Absolute gratitude and love for making my first semester of Graduate School totally welcoming and fulfilling. We are living through a global pandemic, a re-energized racial uprising, and a wild presidential election. It’s been a pleasure to start the week with your Monday morning class. You’ve made the energy of a virtual class engaging by keeping us thinking and laughing. You have been the only professor who has addressed the importance of boosting our mental health during this horrible moment. Your weekly check-ins and reminders for us to do something that makes us happy are fundamental tools for self-care. This activity also forges beautiful and important relationships between students and professors. Thank you for celebrating and practicing a pedagogy of joy, critical thinking, and subversion.

Coming into my first semester at Columbia, I was feeling very anxious about the transition, especially being out-of-country and in the middle of a pandemic. I feel so thankful to have had the ability to take a class with such a vibrant, caring instructor. Your passion is both clear and inspiring. It is evident you genuinely care about the topics you teach and really work towards helping your students succeed. You have definitely made my first experience at this school incredibly memorable and I want you to know that your work does not go unnoticed. After speaking with other students that have had the opportunity of learning from you, I can confidently say that my colleagues share my same thoughts. I wish everyone gets the opportunity to come across someone like you during their journey at Columbia.

Thank you for such a great semester! I really enjoyed your 1601 course. Thank you for being so approachable and for answering my questions so thoroughly in office hours. Even though my high school technically covered most of the concepts, I learnt so much more from the course. I learnt a more mathematical perspective, and how to deal with complex problems. This new way of looking at things I thought I already knew was truly fascinating. I really enjoyed your lectures and working through the challenging problem sets. Looking forward to the new semester’s continuation!

Thank you so much for all the time and effort you put into making this course more digestible for us through the 3D anatomy sessions and all the content on complete anatomy. Having this as additional support for the course was absolutely amazing and very helpful in the long run. Being in 3D sessions with you also made me appreciate the comfort level with very nitty-gritty details that you have and that we as students can aspire to achieve. Thank you.

Thank you for a wonderful course experience during this difficult year. I enjoyed the lectures and in-class discussions around software testing, especially the discussions involving the testing of AI models and autonomous driving products. Because this class attracts students from all walks of life, I felt that in-class group discussions were an excellent medium for learning more from peers. The best take-away from this course is that we apply the concepts learned in the class first to develop an individual project and then a team project. This experience has taught me the value of teamwork. I feel more confident about my skills as I transition to a full-time software engineer role in the industry. Thank you once again for going out of the way to help the students. It has been a fruitful and fulfilling experience.

You have a tremendous impact on all of the students of group A every day you are in clinic. You show up every day ready to work, take the time to teach, and believe in us more than we believe in ourselves. I can’t say enough how much we appreciate you!

Thank you for your amazing energy throughout the semester. I know it has been tough for you to teach in a hybrid mode and stare at so many black boxes every class, but your enthusiasm, passion for teaching and your great sense of humor made a HUGE difference. Thank you for working so hard to create new material to support our learning and for offering so many office hours to help us understand micro. Your dedication to your students, your genuine love for watching us learn and your attention and care for each of our lives will be greatly missed!

Thank you for teaching a great and enjoyable semester of biochemical engineering. I am really appreciative of your course organization during the pandemic and particularly like to thank you for making this course interesting during these stressful times. Also it was really kind of you for give us a safe space to share something we are grateful about after the election day, when most students were feeling anxious. As a student, I felt motivated to learn more by the way this course was taught and you deserve full credit for that. Undoubtedly, the course material was not easy, but your approachability through the class Zoom chat and office hours made it easier for students like me who are afraid to email professors frequently, to seek help from you. I would also like to thank you for your flexibility in allowing students to take the exam at their own pace and timing. And lastly, I would like to thank you for allowing my group to record our paper presentations. Thank you so much!

Thank you so much for an amazing semester in ODE and for your amazing teaching both in lecture and in office hours! I loved your way of explaining topics without just stating facts and theorems, but rather by presenting ideas and exploring those ideas to develop theorems and techniques.  Your class was definitely my favorite of the semester, and after recently declaring a Math Major, it really reminded me of what made me like math in the first place!

Even though the second half of the semester became remote, I wanted to let you know that I find myself thinking about the design principles you teach in class every day. I’ve leveraged design to improve my mental health, changed my daily routine to work towards a better lifestyle, and expanded my awareness of the importance of iteration day-by-day. Thanks to you and your class, quarantine has become so much more bearable.

Just a quick note of appreciation for everything that you do! Not only is your teaching habitually second-to-none, it is also carried out with such gusto and contagiously positive disposition as to inspire a generation to become better people and better data scientists – myself included. You are a rare breed of extraordinary talent and knowledge that also possesses the facility for conveying that knowledge, which is a gift few are blessed with. Advanced Analytic Techniques belongs to the small pool of exceptional courses that have taught me the most and that most assuredly represent an exceptional return on investment in the program. For all that and more, thank you!

This semester did not play out the way anyone had planned but you did your utmost to stay positive, connected to the students, and committed to our education. I just wanted you to know that your efforts did not go unnoticed and that we really appreciate it. Despite everything, I really enjoyed your classes this semester and learned a ton! So thank you for being a fantastic, dedicated teacher and just generally a wonderful human.

Thank you for your dedication and hard work!

I cannot thank you enough for helping me to be a better writer.

I have improved so much compared to the beginning of the semester.

I know that it has been difficult for you with the virus, but I really appreciate the time and efforts to make this class as normal as possible.

Thank you so much for being a strong female role model at Columbia for me and many others. You perfectly balance kindness and poise with the ability to give strong, logic-based feedback. Your class was somewhat outside of my comfort zone but I always felt supported and encouraged to participate and learn from our community. Thank you for making our classroom feel safe and connected.

These are unpredictable times. But you, in the midst of everything, have been a constant. You are a voice of reason and a spirit of empathy. You are always that, but I am especially grateful for that now. Your class keeps me motivated and reminds me of what I am working towards.

Thank you for who you are!

Thank you for your constant words of encouragement and support through this difficult semester. In class you are a fantastic instructor and helped us understand the material very clearly; since remote learning has started, you have also become a reassuring voice and a small piece of normalcy through these trying times. I appreciate all that you have done for our class.

Thank you for being so flexible and understanding with your students amidst this crisis. You have been so creative in keeping the class motivated and involved. I know at times, teaching through a virtual platform may have been frustrating! Just wanted to thank you for keeping me motivated as I finish my last semester as a Master student.

Thank you so much for all of your help, it was so nice to have someone help to explain all of the tricky French grammar concepts to me! I know my classmates really benefited from your expertise as well. I am so grateful to you for sharing all your knowledge! The pronunciation session was very helpful too. I really struggle with languages and sometimes even after hearing explanations from your prof, classmates and online videos you just need another perspective to guide you.

Thank you for being such a great TA. You have such great attention to detail, and this means that students don’t face a ton of frustration. You approach every student with kindness and enthusiasm. You have made the move to online teaching really smooth. It’s no wonder your office hours are always a huge hit! Thanks for making class wonderful for everyone.

Thank you for all your efforts this spring during recitation to ensure that we understood the concepts presented in class. I was so grateful for the ease with which you taught both the in-person recitation classes and am especially grateful for your instruction via Zoom. Your seamless transition to the online platform allowed me to survive a difficult semester. I am not exaggerating when I say that I could not have done it without you. You’re amazing!

Thank you for being such a positive and engaging TA! Although I already enjoyed learning Korean, I definitely enjoyed it more having you as my speaking TA. I got to learn beyond what was taught in class and some handy memory tricks. Also, thank you for making the learning environment welcoming; I felt like I could be myself, which isn’t always the case in other learning environments. I hope to continue learning Korean, and I already feel more confident to do so because of your teaching.

Thank you for being such an engaging and funny TA! I appreciated how you conducted your recitations with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Even when the class was online, I felt that the recitations were as lively and informative as they were in-person. You also went beyond the course and shared your experiences as a PhD student. Thank you for the opportunity to learn from you and I am glad to have had you as a TA!

Thank you for being an amazing TA for Quant this semester.  You are such a great team player – making sure that work is done carefully and with minimal turnaround, achieving consensus, and stepping up to the plate to offer more office hours.  Thank you for your patience and accessibility with students. You were kind, supportive, and conscientious in your support of students, including those who needed extra support.  We had to be really flexible and adaptable with the course, given the move to the online format, and I appreciated your precision, efficiency, and enthusiasm in getting us there.  I wish I could have thanked you in person with a big celebration at our last class.  Thank you for being AMAZING!

Thank you so much for being a great TA this semester.  We had to make a lot of changes to the class because of COVID, and you really helped make the transition to that format smooth. Helping set up breakout rooms, actively participating in breakout rooms, helping with posting (and publishing LOL!) all the additional course material was really helpful. 

Thank you for always being calm, detail-oriented, and patient with students.  I wish I could be thanking you in person.  Your amazing skill made the course run smoothly ALL YEAR LONG. THANK YOU!

Thank you for your hard work and dedication!

I greatly appreciate your time and effort to make this lab as normal as possible despite the virus and sudden changes that we had to deal with.

You have taught us not only how to write a physics lab report, but also how to think critically to understand what really happens in the lab and to generate an academic report.