I have spent most of my life in India where education is a regarded as the most important tool to

bring about change in society and contribute towards the sustainable future. Since my father is
a civil engineer, he himself and his profession had a great impact on me. I used to visit the
construction sites while I was growing up, which got me very fascinated by the effort that goes
into the designing and planning of the construction projects and how different groups of
engineers, managers etc come together to build different structures to improve the lives of
people. So, I decided to pursue civil engineering as my career as I thought it would be the best
way for me to become a contributing member towards my society. During my undergraduate
programme, I was enthralled by the dynamics of the science and its ability to change human
lives. I actively participated in all lab experiments and learned how to use and modify the
behaviors of different materials and use it to our advantage. I was always ready to help my
fellow classmates with their projects and understanding of any civil engineering concepts. This
very act of helping my friends allowed me to break complex concepts of engineering down into
several simpler and understandable chunks and forming a smooth connection between them to
digest the concept as a whole. Hence, during my undergrad i developed my keen interest in
teaching and I started giving mathematics classes to high school students which I continued
even when I was working as a full time structural engineer.
My teaching philosophy has many facets and I try to include all of them during my interaction
with students.
1) I always try to create a reward system for my students to encourage them to ask
questions in the class. I try to give chocolates or some kind of recognition to the students
who have asked the best questions in the class. This creates a positive environment in
the classroom. Moreover, it forces other students to think creatively and pay attention in
the class to ask better questions. At the same time I try to reinforce the belief that no
question is dumb or stupid.
2) I always offer students ample opportunity to learn how to apply their knowledge into the
real life scenarios. Usually, during the learning phase, students may not get a chance to
apply their knowledge. So I try to give them the assignments to interview professionals
from their field and ask questions about how these people apply theoretical knowledge
into their everyday work life.These assignments make students more aware of their field
and appreciate their subject much more. Following the same ideology, I try to connect
the current learnings with the future knowledge that the students aspire to acquire. For
example, for a freshman aspiring to be a mechanical engineer and learning solidworks
from me, I would import the solidworks file of the part he created in ANSYS and show
him how he can study the behavior of that part under different loading conditions and
decide whether the part would fail or not or for a student learning AutoCad, I would
import that file into RISA-3D to show him how he can easily model the whole building
based on the dxf file that he just created in RISA-3D and study the stresses in beams
and columns of the building. This generally creates more awareness and dedication
among the students when they are exposed to the different ways in which they can
exploit their skills.
 3) I always try to make the learning process more interesting by involving students using
projects and case studies rather than monologue lectures. I always try to present some
type of case studies to the students to allow them to learn, how the knowledge gained in
the classroom can be applied in practical real life situations. Also allowing the students to
work in teams creates a sense of responsibility and empowers them to handle the
dynamics of a team.
4) I always try to stop frequently in class to ask if any of the students have any questions,
doubts,comments or ideas. I also try to give pop quizzes in the class to refresh the
memory of my students.
To conclude, my primary philosophy as a teacher is: to get students to think creatively by
encouraging them to ask questions, connecting different small concepts coherently to make a
learning process a rewarding experience.
I always encourage my students to think by asking the following questions:
1) Why do you think that this part is designed in this way?
2) How do you think we can optimize the design of a slab or beam to save concrete and
steel reinforcement?
3) Whether the information we have is sufficient enough to make a decision if the part
would fail or not?
4) What methods you can use to verify the results that you got from your computer
programme simulation, both qualitatively and quantitatively?
I always try to explain the multiple ways in which the same problem can be solved and how to
perform sanity checks on your results.
Through my experience, I have realised that learning is an individual experience. Different
students have different pace of learning and every students’ brain speaks different language.
Sometimes you would get to speak to the students in the language they understand the best but
sometimes a teacher would not be able to guess the language. So I always try to assess my
performance by taking feedback from the students in the form of questionnaire and gauging the
students’ participation in class along with their performance on weekly quizzes. I also
understand that while pursuing their professional education students can go through personal
hardships such as homesickness, financial difficulties, relationship issues etc. I try to
accomodate all those circumstances in my capacity as an instructor by giving them extra time
to submit their assignments, helping them outside my office hours, providing them with
knowledge of available online resources etc. For example, when one of my students suffered a
major loss in her family and started performing poorly, which clearly reflected in her grades and
class participation, I came forward to help her by inquiring about her situation and very politely
allowed her to submit assignments beyond the due dates and also gave her some independent
study tasks to improve her grades on the course. Also from personal experience, assessing how
sensitive the issue was, I very cautiously suggested her to go for counselling sessions to cope
up with the coursework and personal loss.I also kept inquiring how was she performing in her
other classes. Later on with my support and the support of other people around her, she was
able to perform well in my class and in other classes as well.
I am very confident that what really drives me to teach and improve myself continuously is the
satisfaction at the end of each of my classes that I observe on my students’ faces implying that
they feel empowered to learn something new today which would help them to be successful in
their professional lives and enable them to be the contributing members of the society.