Individual Fellow Initiatives

Internships have increasingly become a critical step in the college-to-career transition in the media industries and beyond.

My project, “Developing Experiential Experiences in Organizations,” assessed HDO students’ access to experiential learning
in organizations, particularly in the form of internships; additionally, our program aimed to provide more built-in
opportunities HDO students to engage in experiential learning. To gauge need, I surveyed HDO students. Results
demonstrated that many of our students were graduating without any organizational experience, especially first-generation

The Peer Mentor Leadership Project (PMLP) empowers undergraduate students to explore and develop their leadership styles. Participants design and implement mentoring and leadership projects that align with their goals and values, while assessing the impact of their work. The program emphasizes introspection, reflection, and professional growth, helping students strengthen their resumes and leadership skills.

While instructors across disciplines frequently rely on group or team projects in their courses, and the ability to work effectively in a team is a highly valued workplace skill, many courses currently lack explicit content or instruction focused on building skills related to teamwork. Students will be provided with a series of short (10-15 minute) pre-recorded videos, in which various aspects of working effectively in a team are taught. Students may be asked to complete short comprehension check or reflection questions related to these videos.

When I first became faculty at UT Austin, I inherited an existing course; for a variety of reasons, I felt the need to overhaul all of the lectures. This process, however, proved time-consuming and I found myself unable to complete all of the lectures as originally planned prior to the start of the semester. Moreover, even the lectures that I did overhaul continued to have flaws and I was growing increasingly frustrated with the continued inadequacy of my lessons, despite devoting considerable time and energy to them. This was disheartening and my other responsibilities (e.g.

(Project completed 2023) At UT Austin, undergraduate women are about twice as likely to leave the physics major then are undergraduate men. This does not arise primarily from academic difficulties–women physics majors and men physics majors are dismissed (for academic reasons) or drop out at roughly the same rates. Rather, women are more likely to switch out of the physics major into other majors than are men.

In CNS we teach ~6500 non-science majors in our introductory classes each year (>2000 in Astronomy alone). These are the last science courses these students take, which presents us with an opportunity to make a lasting impression. I propose to lead a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to design module focused on scientific literacy and the science behind climate change. This module will be based on active learning, making use of the abundance of research that shows students retain information better by doing rather than listening.

My project is designed to support engineering students primarily in their freshman and sophomore years, when they struggle the most, resulting in high failing rates. Students do not always implement the best study strategies as they transition from high school to college, and do not prioritize their self-care and well-being. College level coursework is significantly more difficult compared to high school level courses and require more critical and abstract thinking.

Mentored research defies the traditional higher education approach, which separates research and teaching into distinct activities. Instead, mentored research fully integrates faculty research activities and student learning. In this approach, researchers do not simply carry out their research in isolation with a paid set of PhD-level research assistants. Further, students do not simply learn from in-class lectures or more traditional out-of-classroom experiences, such as study abroad.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

Although Cockrell School of Engineering (CSE) undergraduates take a required engineering writing class, which I teach for Chemical Engineering, they typically struggle with writing laboratory and long-form research reports. Helping CSE students to overcome this obstacle matters because writing technical reports prepares engineering students for the writing-intensive work of a professional engineer. Faculty teaching these classes would also benefit from higher quality student work.

Students in pre-modern disciplines face greater challenges in finding productive and engaging avenues for Experiential Learning than students in fields whose connections to current events are more self-evident. Podcasting offers students of ancient Greece and Rome a way to connect with people outside their classrooms, both other students and interested members of the general public. It also requires them to hone their oral presentation skills and to think about how to present the same idea to different audiences, both of which are fundamental to critical thinking.

(Project completed 2021) Reading in community broadens our understanding of how we belong and how we connect to one another. I propose to develop and execute a community-wide collective reading program including related events programming around one book that addresses topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion issues featuring a topic around the design, use, and implementation of data-driven technologies at UT’s iSchool. Typical diversity and inclusion initiatives in iSchools focus on curriculum development.

The students participating in this project are part of a group of students known as McCombs Success Scholars (MSS). Such students have been identified as potentially not as well prepared for academic success as some of their McCombs-school peers (i.e., they grew up in smaller cities/towns, their family’s socio-economic status tilts toward the lower end of the scale, they attended a small high school).

In my role as Undergraduate Advisor for the Department of Special Education, I oversee the five-semester Professional Development Sequence (PDS) for pre-service teachers majoring in special education. Students apply for this program in the fall of their sophomore year to begin in the spring with at least two courses taken as a cohort. Starting in the fall of their junior year, students take all their courses together as a cohort for their final four semesters. The cohorts create long-lasting professional and personal networks and –in my opinion –lead to stronger special education teachers.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

(Project completed 2021) Since its inception at UT in 2006, the Difficult Dialogues (DD) program has worked with over 40 faculty in 8 colleges or schools to develop Difficult Dialogue signature courses, i.e., introductory UGS courses that promote respectful and productive dialogue about difficult and controversial social issues, including race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion, human rights, immigration, evolution, climate change and sustainability, and illness and mortality.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering (CAEE) department has taken several steps towards improving the preparation of Architectural Engineering students with respect to modern engineering tools, including the computing tools commonly used in engineering practice.

(Project completed 2021) In my lectures, I rely on supplementary videos to break up the pace of the lecture and introduce new concepts. However, when I search for videos online, I have trouble finding a diverse representation. As a result, I end up with an oversampling of white male scholars in my course.

Cross-cultural connections can deepen student engagement in the world around them and encourage their creativity about the course material.  Such connections can happen in a UT classroom if the student body is particularly diverse, or if students participate in study abroad programs. Global connections are also being created through the Global Classrooms Initiative that connect UT students with students at universities from other countries through classroom activities, conversations and projects intentionally designed to encourage collaboration.

Marketing is inherently an applied science and, as a result, students learn the most when they can see marketing theories, constructs, and models in action. Marketing is at the intersection of so many academic disciplines—economics, statistics, psychology, sociology, organizational theory and decision science; and to see the way in which each of these disciplines influences marketing decisions requires the real-world dynamics of marketing-decision-making in a dynamic real-world context.

Educational research has provided compelling evidence that science students learn most effectively when they are engaged in Experiential Learning, broadly defined as hands-on learning where students are doing meaningful work in their discipline under the guidance of experts. Ideally, students would be exposed to Experiential Learning at multiple stages. While programs have been successful in providing experiential approaches to underclassmen, no large-scale effort exists for upper division students at UT Austin.

The idea for this pilot course grows directly out of departmental and university goals to increase opportunities for Experiential Learning and for new technology exposure in the Humanities; and to involve more undergraduate students in original faculty research.