What I Wish I Knew

Learning Together

Karthik Srinivasan, assistant professor of information, reflects on how community support, student feedback, and everyday grace have shaped his approach to learning and teaching.

Q: Thinking back to your first year as a student, what’s one experience, challenge, or piece of advice that stuck with you?

I got my PhD in economics at the University of Chicago. The department has a reputation for being competitive, and the first year culminates in intense weed-out exams. As those exams approached, I was struggling, but my classmates noticed and took action. My friend Walter stayed up with me until midnight each night for a month while I studied. Another group of friends (Olivia, Lucy, and Pauline) roped me into their 9:00 a.m. study group. These interventions made me realize the immense importance of community: Even in something as individualistic as exams, we owe our success to the love and support of the people who surround us.

Q: What do you remember most about your first year teaching, and how has it shaped the way you show up in the classroom today?

For my first year teaching, I developed a new class for UMSI (Intro to Machine Learning), which came with some growing pains. I got a lot of support from my launch committee (Yanna, Stephen, Tanya, and Erin), which helped the year run a lot more smoothly. The thing I will most remember is how thoughtful my students were when it came to pedagogical suggestions. After each class, many of my students openly shared with me what worked for them and what didn't. Student feedback helped push the course towards more hands-on projects, and it has been nice to think about how students in the first iteration of the course have made things better for every student who will take the course in the future.

Q: What’s one lesson you’ve learned (either from students or experience) that continues to influence your approach to education?

Something that influenced my approach to education is David Foster Wallace's commencement speech This is Water. Wallice says that, rather than defaulting to cynicism, we should strive for grace, because we cannot know what other people are going through. Similarly, we cannot know how our class fits into the broader context of a student's life, so we should try to meet each student where they are.