Teaching

I think of teaching and research as complementary aspects of social science exploration. As a PhD student at New York University in New York, I was given the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant in numerous undergraduate courses and to teach independent graduate MA courses on Political Economy and Quantitative Political Analysis. I have also assisted faculty members in their courses on research methods while working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and New York University-Abu Dhabi. These experiences have not only given me the opportunity to develop my teaching skills but have also reinforced my interest in teaching courses like Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Game Theory, Statistical Methods, and Experimental Political Science. Regarding more specialized courses, I am looking forward to teaching courses such as Identity Politics, Middle East Politics, East Asian Politics, and immigration studies.

My first teaching experience was to work as a teaching assistant for Professor Steven Brams in his game theory class for undergraduate students. Then, I worked as a teaching assistant for Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Professor Shanker Satyanath in their courses on International Politics for undergraduate students where game theory is heavily used. Also, I am working as a teaching assistant for Professor Michael Laver in his Comparative Politics course in the Fall 2012 semester. From these experiences, I have learned that it is very useful to utilize examples familiar to undergraduate students in explaining theoretical concepts. Undergraduate students often lack not only experience with political events but also an understanding of what a theory is and what role a theoretical concept plays. The lack of political experience and academic training operates as a major obstacle for undergraduates to develop an interest in political science, thereby making them passive learners who study political science only for academic credits. Hence, while working as a teaching assistant, I tried to use cases that undergraduates are much more likely to experience in their daily lives in order to help them understand what a concept intends to capture and encourage them to develop an interest in political science. The following summary of student evaluation shows that my students were very satisfied with my teaching approach. The summary reports the evaluations of 41 undergraduate students from two sections I led in Spring 2009 for NYU's International Politics course. On the question of whether or not they recommended me to their friends, 38 students (92.6%) marked at "Yes".

1-Poor, 2-Fair, 3-About Average, 4-Good, 5-Excellent.

TA's quality 1: compared to other TAs in the university.

TA's quality 2: compared to other TAs in the Politics Dept (Four students not marked).

In teaching a course on Political Economy at the graduate level during the Fall 2012 semester, I placed special emphasis on improving students' analytical reading skills. Graduate courses differ from those at the undergraduate level in that they are usually organized as a series of seminars, making successful performance at the graduate level highly dependent on one's capacity to critically read assigned materials. However, students may have difficulty grasping the analytical approach of academic research studies, so the discussions can end up as exchanges of opinion as to whether or not the authors' arguments are compatible with students' a priori opinions. For that reason, I believe an instructor at the graduate level should consciously engage in students' seminar discussions, asking analytical questions about the logical development of an argument from assumptions to theoretical predictions, the validity of the empirical testing of the predictions, and the explanatory power of the theory. By doing so, the students are encouraged to investigate academic work from a broader analytical perspective that strengthens their own research design skills. Furthermore, as students are trained to read analytically, they will become more conscious of the meanings and boundaries of words that they use in their own writing and will thus produce more analytically rigorous papers.

While working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and New York University-Abu Dhabi between the Spring 2014 and Spring 2017 semesters, I have assisted faculty members in teaching statistical and experimental methods. Specifically, I assisted Assistant Professor Kenichi Ariga in his statistical courses for PhD students in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, focusing on statistical analysis using R software. I also taught how to program a lab experiment using the computer software Z-tree to undergraduate students in Professor Rebecca Morton's experimental classes and to senior students working on their graduation projects in the Social Science Division at New York University-Abu Dhabi.

Based on my teaching and research experience, I believe that I am ready to teach a diverse set of courses in the areas of Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Electoral Studies, and Research Methods at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I have already prepared syllabi for an introductory course for undergraduate students on Comparative Politics, an introductory course for graduate students on Political Economy, a seminar for graduate students on Electoral Studies, and an introductory course for undergraduate students on Experimental Political Science. I also look forward to developing specialized courses on topics such as Identity Politics, Immigration Studies, Middle East Politics, and Korean Politics, depending on the department's needs.