I am the recipient of the 2019 Kathy Alberti Prize from the School of Social Sciences at UCI. The prize “recognizes a graduate student who holds truly outstanding promise
as a future professor or academic. The student selected will epitomize a broad range of talents. Evidence of excellence may include scholarship, teaching, student mentoring, electronic pedagogy, or any other relevant area(s) of contribution as defined by the nominator.” For more information see https://www.socsci.uci.edu/awards/descriptions/scholar_alberti.php
I am incredibly passionate about teaching especially on topics of social theory, peace & conflict studies, and introduction to sociocultural anthropology.
Selected excerpts from recent teaching evaluations include the following comments:
- Neil was great at giving examples that broke down the concepts in ways we could understand, and he is so passionate about everything he teaches that you can’t help but be
interested, too. He is also one of the nicest TA’s I’ve had and he is always ready to help
students both in and out of the normal discussion sessions. - Neil was very knowledgeable on the course material and was always enthusiastic about
the subject. There was a good balance of questions that challenged us to think like real
anthropologists and discussion questions that helped us to better understand and connect
the readings to our lectures. Neil was also always very encouraging and tried to support
us in every way he could. - He took the feedback of the last evaluations and changed his teaching methods to be more
effective to the discussion sections. He is very friendly and creates a comfortable safe space
that allows students to voice their opinions. He is also very effective in making certain
material that may be difficult to understand stick through analogies in discussion. - I think the strongest points were that he was very enthusiastic and passionate about the
topic that he was teaching. It’s easy to just put together power-points and discuss what
was already discussed in lecture, but Neil went beyond the scope of that and created
interactive activities for the section to engage in and really treated discussion like another
lecture that really benefited students.I was able to tell that my TA knew exactly what he was doing and what to expect. - He was very informative and also encouraging. He taught by promoting learning. He never
turned down any opinions from anyone. I could truly tell that he will one day be a great
professor (if that is what he would like to be).
All of these quotes are from students from Fall 2018 when I was a Teaching Assistant for Professor Mei Zhan’s Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology course.