Teaching is my primary responsibility and I am thankful to have a job in which I love what I do: Share my knowledge of and passion for the weather with the meteorologists of tomorrow. Teaching is also rewarding. Every day, you can come home and realize that “I did X” or “I helped person Y.” I enjoy this a lot more than spending sometimes a week debugging my (or, even worse, someone else’s) code.
The funny thing about teaching is that no one really knows whether or not they like or are any good at it until they do it. Although I was a grader for the synoptic meteorology class for a couple of semesters at Penn State, I was grading, not teaching. It wasn’t until I led a dynamics discussion section that I realized that I liked teaching and helping students learn, even though I had very limited control over course and homework design at that point. The following semester, I taught two sections of the general education meteorology course at Penn State and decided I wanted to teach. I applied to teaching-centric positions as I was finishing my Ph.D. and the rest, as they say, is history.
For more information on my teaching philosophy or the courses I teach, please see the links below.