June 01, 2017

Congratulations to MLD TA Award Recipients

Congratulations to the Machine Learning Department's Teaching Assistant (TA) Award recipients (pictured above from left to right): Travis Dick, Kristin Early, Manzil Zaheer, Devin Schwab, and Mariya Toneva.

The awards were presented for the best teaching assistants from the Spring 2016, Fall 2016, and Spring 2017 semesters. Winners were chosen by nominations from students, faculty, and fellow TAs. Manzil Zaheer received the TA of the Year Award after he was nominated separately and independently by five different students in the Fall 2016, 10-715 course.

Ryan Tibshirani presented the awards during a ceremony on May 5th. During the ceremony, Ryan presented a slideshow sharing some comments from nominators including the following:

Travis Dick (10-601, Spring 2016)

• Travis is perhaps the best TA that I have met …Genuinely committed to the learning experience of other students … I witnessed him answer the same questions countless times without getting upset, bored, or discouraged …

Kirstin Early (10-401, Spring 2016)

• This was a brand new course … She started to prepare class material way before the semester started to make everything ready by the first class … Kirstin was an amazing help both for the students and instructors during the semester … Played a very important role in the success of the first undergraduate course taught in MLD

Devin Schwab (10-703, Spring 2017)

• Friendly and willing to answer in-person questions outside of office hours … Cares about the state of the class … Asked students for feedback regarding the class and its assignments … Dedicated to figuring out how to improve this class for future semesters

Mariya Toneva (10-725, Fall 2016)

• Pleasure to work with ... She was professional and dedicated to her role as a TA ... She was constantly putting herself in the students’ shoes, evaluating whether the pace of the course/difficulty of the homeworks was appropriate, and made suggestions throughout on how to improve the course accordingly

Manzil Zaheer (10-715, Fall 2016)

• Manzil was an amazing and very hard working TA ... Students and instructors really loved working with him … Manzil knows the machine learning literature very well ... I really learned a lot from him during the semester!