Griffin Newbold
Fourth Year Undergraduate at Columbia University
Head Teaching Assistant and Projects Student for Professor Gail Kaiser
Former Teaching Assistant for Professor Adam Cannon
Incoming Software Engineer @ Capital One
Located in New York, New York
Welcome to my Teaching portfolio, here you can flip through the classes I have TA'ed for in the past. It also contains more information about each class from a TA's perspective, if you wish to see reviews from my times as a TA please click Here I also do private tutoring, if you wish to receive tutoring please see the contact page in order to learn how to get in contact with me. My rate is 1.5 times the rate which the university pays me as a Teaching Assistant, this figure currently sits at $22 per hour meaning the rate for tutoring is $33 per hour. It should be noted that any request for tutoring for a person in a subject I am currently a teaching assistant for will be denied.
COMS 1004, Introduction to Computer Science and Programming In Java
Semesters: Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024
I first started as a Teaching Assistant
for this course in my second semester of college. After learning the ropes I quickly fell in
love with the job and decided to put more effort in future iterations, while that didn't mean I
slacked off Spring 2022, it is was simply nothing compared to my efforts in Spring 2023/2024. While I made
weekly slide shows to go with my Office Hours in Spring 2022, in Spring 2023/2024, I made weekly lecture notes for the students
along with extra supplementary resources and even was given the opportunity to give a lecture during one of
the class sessions to help the students review for their upcoming midterm exam.
Below is a sample of the extra resources that I provided the students over the Spring 2023 semester
to view any of these samples please click the corresponding text relating to what document you wish to
view.
1.) Practice Program Analysis
2.) Sample Weekly Lecture Notes
3.) Lecture Notes from My Lecture
Whenever I get some free time, I have been working on a proper set of supplementary course notes for the students.
Drafts of this document have been presented to the students and it seems the demand is there so I will certainly continue
developing them.
COMS 1002, Computing in Context
Semesters: Fall 2022 and Fall 2023
This course is an introductory programming course designed for non-majors who will most likely program
at some point in their college career, whether it is another class or as part of doing research with a professor.
This course is taught in Python as it is deemed an easy enough language for most people, especially non-majors, to pick up
over the course of the semester.
One of the interesting components of this course was that the second half of the course was context specific, when
students enroll in the course they select one of the following contexts: Economics, Social Science, Biology, Art, and Linguistics.
The homework assignments for the second half focused heavily on these contexts, I was a TA for the Economics context and students were
exposed to basic rules of probability and learned the basics of monte-carlo method of approximation as well as the law of large numbers.
Students also had to attend weekly lab sessions held by a TA which briefly reviewed material from lecture and then allowed
the students to get more ungraded practice with the concepts in order to help them succeed on their homework assignments.
Below are a set of course notes that I developed during the summer prior to Fall 2023 that cover all of the general Python
students are expected to know and some more.
1.) Computing in Context Course Notes
COMS 4156, Advanced Software Engineering
Semester: Fall 2024
After completing the course myself the previous Fall, I decided that as a senior I should expand out and try new classes
to TA for that were more in line with my talents and skill set. This is an core-elective course that juniors, seniors and even
graduate students can take to fulfill some of their degree requirements.
Central to the course is a large technical project completed in groups of 4 to 5 students, with each TA acting as a mentor for
around 3 to 4 groups. The TA is responsible for making sure the students understand the requirements of each project iteration as well
as demoing the students projects at the appropriate time throughout the semester. TAs are also responsible for grading the
individual assessments of their mentees as the assessments are strongly connected to the team projects.
I was also given the opportunity to develop a series of individual assignments to act as a mini project for the first month of
the course, more information about this will become available in the projects section as I develop it over the coming months.