Email me: aschach at bu.edu
I strongly value teaching and mentorship in research. In particular, I believe that the lesson of deepest value in any education is how to think empirically: How to formulate a clear question, find evidence that bears on the issue, and evaluate that evidence to draw a justified conclusion. In my teaching, I aim to help students become good psychological scientists, and also more judicious consumers of information more generally, better able to wrestle with the many empirical claims that surround us in daily life.
In my time at Harvard and Boston University, I have sought out many substantive teaching experiences. I have taught my own seminar course, receiving excellent teaching evaluations (4.75/5) and two teaching awards. As part of this seminar course, I mentored students individually as they selected topics and wrote multiple revisions of the Sophomore Essay, an open-topic research proposal or theory paper making an original contribution to the scientific literature.
I have also served as teaching fellow for two courses: For these courses, I taught weekly discussion sections, co-wrote and graded exams, and met regularly with individual students as they designed experiments, collected data, and wrote empirical research papers.
I've also given many guest lectures, in classes at Harvard, MIT, BU and UCSD. In addition, I've sought significant other teaching as an instructor in the MIT Educational Studies Program (for local high school students) and the Harvard Museum Family Program (for local families), and have taught workshops for undergraduate researchers at Boston University.
Read my course's syllabus (PDF), Read student evaluations (PDF).
I enjoy and strongly believe in the value of providing good mentorship for undergraduate students and junior researchers. As a research mentor, I aim to shape students into colleagues by giving them insight into every stage of the scientific process. I have mentored 26 undergraduate research assistants at Harvard and Boston University, many of whom continued in research. I also served as primary mentor to an undergraduate thesis student, who is now enrolled in a top-tier psychology PhD program.
From 2007 to 2012, I served as primary academic advisor for 50+ undergraduate psychology students in Mather House, one of Harvard College's twelve residential communities. I advised students from their sophomore to their senior year, meeting with each student several times per semester to guide and approve their academic decisions and help them plan for the future.
I've also developed and conducted a series of useful workshops for undergraduate and junior researchers, including topics like how peer review works, data analysis and visualization, and writing great scientific papers.
