“To me it was very much like where I grew up [near the Poconos], which is not boring, necessarily, but everything is very spread out,” added Lauren Klabonski, PhD candidate also in the Biological Sciences program. “You have to have a car and it's very rural.”
“This is leading me more in the teaching direction,” Alexander-Floyd said. “I'm definitely more motivated because I think we really had a positive impact on the students.”
Both Alexander-Floyd and Klabonski taught three classes over the course of the term, instructing biology underclassmen and upperclassmen as well as non-majors. And instead of working as a TA where coursework for students is usually prescribed by faculty, the two PhD candidates did everything from scratch at Stillman — wrote lectures, created assessments and assignments and ran labs.
“It's difficult to find a way to teach your own class, and I really wanted to find something that wasn't just regurgitating something someone else had made,” Klabonski said of her interest in the Stillman opportunity. “I feel like the freedom is one thing that I really wanted. And also, I knew that it was going to be different from the environment [at Drexel], and I think the challenge to me was sort of like, ‘If I can do it here then I can do it anywhere.’ So it was like a personal confidence-building exercise.”
Alexander-Floyd and Klabonski also worked with the Stillman students to boost their own confidence academically. For instance, many of the Stilman students had never been exposed to the lab environment before, but welcomed the opportunity.
“That was probably the one piece of feedback that I got back from a lot of my students is how much they enjoyed taking the science that they're learning about and turning it into hands on [experience],” Alexander-Floyd said.
Klabonski said she also tried not to underestimate her students, and implored them to rise to the occasion and adapt when they were struggling versus bringing things down a level for them.
“I feel like they lacked a lot of confidence in themselves, not because they couldn't do things, but because they just didn't feel confident trying,” Klabonski said.
And they weren’t alone as they navigated their first solo teaching experiences. It helped to regularly check with each other about their individual courses and share tips on what worked and what didn’t. They also met with Sampson once a week to discuss everything from their personal research to the classroom experience to trends in education and science research as a whole.
“The experience they got, I think, is priceless going forward,” Sampson said. “If they should go into an academic environment, now they have some previous experience, some tools from which to draw on, so that they can more easily navigate that academic experience to undergraduates to come.”
All in all, Alexander-Floyd and Klabonski enjoyed the freedom that this opportunity — brought about by the MOU — afforded, but also knew that they didn’t have to go it alone.
“Be very open-minded and don't think that you're going to go from Drexel to Drexel,” Alexander-Floyd said in terms of her advice to future teaching assistants who head to Stillman. “Don't think that with really anywhere that you go, but go and submerge yourself in your surroundings and adapt and remember why you're there — that you're there one, to get experience, and also to try and change the lives of students.”
The Future
There are already plans to expand the MOU by Stillman welcoming teaching assistants in both biology and mathematics for next year’s cohort — giving even more Drexel students the experience that Alexander-Floyd and Klabonski received. It’s also a very advantageous arrangement for Stillman.
“To be able to cover courses on our side for undergraduate students is crucial,” Sampson said. “It is almost like hunting for unicorns to look for trained and able individuals in the STEM area.”
Drexel will also host two new Stillman students this summer as part of the SURF program. Future expansions may also include a longer-term opportunity for individuals from Stillman to come to Drexel, now an R1 research institution, and partake in opportunities they may not get otherwise.
“It's a good way for us to increase the diversity of our own student body and potentially increase the diversity of faculty, particularly in areas that are STEM in nature,” DiPietro said. “This is a win-win, I think, for all the participants.”
The MOU is also helping Stillman embark on an initiative to expand how the college awards academic credit for internship-based experiences — looking to Drexel’s co-op program as a model.
“We're going to be leaning on the longstanding program that Drexel has in place to look for ways that they do that and then how do we apply that in our own particular environment,” McCormick said.
All in all, the fact that two very different, but very dedicated-to-mission institutions have come together in this way is higher education at its finest, McCormick said.
“Higher education is not only about the content knowledge and the training of an individual within a specific discipline … We also shape and form individuals for productive and meaningful lives,” McCormick said. “So that means providing them not only the content of their discipline, but also experiences that broaden their perspective of the world that we live in. … I think we do that better when we work together, bringing our differences and contributing that to each other. It's just what higher education hopes to accomplish at its best.”
