Having the opportunity to share knowledge, teach students, and spark curiosity is one of my greatest privileges and joys. My main mission is to equip students with growth mindsets, help them thrive off of curiosity, and empower them with tools to achieve clarity in technical topics.
Most of my academic teaching experience has been at UC Berkeley. You can check out quantitative end-of-semester student evaluations of my teaching effectiveness here and qualitative student testimonials below.
With my co-lecturer Nate Weinman, I taught the first online summer session of CS 160, a course introducing students to the domain of human-computer interaction. For over 100 students around the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic, we built out a virtual course infrastructure for this traditionally interactive studio-based course using Zoom, Slack, Piazza, Canvas (bCourses), GitHub, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. I hired and managed a course staff of 8 graduate and undergraduate student instructors and course readers who assisted with weekly sections and grading.
Each week, I developed and presented lectures and led interactive virtual studio sessions. I also designed creative design and coding projects with clear learning objectives and deliverables (example 1, example 2) as well as structured weekly reading assignments and quizzes. The course culminated in a multi-milestone capstone project for students to practice the design and development process in teams, centered on the unique theme of deconstruction and reconstruction.
I was a Teaching Assistant (TA), also known as a (under)graduate student instructor ((u)GSI), over 9 semesters for a variety of courses at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering and UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science.
My main responsibilities included teaching 1- to 1.5-hour discussion and lab sections of 30 to 40 students once or twice a week, holding weekly office hours, grading assignments and projects, handling course logistics, responding to student questions, and mentoring students one-on-one.
I was a GSI for a natural language processing course that introduced approximately 190 students to methods for reasoning about text in computational systems. In this course, students learned about major algorithms used in NLP for various applications (part-of-speech tagging, parsing, coreference resolution, machine translation) and on the linguistic phenomena those algorithms attempt to model. I helped create assignments, run office hours, and facilitate student learning.
I helped teach the design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces, with focuses on: user-centered design and task analysis; conceptual models and interface metaphors; usability inspection and evaluation methods; analysis of user study data; input methods (keyboard, pointing, touch, tangible) and input models; visual design principles; interface prototyping, implementation methodologies, and tools. I teach students Android mobile development as a tool to build their own interfaces. Each semester, this class had approximately 80-90 students.
I taught 7 sections of this intro-level computer science class, in which we focused on topics like functional programming, environments, abstraction, recursion, trees, mutability, object-oriented programming, orders of growth, interpreters, declarative programming. I helped students build proficiency in Python, Scheme (Lisp), and SQL. Two semesters (Spring 2020 and Fall 2018), I even taught a section of CS Scholars (students from under-resourced and low opportunity communities). Each semester, CS 61A has over 1,000 to 1,300 students, and I am well-versed with the various challenges of running a course at this scale, and the critical role that teaching assistants play to connect students with course material.
In this course with over 1,000 students, I helped students explore key areas of data science including question formulation, data collection and cleaning, visualization, statistical inference, predictive modeling, and decision making. with emphases on: data-centric computing; quantitative critical thinking; exploratory data analysis; languages for transforming, querying and analyzing data; algorithms for machine learning methods including regression, classification and clustering; principles behind creating informative data visualizations; statistical concepts of measurement error and prediction; and techniques for scalable data processing.
I helped teach this class exploring the question "How does the human mind work?" with a focus on analyzing a range of data related to human rationality and irrationality, human memory, how objects and events are represented in the mind, and the relation of language and cognition. I also helped create assignments and presentations, and I revised a 30-page booklet introducing python for data science applications.
In a course with over 970 students, I worked with a team of about 30 other course readers to grade 14 weekly problem set-style assignments, 2 midterms, and 1 final exam. Topics included mathematical induction, proofs, recursion, stable marriage, primality testing, polynomials (error-correcting codes, secret sharing), RSA, probability, diagonalization, self-reference, and uncomputability.
In this intro-level course with over 1,000 students, I taught a tutoring focus group for 4 students, held a weekly office hour and multiple homework- and project-specific workshops, graded exams, gave feedback on coding assignments, and monitored and responded to student questions over Piazza and email throughout the semester.
I provided one-on-one private tutoring for high school-level pre-calculus and statistics.
I taught weekly 30-minute one-on-one private piano lessons to beginner students.
I volunteered with Reading Partners at a local elementary school, where I worked one-on-one with 2nd through 4th grade students from under-resourced backgrounds at a weekly after-school program to help them reach grade-level reading standards.
I taught weekly Indian Classical Kathak dance lessons to young beginner students in individual groups of 2-3 students and assisted my teacher in larger group sessions of beginner students. I worked with my teacher and a team of other intermediate and senior students to prepare young beginner children for our dance school's annual productions.
"Janaki was an incredible lecturer and a wonderful instructor. She made herself extremely accessible to her students via Slack and Piazza and was easily one of the most approachable instructors I've ever worked with. I would love to take another course taught by Janaki again!"
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"Janaki really encourages questions during the cs scholars discussion, and says things like 'we like questions,' and makes us all really comfortable to ask questions. She also explains the material very well and anticipates confusions we have."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Fall 2018)
"Janaki is the best. She explains hard concepts and her ideas in a simple way based off of the foundational knowledge we know. She is so nice and everyone loves her as a TA. She is the best I’m serious."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Fall 2018)
"A very kind GSI who cares a lot about the mental health of her students and always emphasizes the importance of a growth mindset. This actually helped drive this concept home with me, as I didn't very much believe in my own growth mindset before. Slowly, I began to see myself improving and growing a lot, not necessarily to complete mastery, but to a point where I could be proud of myself and how far I've come. She has been such an encouraging, knowledgeable GSI!"
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Spring 2020)
"Janaki has a lot of passion for the material! She did a great job of conveying the importance of what we were learning."
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"Janaki has good control of time in lectures so the lectures flow very well."
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"A really good speaker and can help us really quickly because she can pinpoint issues in the code quickly. She's good at understanding our problems. She is thoughtful when it comes to thinking about studying planning. She is a role model to the class. I appreciate the emails that she and [redacted] send to the class. Made my experience as a CS scholar really worthwhile. She really is amazing and the best of the best. Always really on point when it comes to teaching. Encourages us to work with each other. Cares about our well–being as well as understanding of the material."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Fall 2018)
"Janaki was a great GSI. Her experience taking this course two years ago provided great insight and perspective into the class projects. She made herself available to students and tried ways to connect with us at a distance. She has great enthusiasm for the material which came through each week during section. I hope she continues teaching and sharing her passions with others."
— Anon, CS 160 (Fall 2020)
"Janaki is amazing and is one of the best instructors I've had! I would want to have her as my teacher for every cs class."
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"Janaki is an amazing TA. She is very clear when explaining concepts and has a very effective way of teaching. She answers all our questions and helps us whenever she can. I really enjoyed learning from her. She is also accessible outside of class and is very friendly and kind. I am glad I was able to meet her and that she was one of my TAs."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Fall 2018)
"Janaki is wonderful and enthusiastic about the material. Great lecturer."
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"She was very enthusiastic about presenting project ideas/themes and rewarded students with design awards, which is quite nice."
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"Very effective. She communicated high–level concepts from the slides in an effective manner."
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"Janaki is brilliant!! I started going to her discussions about halfway through the semester and they were consistently extremely helpful. She's great at explaining concepts and making students feel heard and understood."
— Anon, DS 100 (Spring 2019)
"Janaki was very friendly and had great energy when interacting with the students."
— Anon, CS 160 (Summer 2021)
"I truly enjoyed being in her class. I believe she helped me understand the material and motivated me to continue regardless of the stuff I was dealing with at the time."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Spring 2020)
"really kind and personable. was really approachable which made it easier to ask questions."
— Anon, CS 160 (Fall 2020)
"Janaki is so sweet and beyond helpful. She genuinely cares for her students and does a great job of addressing their needs."
— Anon, CS 160 (Fall 2020)
"Fantastic instructor! Very knowledgeable and also great at working with students."
— Anon, CS 160 (Fall 2020)
"Janaki is a fantastic GSI! She is patient, helpful, and very knowledgeable. She explains concepts clearly and makes sure students understand the material."
— Anon, DS 100 (Spring 2019)
"I had Janaki for a no prior experience section and she did a fantastic job at helping us understand the material. She truly made difficult concepts easier to approach."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Spring 2020)
"She was so kind and did not make you feel less for not comprehending the material"
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Spring 2020)
"Janaki is really patient with everyone and she definitely helped me to stay confident in a course that one can easily get very depressed."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Spring 2020)
"Has been really helpful throughout the semester. Answers all of my questions. Helps when I am struggling. Very concerned about the students, she even has a feedback form for herself."
— Anon, DS 100 (Spring 2019)
"Very accessible, enthusiastic, and clear in explaining concepts."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Spring 2020)
"Janaki is very good at explaining concepts a different way when students are confused"
— Anon, DS 100 (Spring 2019)
"Janaki is by far one of the best GSI's I've had during my college career. She is very good at explaining challenging topics."
— Anon, CS 61A (Fall 2017)
"Janaki is awesome––she takes time to explain the material step by step & offers superb life advices too"
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Spring 2020)
"approachable and friendly, makes material easy to understand and great at explaining concepts"
— Anon, DS 100 (Spring 2019)
"Janaki shows that she really cares about her students succeeding in the class. I like that she breaks down the concepts piece by piece and provides with strategies on how to tackle the problem or how she would approach an exam problem. I find this teaching method pretty helpful, since these are my first CS tests that I have ever taken. Overall, I think she is a good CS61A lecturer."
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2020)
"really good at picking up students who have fallen behind. thank you for your explanations"
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Fall 2018)
"She is helpful, truly cares about the people she's teaching and effectively explains the course materials."
— Anon, CS 61A (Fall 2017)
"I think you do a really fantastic job of breaking complex stuff down."
— Anon, CS 61A CS Scholars Section (Fall 2018)
"She is always prepared and can answer any question, even if it is hard or not. Very sweet and caring. I understood a lot about the course through her discussions and office hours."
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2018)
"Janaki is very organized, and presents material in a way that makes it easy to understand."
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2018)
"She is very caring for students, kind, helpful, and knowledgeable in material and effective at teaching it."
— Anon, CS 61A (Fall 2017)
"I really like the way you explain problems. You go through each and every step and that makes the problem look way easier than it looks."
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2018)
"I like it when you step through coding problems step by step and show us how you get there and how to put ideas together"
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2020)
"I really appreciate all you've done for us in this course! I'm completely new to CS and this isn't even my major lol but I've really enjoyed this class. The problems are fun even though they're tough and the class is fun even though it's time-consuming. You explain topics so well and are so positive and helpful (all those emails and reviews are so nice of you) and are really good at breaking them down and going through them for beginners."
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2020)
I really liked your teaching and overall enthusiasm for the class. Thanks for being a TA! Your teaching was very clear and well explained, especially for someone like me, who had no experience coding prior to 61A."
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2020)
"You were a really great and enthusiastic teacher. Even in these tough times, you still care about your students and try to hold sessions for learning and reviewing!"
— Anon, CS 61A (Spring 2020)