AAPT: American Association of Physics Teachers

Meet Andrew

I was an ambitious high school student taking calculus-based engineering physics classes at the local community college in my last two years in high school. When I got to UC Berkeley, I loved starting my first semester with the upper division quantum mechanics course, Physics 137A, working my way through Griffiths' Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. I volunteered to tutor physics at the Student Learning Center, and I got my first chance to teach physics in a classroom setting when the physics department had to find a lab instructor at the last minute. I applied and was hired as an undergraduate student instructor (UGSI). Fast—forward to the end of my graduate school career, getting disillusioned with the life of an academic researcher—and hating my PhD project and trying to write the thesis—I found my dream job teaching lower division physics at a local community college.