On the surface, Summer@Brown (S@B) is a pre-college program that offers a range of courses reflecting the breadth and depth of Brown’s undergraduate curriculum, but the opportunities here are not only for pre-college students. S@B offers a unique opportunity for Brown’s PhD and Master’s students to teach and, if they choose, build their own curriculum. This turned out to be an exceptional opportunity for Alex Hruska, a second-year BME PhD student, who, like many S@B teachers, plans to go into academia after graduating and wanted to try his hand at teaching. This summer, Alex taught several sections of “Engineering Biomedical Systems,” a course aimed at providing “…an introduction to biomedical analysis, specifically relating to device design and tissue engineering approaches.” Though this was his first live teaching experience, Alex was not daunted by the task because he had attended a pre-college summer program at Johns Hopkins and knew the kids would be expecting to have fun.

In terms of course curriculum, Brown gives the summer teachers plenty of freedom. In fact, for those who want to, they can propose a whole new course and build the content from scratch; however, teachers are also welcome to base their curriculum on a class that has been taught before. Alex chose to build the content himself using the research he’s involved in in the Wong lab, including tissue engineering modeling and applications. Some of the course activities Alex dreamed up for this summer included: a tour of a lab, a visit from a guest lecturer, actual lab time, and classroom activities such as “tissue jeopardy.” As an aspiring professor, Alex’s favorite part of teaching a S@B course was interacting with the students and seeing them learn; he found watching the “light bulbs go off” particularly rewarding. Reflecting on his experience, Alex conceded that teaching requires a lot of energy, but he was glad that he had learned a lot, both from his students and the experience. As he said, "Teaching forces you to evaluate how well you understand the topics.” Another major takeaway was learning how to keep the whole class engaged, that is, being able to engage all the different personality types, not just the more outgoing students. Overall, the freedom to develop his own curriculum made this experience enjoyable and rewarding for Alex and one he would definitely recommend to other graduate students.

The number of BME master’s and PhD students teaching in S@B has grown rapidly over the past few years. In addition to Alex, PhD students Rajeev Kant, Alicia Minor, and Kiara Lee and master’s student Aaron Cherian also taught sections of Engineering Biomedical Systems. Aaron also taught Biomedical Engineering and Device Design. Master’s students Ashton Stoop and Ramisa Fariha taught sections of the Introduction to Engineering and Design course, and PhD student Sabina Stefan taught Introduction to Applied Mathematics: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Alex, Alicia, Kiara, and Sabina also helped our their colleagues as teaching assistants, and Itzel Aponte '19, master's student Sophie Brown, and PhD students Lindsay Schneider and Zahra Ahmed '18 ScM'19 also served as TAs.