben enjoys spending time playing sports. Fun fact, he was the president of the club baseball team here on campus. Welcome to the show, Ben,
Ben Zenker 11:13
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. Great.
Noelle Kim 11:16
Great! So to get us started, could you tell us about your interests in math and maybe a little bit about some of the projects you've worked on?
Ben Zenker 11:22
Yeah, so like, freshman sophomore year, I took a lot of different courses in the math department. I started off with the intro sequence of MAT216, 218 which is what a lot of first year students take. Then after that, I took really just a broad range of courses, but I enjoyed all of them. It took me a second to find out where my interests were. I took this amazing course by spring of sophomore year under Manjul Bhargava, who's a Fields Medalist, which, if you guys don't know, is like the Nobel Prize of math. And he taught a course on quadratic forms. It was a number theory course. So it's all about studying like the natural numbers 12345 and how they relate to each other, how primes work. If you get if you look at bigger and bigger numbers, like how many of them are primes. And he taught this course about quadratic forms, which is something related to number theory. And it was so well taught. And it talks about so many different areas of number theory. And it was, I think, the deepest I've ever engaged with a math course before. So it really piqued my interest. Since then, this is my third time taking a number theory course. One of my junior seminars was also on number theory, and I hope that's what I'm going to write my thesis about.
Noelle Kim 12:29
Alright great. Thanks so much for that response. Next, could you briefly describe some of the main responsibilities as a UCA both inside and outside of the classroom?
Ben Zenker 12:37
Yeah, so as I mentioned before, kind of I really enjoyed these undergrad freshman, sophomore intro intro classes. And because of that, I wanted to stay engaged with them, stay engaged with the new math majors that were coming in. So one of the ways to do that is to come to UCA and help these students through their problem sets, through their conceptual understanding of whatever they're learning in the classroom. The way the role is, is we're supposed to hold office hours two or three times a week. And that's both to like talk about the material with the students and also to help them through their problem sets. These problem sets are brutal. The problem sets that you get in MAT216 and 218 are brutal. There's one classic story about the person who wrote the textbook for this. His name is Robert Gunning. He still walks around Fine Hall, sometimes/. He's 92 years old, maybe. Somebody went to his classroom one day. He was teaching this course four years ago, somebody went to his class, and they're like, Do you have any idea? Like, can you help out with a hint to solve question seven? He looked at it for a second. He was like, I don't know. And he was the one who wrote the textbook. So it's a hard process to like lead students to the right answer when the right answers are a really far distance away. So that's essentially what our role is.
Noelle Kim 13:41
Alright ,so I know you have already touched upon possibly some of the difficulties. But could you talk a little bit more about some of these difficulties that come with being a UCA?
Ben Zenker 13:49
As I mentioned, the problems are hard, and the material you learn sometimes in some of these classes, you learn some material that gets used over and over again, in future math courses. And that stuff, like sure you can be really good at, but the stuff that like only gets taught once naturally, you're gonna forget, or you might remember the big picture, but the technical details are totally lost on you. And that's what matters in solving these questions. So you have to take a lot of time to go back through and really re-understand the material that was taught. The second thing is, there's a little bit of a weird dynamic between UCAs and their involvement in the course UCAs don’t go to lecture. We're not TAs. We don't hold precepts or anything like that. So our main focus is these office hours. And that's our only involvement in the course. But what that means that like, we don't really get to see how the material is taught. The teacher could have changed since we took it. And also we're not we didn't grade for the course. So a lot of the times kids would come to me kind of being like, is this proof rigorous enough? Like how would you want me to format this? I don't know. I can't answer any of those questions. I'm not a grader so I would try and give them my best impression at the end of the day. Like I have like a very limited kind of skill set that can be offered to these students. I can I can help them with the contents, I can help them with some of like, the main ideas on the pset problems, but I can't really answer Oh, how the professor, what did the professor mean when they send this lecture? Or like what's the best way to format my problem set?
Noelle Kim 15:14
Okay, so thank you so much for telling us about some of the demanding responsibilities that come with being a UCA. But it does seem that you get to meet a lot of different students in the course. So I did want to end us off by asking what has been one of the most memorable encounters you've had with other students. And overall, just the best part of being a UCA.
Noelle Kim 15:32
Yeah, I guess for the past two minutes, I talked about all the things that suck about being a UCA, but on the whole, it's been an incredible experience. That's why I keep doing it. I really wanted to get back and to enhance the experience that first years get when they're coming into the math department and also get close to them. It's a really close community, there's only about 25 math majors a year. So you can pretty much know everybody that's or know like 90% of the people that are a math major. That's one of my favorite parts about being a UCA. Just like a few things that we've done. The people in the in 216, held like an assassin's game. And it was, it was a month long thing. And it was brutal. Like everybody was paranoid, like all the UCAs were in it as well. And it was it was a blast, though, it was a great time. And we also kind of like do fun Kahoot sessions, like before finals, and midterms. A) to like, try and help the students get the material better, but also B) just to like, have fun and to like really open to the stress. So those things are kind of the best part of the job, right? Like you have to like, give back a little bit like, make new relationships with these people that are gonna be like, I don't know, in the same class as you in a year or two, and have fun. Genuinely it’s a fun job.
Noelle Kim 16:37
That's wonderful. I feel like we got to learn so much more about the mathematics department here. So thank you so much for your time, Ben. And best of luck with all your work.
Ben Zenker 16:47
Thank you for having me.
Jessica Jin 16:49
Hello my name is Jessica Jin. I'm a third year graduate student in the CBE department, which is chemical and biological engineering. My research here is in chemistry with Professor William Jacobs in theoretical chemistry.
Lina Kim 17:02
And so we understand that you've been a TA so what kind of classes have you TA’d for in the past?
Jessica Jin 17:08
Yeah, so my first TA-ing experience at Princeton was in 2022 fall with Chem 201 with Dr. Hecht. And the following spring, I then TA’d chem or CBE 246.
Lina Kim 17:22
Yeah. So as you said, you're a grad student. What kind of research do you primarily do here at Princeton?
Jessica Jin 17:29
My research group here is one of the theoretical chemistry groups at Princeton. And so we use a combination of theory and computer simulation to study how molecules and in particular, biomolecules self organize. So how they self assemble in cells. Yeah, it's a really fascinating and challenging thing to study because in the cell, there are a lot of biomolecules that are involved in the process of self organization. And on top of that, you have things that are constantly changing, and not in some like stable, fixed state, kind of like if you think about the high school bio textbook picture where you have some membrane that's like fixed and static and, you know, things are happening inside of that. But what we found over time in the scientific community is that in cells, things are a lot more dynamic and kind of constantly changing. And so so it's both the the fact that you have a lot of these different biomolecules involved. And this dynamic process of self organization that makes it pretty challenging, and we don't have clear cut theories, equilibrium thermodynamic theories that can tell us what's going to happen. So So basically, our main philosophy in our in our research is to build generalizable models that can make things as simple as possible, but not simpler than that. So one fascinating area that I've been researching is, is what I'll call the social lives or social dynamics of, of a particular class of biomolecules called intrinsically disordered proteins. And so these disordered proteins, like the name suggests, kind of lack this fixed, stable three dimensional structure. Like what you would think of, you know, I’ll go back to the bio textbook picture again, you have this protein as like a stable three dimensional structure that can undergo this key and lock binding mechanism with other molecules. But in this case, it's totally different because what we found is that these intrinsically disordered proteins, which make up about a third of the human proteome, actually kind of look more like spaghetti. So they're disordered in that sense. And the unique feature is that this disorderedness allows them to interact with a lot of other biomolecules. So that makes makes you think that they might interact randomly with everyone else. But what we found in experiment is that they like to form these cliques where some IDPs, intrinsically disordered proteins, are in and somewhere out. And so that's where the challenge comes in. We want to capture the complex social dynamics of these 1000s of different disordered proteins in cells in the way that Einstein said, famously, to make everything as simple as possible but not simpler
Lina Kim 20:06
Very cool. Wow, no. Very interesting stuff. Especially with, you know, definitely a lot of overlap with Chem 201 and 202 that we can definitely see. So yeah. And to sort of elaborate on your experience as a TA here, how has that been going? How do you balance your own research, which you obviously seem very passionate about, as well as teaching?
Jessica Jin 20:30
Yeah, actually, I'm right now just focused on research, because I kind of finished my two semesters of TA duties last year, but I think TA-ing was a really incredible experience. You know, it was my first time teaching in the fall and I kind of remember, just like two weeks before I was TA-ing, and I was kind of assigned this chem 201 assignment. And to be honest, it was like not really sure what to expect. I was kind of not looking forward to it. Because I don't know if I should say this, but I asked around grad students and their experiences with with Gen Chem, and they're just like, rolling their eyes like No, like oh freshman like. And if you ask, like undergraduates and look at the reviews, it's like, it's like gen chem has like this, this really like made me nervous. But then I just remember like going into my first precept, and I like, totally fell in love with TA-ing. And it's like, overall, a really fantastic experience. Especially, I just want to highlight like, gen chem itself is like such a wonderful course. Because, you know, you think it's basic. And I was I just remember going to my first day of lecture with Dr. Hecht and I, I was sitting in and I was kind of expecting to just hear like, sort of rehearsed or flex and rehash, you know, set of static information that I had learned, like years ago, in gen chem, when I sat in I Am is I'm kind of old now. Years ago when I was a freshman, but I was pretty amazed that when, like we were talking about, like, kind of early biggest hits of Gen chem which like the the atomic experiments, like really different. And, you know, JJ Thompson, and these these big names, and as I was sort of hearing about the experiments again, and I was mentally revisiting, I just kind of had a realization of how, how much deeper my analytical and synthetical thinking had gotten just through years of academic and scientific training. And it was really cool, because I the way I was processing, what I was hearing was just on a totally different level, of course, than what I had done like years years ago. And so I kind of learned that I mean, even as I'm, I don't really like to use the word teaching, because it kind of puts me in that. It makes me seem like I’m ina a position that I kind of just know it all or kind of just on me, I'm on a different level or something than students. But I kind of like saying, I'm working with students, just because it's, it really is like, where I'm kind of at because when I'm hearing these lectures, I just realize I can't ever like fully learn gen chem, I'm always going deeper, getting another perspective, or just getting more insight from each kind of layer of learning that I can go into. So that's what made it really wonderful. But I'd say the highlight maybe was just getting students’ questions, because students are curious. And it just, it really makes my day. They get these interesting questions that can sometimes be especially in, in the context of general chemistry, it can be deceivingly simple, where, you know, it's like that, that's a simple question. You're just you're asking something about what you see everyday macroscopic phenomena. But when you get into the microscopic origins, things are more complex or more, not as clean cut, and it's, it's just so fun to think deeply about it. And then and then try to like, actually articulate that into words and constant and be able to, like, communicate that clearly to students. And I think that was probably the most fun thing about TA-ing. And of course, I won't go too much into the CBE 246, which is chemical engineering thermodynamics. But I mean, it's a different course it's, it's an, it's a huge step up in terms of the level of rigor and abstraction that students kind of need to think clearly in a thermodynamic framework. But it's, it has its own finding, and beauty, especially in the mathematical elegance with all the partial derivatives that you're working with. But I think the experience of TA-ing that is, is also very different, because, you know, you're trying to distill this complex math into something that you can actually sort of connect to in an intuitive way. And that's a big challenge to not kind of rely on the math as a crutch and say, like, Well, the answer is like right here and in point of the partial derivatives, but actually, you know, explain in concepts in words in English. So yeah, But But overall, both were really fantastic experiences.
Lina Kim 25:04
Yeah, I mean, I'm so glad that, you know, you were able to come out of that experience feeling a lot more, I guess, fulfilled. And, yeah, I mean, chem 201 Gen Chem is definitely one of those classes that a lot of people, a lot of students here at Princeton end up taking, and it is daunting. And it does seem, you know, kind of, you know, pretty run of the mill, and simple, just gen chem just gotta get through those concepts. But there are so many different layers of complexity to it. And I think that also speaks a lot to just, you know, Princeton as an ecosystem, in general. We think everything works a certain way, and how classes are run, or how, you know, different functions or events are held, but, you know, it's, once you really get into the meat of it, you know, there's so many different intricacies and nuances that I'm sure like you as a TA have definitely explored with, you know, students different curiosities or problems and whatnot, but ya know, very cool. And I guess, to end things off, has being a TA shaped your goals or aspirations for the future? Or yeah, what does that kind of look like for you?
Jessica Jin 26:20
Yeah, absolutely. I do miss TA-ing this semester, although I do have more time for research. But I, I definitely think that it has shaped my goals for the future because it just kind of, I kind of just fell in love with it. And it's like, now a big passion of mine to to work with students. And I think that, you know, four years at Princeton, or wherever you are, goes by really fast. But at the same time, they can make a big difference on you. You know, the classes you take, and the professors and maybe the people you meet can really make a big impact. And so I think, if I get the opportunity again in the future to work with students and maybe get to make a positive impact on their academic journeys, I think that would be really wonderful.
Lina Kim 27:06
Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much.
Jessica Jin 27:08
Really, thank you for thank you for this chat.
Noelle Kim 27:12
This episode of v cube is hosted by Senna Aldoubosh, Noelle Kim and Lina Kim, sound engineered by Sena Aldoubosh and Noelle Kim and produced under the 147th board of the Prince. To see more content about ‘who runs Princeton’, visit the Daily Princetonians’ website linked in the description. From the Prince, my name is Noelle Kim. Have a wonderful day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai