My Experience as a Teaching Assistant for the Engineering Leadership Program

For the 2025-2026 academic year, I served as a teaching assistant (informally referred to as peer mentor) for the Engineering Leadership Certification Program. This is a year-long program where a small cohort of students focus on growing into authentic leaders. In a few words, the program is about realizing what’s important to you, getting yourself out of the way of yourself, and learning the skills and practicing the courage to take steps towards your goal—all highly experiential and with a large support network.

Mission. TAs play an important role in the support network of the program: we are accesible, listen to concerns, and provide guidance and advice in ways that facilitate growth. In addition, we provide feedback and suggestions to the instructors to improve the class experience. We help run in-class/retreat activities, and we grade and give constructive feedback on all assignments (most of which are reflections).

Why. I was a past participant of the program in the 2024-2025 academic year, and it really helped me become the person I want to be. Kinder, empathetic, open-minded, willing to be wrong, willing to be challenged, constantly growing, in tuned with what I want, and it really helped with forming my decision to pursue academia and my area of interest (cryptography and machine learning). Giving back, helping others grow, being empathetic are all very important to me, so I was super excited to join the course as a TA and help the next batch of students.

In addition, I wanted to further develop myself as a leader by pushing myself outside my comfort zone as peer mentor, as opposed to TA’ing for a CS course.

Lessons Learned.

1. I cannot expect feedback, I need to ask for feedback. We made sure to give a lot of feedback to students throughout the program. Though something that was still lacking was getting feedback for myself. I took a more passive role, espeically since I was focusing on grad school applications and visits.
2. My best version of being a mentor is listening, being empathetic, giving feedback (when appropriate), and always looking out for the mentee’s goals. At points, I got into my head about what I thought a good mentor would be or do, but I’d forget that the best mentor is to be in the present. No notion of the ego here.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to the awesome intructors: Karel, Rob and Erica. Huge thank you to all the TAs: Julia, Madeline, and Marco. Together, we are J3M.