Teaching
I love teaching. It's something I have cared about for a very long time, and it informs not only explicitly pedagogical activities but even my research. Focusing on interpretability of neural nets, for example, can be thought of as merely making neural nets "teachable" to humans. This is something I care a lot about.
Given this longstanding interest, I have taught everyone from preschoolers to graduate students. Below are some of the ways I've taught.
Teaching Assistantships
I have had the pleasure of TA'ing in 3 departments at MIT: EECS, Aero/Astro, and Brain and Cognitive Science. The three courses were Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (6.034), Real Time Systems and Software (16.35, twice), and Computational Psycholinguistics (9.190). In these courses, I have conducted recitations, held office hours, led labs, and given guest lectures. I was the Aero/Astro Teaching Development Fellow from 2021 to 2022. Student reviews of my teaching include:
"BEST TA I HAVE EVER HAD. Hands down. Always willing to answer email questions at any time of the day, definitely knows his stuff."
"I didnt have Mycal as a TA but still went to his recitations since I found them very helpful."
"Mycal is a great TA. His recitations were very concise and straight to the point, and the examples were very specific. I really liked the recitations he had right before a quiz when we reviewed the material. He would always teach us in the depth that we needed. However, his puns were sometimes a bit too bad." [I dispute this slander about my puns]
"Interactive recitations were very useful for strengthening knowledge of the topics."
Teaching Pre-College Students
Since being in high school, I have taught a wide variety of students. In "Science for Pre-Schoolers and Kinders" (via the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo) and "Stretch to Kindergarten" (a non-profit program for preparing underprivileged students who were unable to attend preschool prepare for kindergarten), I got to work with very young children, answering questions like why balloons float and why sunlight helps plants grow. As I learned more, I started teaching more experienced students: tutoring classmates in math in high school, as well as bringing a group from Girls Who Code to my lab in grad school. My teaching has even been recognized: I tied for first place in an Aero/Astro graduate student teaching competition for my presentation "And for this next bit... Error Correcting Codes, Voyager 2, and You"