They weren’t kidding when they said the first semester flies by
As I’m wrapping up grading hundreds of pages of exams and papers (while also juggling two of my own research papers due in a week), I knew I had to take a few minutes to jot down some thoughts about finishing my first semester here at Claremont McKenna College.
I could write a laundry list of moments I’m proudest of, lessons I’ve learned, new research, student success stories, and more.
But that’s probably not what you’re here for (if you’re even here at all… I certainly don’t expect this to go viral!).
Instead, I’ll just tell four short stories. These, I believe, capture the moments throughout the semester that I don’t want to forget. And maybe, one day I’ll look back on these moments and see threads of growth that started back in Fall 2025.
You’ve got to try it to learn it
About midway through the semester teaching Introductory Statistics, I realized I was talking too much. Some of that was the nature of the course as a more lecture-oriented course, with the early content very much focused on teaching the correct interpretations of p-values and how the Central Limit Theorem really works.
But at the same time, the students needed hands-on practice to really learn these foundations of data analysis. It helped that we naturally had more hands-on activities as we entered the second half of the semester learning specific analysis methods like ANOVAs and regressions. Probably my favorite activity was having students watch and rate Dancing with the Stars clips, then clean and analyze the dataset to test reliability.
Next semester, I’ll try to incorporate some memorable activities earlier in the semester. Anyone have a hands-on activity to learn the Central Limit Theorem? I’m open to ideas!
From start to finish, a full project
Research normally is slow and takes years. Every once in a while, you encounter an exciting project, with a bit of a narrower focus, that moves a little quicker.
One of my projects was like that this semester — a short paper using bibliometric methods to explore the social network of faculty coauthors in research on human-AI teams. It began with an idea in August, literature review in September, data collection in October, analysis in November, and now writing the first draft of the paper for submission this month! In the middle of all my other tasks starting the lab and designing courses, it was a nice reprieve to sit down and stare at long chunks of code for hours on end to debug it, try different analyses, and produce nice and meaningful visualizations. It also helped that I had a very talented undergraduate RA join the project and contribute meaningfully to all the data scraping and cleaning, visualization, and writing of the Methods and part of the Results section.
We’re clicking submit on this paper next week!
AI is changing everything
(to quote basically everyone in recent history…)
In my world, this means that there is no escaping how AI is increasingly integrated into the classroom, future jobs, and research. I don’t plan on fighting that — instead, my question is how we can use AI ethically and effectively. What guardrails do we need, and how do we evaluate quality?
Sometimes, it’s just for fun. I created AI songs to accompany my lectures and distributed them for students to use for studying (which I guess was novel enough to be featured on CMC’s homepage!).
Other times, it’s purposely teaching students the pros and cons. Several assignments in Org Psych required students to use AI to generate content (a worker well-being policy, a personality assessment) and evaluate its usefulness and accuracy. Near the end of the semester, I started working with students in Intro Stats to use AI to debug their code.
I’ve started connecting with some amazing colleagues at the Claremont Colleges who are likewise looking for best practices in integrating AI in teaching and research. Hopefully, we’ll be launching some collaborative initiatives to provide tools and other resources for faculty!
Running a small business
Finally, launching a research lab feels like starting a small business. It’s been amusing to me when students have told me about how they love our lab Instagram account. What they don’t know is that social media is my least preferred aspect of the job — I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t have to, but I know I have to in order to reach today’s student population.
Beyond that, I’ve had to explore and experiment with different ways to recruit students, funnel their interests into tangible projects and learning opportunities, and set and maintain clear expectations despite research being an extracurricular. I had the fortunate problem of having perhaps too many students interested — over 30 initially applied to join the lab! — which led to plenty of potential lab members, but also bottlenecks of bandwidth and breaking down large projects into tangible micro-roles for students.
I’m exploring some new lab management methods in the Spring, trying to balance still maintaining an open environment with lots of engaged students discussing a topic, but focusing on a smaller subset to take lead in bringing some projects across the finish line.
Time to take a break!
Once I click submit on the grades (and the remaining two papers) next week, I’ll be offline for a break — and I’m encouraging my students to do the same.
As a final note, I want to thank anyone who’s still reading this, along with the people who have really engaged with the lab this semester, from students to faculty to collaborators to other followers on social media. Your feedback and engagement really affirms for me that our work is making a difference!
With that, happy holidays, and I will “see” many of you in a few weeks!
