“Remembering how kindly they communicated with me during the training, I try to create the same impression for those who attend my course.” Alumni of the CS Center who became teachers recall the years of study and talk about the start of their teaching career.
Open until 13 April for admission to the CS center. Full-time education in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. Correspondence for residents of other cities.
Nikolai Polyarny, issue of 2016. Engaged in the development and implementation of computer vision algorithms in the field of three-dimensional reconstruction - develops the Metashape program (formerly PhotoScan) at Agisoft. Last fall I read at the CS center .
Mikhail Slabodkin, issue of 2014. Analyst at Yandex, teaches at the ITMO-JetBrains master's program and at the Computer Science Center. Leads to the center .
Kirill Brodt, issue of 2018. Develops dialogue systems at Tinkoff Bank. Leads in Novosibirsk.
Leyla Khatbullina, issue of 2017. Works in the Big Data Analysis Methods Laboratory at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in the JUNO project, teaches data analysis for economists, and develops the FProg project. Checked in the CS center .
Alexey Artamonov, issue 2014. Develops a drone at Yandex. Since autumn 2014 he has been reading the annual .
Let's start from the very beginning. What are your memories of entering the center?
Kolya Polar
I have always liked interviews very much: both in different companies and in the CS center. It seems that at the interview at the center there was something about mathematics, but the emphasis was on the issue of motivation. This is true almost everywhere: at the university, in any research and in any difficult job, the results are highly dependent on motivation. If it is not there, then no matter what the predisposition and skills are, at some point everything will get bored and there will be no need to go further.
I vaguely remember the story of how I went to the first lecture after entering. I just quit my job that day to immerse myself in my studies, and I was late for the lecture, as the dismissal process dragged on. As a result, I rode with an interesting feeling of a kind of end-to-end transition, when the completion of one leads to a delay in the beginning of another. It's hard to convey exactly, but against the background of the general optimistic expectation of something new, it was funny.
Kirill Brodt
I applied twice: in 2015 and 2016. The first time I didn't know anything about machine learning, I decided to try it just because I could. Yes, and I had to leave for an internship in France, finish my studies, so I did not prepare and failed at the second full-time stage, gaining less than half the passing score for the interview. I was surprised that the math problems were of the Olympiad level, but I wasn’t particularly upset, because I didn’t know what it was all about, and even if I entered, I wouldn’t be able to study.
At the end of 2015, after finishing my studies, I returned back to Novosibirsk, because a girl was waiting for me at home. I remember that at the beginning of 2016, there was news on the NSU website about an open course on parallel programming from ShAD, which I decided to take. This course took me completely one evening for a lecture and seminar and one full day off for homework per week.
Then the set began, and I decided to try again, although I didn’t really burn with it. If one course takes so much time, then with three I was afraid to even imagine what would happen. This time the second stage was by correspondence. After a while, I receive a letter that I scored a little less than the passing score. But I was lucky that I passed the open course on parallel computing - the curators took this into account and invited me to the third stage. Then it’s already clear what happened 🙂
Leyla Khatbullina
I seriously prepared for admission: I watched lectures on Stepik, went to Pavel Mavrin's programming circle at ITMO and Andrey Kolpakov's additional seminars on mathematics. analysis at LETI, read Kormena.
Before the interview, I didn’t sleep for a day, I was worried and at the same time trained to write algorithms on a piece of paper, and there was always one thought in my head: “The main thing is to take the middle of the array correctly.”
Lyosha Artamonov
The first time I tried to enter the center was in my second year of university. It was spring 2011. I am an astrophysicist by education, and at school I was more involved in mathematics and physics and less in computer science. I had an idea about programming in different languages, we even wrote games, but there was no algorithmic base. The motivation before the first interview was also at the level: “Well, my friends advertised, they say it’s cool there.” As you might guess, the first time I didn't get in. Lack of basic knowledge.
Since the beginning of 2012, I have been motivated to enter, I started watching online courses. My high school math teacher moved to California and sent a link to lectures on Machine Learning from Professor Jaser S. Abu-Mostafa. My knowledge of English was barely enough to understand what was at stake, most of all, the formulas helped me figure it out. I carefully reviewed each slide and in the end I passed the course with excellent marks, although I expected to get no more than a three. Then, in the summer, there was a course on Machine Learning from Andrew Ng on Coursera. Interest in this area helped me a lot to enter.
The second time I came with a little more knowledge and a clear plan of what I want to study at the center. I was lucky that I was called for an interview: at the end of the exam, I had a borderline score. Not to say that I somehow especially prepared for questions on algorithms, so I tried to reduce the interview to the mainstream of machine learning and called gradient descent my favorite algorithm 🙂
What course has most influenced what you do now?
Kolya Polar
Computational geometry course by Anton Kovalev at ITMO. The lectures were interactive, you had to try to come up with constructions yourself, and not just listen. Great flight of thought! As a result, I went to Anton to Transas to work on what I am doing now - the reconstruction of three-dimensional surfaces from photographs. This field relies heavily on computational geometry.
From the CS center I remember the course on functional programming in Haskell. Firstly, because lectures are suitable both for those who fall asleep if they are told in too much detail and slowly, and for those who do not have time to understand and get lost due to the high pace or lack of detailed explanation. Secondly, this is an example of an area that is unlikely to be directly needed at work, but staggers consciousness in the right direction.
Misha Slabodkin
It is difficult to single out one thing, I will mention several areas of my educational and professional activities after graduating from the CS center:
— All courses in theoretical informatics significantly influenced the choice of further education, supervisor and the topic of two diplomas (in the master's and specialist's programs). In particular, the excellent teachers of these subjects have always delighted and inspired me.
— I began to seriously study algorithms at the CS Center and I have been teaching them with great pleasure and benefit for myself for the third year in a joint master's program at ITMO and JetBrains, and earlier at the Academic University.
— In my analytical work at Yandex, I use my knowledge of Python, statistics, and algorithms.
Lyosha Artamonov
It was 2012, I was in the first year of the center. My classmate, Vadim Lebedev, who entered a year before me, showed me interesting problems from the course on image analysis and talked about the tools with which they are solved. I started watching the tape of the course and then the next year I took it. Instead of a semester course, the course became an annual one, and I became even more imbued with computer vision. For several years now I have been teaching this discipline at the CS center, and at work I am engaged in the analysis of data received from the drone camera.
Do CS students have free time? How much did you have left? What were the difficulties during the training?
Kolya Polar
It's hard to tell in hours. In my second and third years of study at the CS Center, I was in the third and fourth year of ITMO, worked 35-40 hours in parallel (sometimes less, sometimes more), on Saturdays I took tasks from children at a mathematical circle, participated in hackathons and in some moment passed on the driver's license. It seems to me that time is relatively rubbery and usually depends on how much you want to do something and what kind of resource you have.
Misha Slabodkin
For me, studying at the CS center intersected with two courses in mathematics and one master's course at the Academic University. After classes at the university in Peterhof, it was quite difficult to endure several classes at the center. But I was able to carry out a tricky combination and count some courses multiple times - in two, and one even in three institutions: first at the same time in the CS center and at mathmech, and later re-counted in AU. From other difficulties: it was impossible to study technical subjects without your easily portable computer. My theoretical term papers have not always turned out well.
Kirill Brodt
In addition to courses at the center, I worked 24 hours a week and tried to study at graduate school, from which I was later kicked out 🙂 After that, I had time to play the piano, swim and spit on the ceiling. In general, there was plenty of time. The big difficulty was that many courses in Novosibirsk then were part-time. It was impossible to ask a question in person if you cannot formulate it normally, since you yourself do not understand exactly what you want to ask. In our year, there were few fellow students or no one at all in general courses, and it is much easier for me to learn new things when I discuss problems with someone else - it turns out to be more productive.
Leyla Khatbullina
I don’t remember this anymore, but I remember that there was always not enough time and I took courses unevenly, so I spent all evenings, weekends and holidays doing homework.
Lyosha Artamonov
There was some time left, not to say that there was a lot of it. But I do not remember that I had to sacrifice something significant in order to keep up with everything. I went to the gym, watched TV series, met with friends. When at the university it was only necessary to write a diploma, I even managed to work part-time.
There were difficulties with logistics. Every day I spent more than three hours a day on the road, probably at this time I rested my head. When classes were added at the center, the time increased to four hours. Moreover, the presence of a car would not solve my problems then. The main thing is that I did not have time to eat normally, this should be avoided in my life.
Were there any cases during your studies at the CS center that you remember vividly?
Kolya Polar
I remember the moment from the defense of semester practices. I got into a conversation with a girl who also defended herself at that time, and it turned out that she was already a senior java developer, but she didn’t like the banking industry in which she worked so much that she had no motivation to continue doing this. Therefore, she went to the CS center to possibly change her field to education. Her semester practice was related to a task for the Stepik platform. For me, this is an ideal illustration of the situation “the person is depressed → wanted to change the area → went to the CS center”.
Misha Slabodkin
Solving theoretical problems, discussing with classmates and telling them to teachers and other students was a great pleasure in all subjects. I especially liked the practice in the "circle" format with oral delivery of assignments - I always considered this the most effective teaching method.
I vividly remember many end-of-semester celebrations, especially karting and paintball, which I helped organize a bit. Participation in such entertainments together with teachers was extremely useful for "humanizing" the CS center in the eyes of students.
Kirill Brodt
The first semester I lived with algorithms, woke up, ate and fell asleep with them. It was such that I woke up at three in the morning from the fact that I came up with a solution. Well, or at least there was an illusion of what he came up with. I got up, turned on the laptop, coded it, uploaded it to the test system and everything fell on the conditional 20th test. I was tormented until 5 in the morning, without solving the problem, and fell asleep. But then I still finished it 🙂
Leyla Khatbullina
In the CS center I found many new friends. I remember how they discussed homework in night chats, waited until late at night for their turn for the exam, at the same time explaining tickets to each other, celebrated birthdays in the kitchen in the BC Times, played games at the holidays of the end and beginning of the semester. It was fun! 🙂
Why did you start teaching? Were you invited or did you decide to start?
Kolya Polar
At some point, I converged into the field of three-dimensional reconstruction, that is, image processing. Along with this, I also plunged into calculations on video cards, since it is impossible to process such scales of data in a reasonable time on a processor. And there was a stable feeling of sadness that these areas were not told to me anywhere, despite their interest. Also, I always liked teaching and I knew where I could go to offer a course, so I decided to correct the situation and make my own - for a start on video cards.
Misha Slabodkin
In 2016, Sasha Knop led the practice in discrete mathematics. Before the beginning of the semester, he decided that checking 70 homework a week was beyond his moral strength and offered to help me. And a year later, we changed: from that moment on, I teach classes, and Sasha helps with checking.
Kirill Brodt
During the training, there were rumors that there was an opportunity to teach. And I thought that would be great. I like to help others in whatever way I can. I don't like to ask for it and waited to be invited 🙂
Leyla Khatbullina
I always liked teaching: at school, after school, I voluntarily explained about fractions in tangerines, and at the university I studied German with one girl, and as a result, she passed A1 in six months. I was invited to the CS center, as there was a vacancy, and I casually said that I would gladly take it 🙂
Lyosha Artamonov
I was inspired by image analysis during my studies at the center. Circumstances turned out so that Natalya, who taught the course to me, moved to the USA. Then the curators offered me and Grisha Rozhkov to take over the course. Grisha was at that time a student at the CS center - he graduated in the spring of 2015.
What were your fears before starting to work as a teacher?
Kolya Polar
I saw a lot of good lecturers and was always quite critical of poorly organized lectures, and now I found myself on the other side of the barricades. “I am from the past” was the most terrible critic in preparing and delivering the course. The fears were natural: bad presentation, too boring material and too much detail at a low tempo, too complicated or uninteresting details at too high a tempo, wasted listeners' time, and the like.
Misha Slabodkin
I will answer specifically about teaching at the CS center, because there were an infinite number of teaching worries with different courses in different years 🙂
— It is quite difficult to conduct a practice for an audience of 50 people. In fact, this is a lecture about problems, and not personal communication with each student, as I sometimes do in other subjects.
- The level of preparation and preliminary knowledge of the subject varies greatly among students, so it is necessary to select the appropriate various tasks and analyze them in such a way as to interest everyone.
Leyla Khatbullina
There was uncertainty in my knowledge, I was afraid that when checking homework, students would not agree with my assessment. But all fears were in vain 🙂
Do you remember how you spent your first lesson?
Kolya Polar
At the very first lecture, there were many listeners, and there were not enough chairs in the audience. I told the material faster than I expected, as a result I continued to tell without slides. But I assumed that this could happen, so I had the material and everything went well.
Misha Slabodkin
I was glad that there were familiar people in the audience and I would have someone to laugh with at my failures!
Kirill Brodt
It felt like I had cancer of speech and no one understood what I was saying.
Lyosha Artamonov
I sat in front of the audience and mumbled something under my breath. In general, it was not good, but then it got better 🙂
What do you enjoy most about teaching?
Misha Slabodkin
Oh, I can answer this confidently and immediately: I definitely like reading reviews the most! When the curators send them, I open the file with the feeling of unpacking gifts under the Christmas tree and read everything twice.
I also enjoy discussing interesting problems with students, watching how they rejoice at beautiful ideas, new unexpected facts and connections with different areas of mathematics. To see sincere curiosity and desire for knowledge. Tell problems that I recently enjoyed solving myself, and observe the same impression on my listeners. Discuss extra tasks with students after class until the guards come at 23:00 pm to ask if I'm sane (it's been three times already!).
Kirill Brodt
I like to come up with different explanations of the same material, and as a result, I myself have a deeper understanding.
Leyla Khatbullina
As in a joke: "While I was explaining, I already understood."
Lyosha Artamonov
I love it when the audience answers my questions correctly.
How did studying at the CS center affect teaching?
Kolya Polar
I understand that course participants have varying amounts of time they can allocate to a course. Therefore, on the one hand, in lectures I talk about complex algorithms from the real world (along with simple synthetic tasks like sorting), and on the other hand, I give only simple tasks in homework, since they are suitable for fixing key concepts, but with it will not take unreasonably much time and effort. In addition, I know that some of the students already have basic knowledge of the course, so they are not interested in listening to part of the lectures, and they would rather read the slides diagonally. So I try to make the slides self-contained with links to the original articles so I can dig deeper.
Misha Slabodkin
At the CS Center, teachers are open to communication and happy to help students. Remembering how kindly they communicated with me during the training, I try to create the same impression for those who attend my course.
You teach in other places as well. Tell me where? What are the features of teaching at the CS center?
Kolya Polar
I taught in a school mathematical club, now I teach programming at school. Someday I want to give a course on computer vision with an emphasis on XNUMXD reconstruction, but there is a lot of material, so it is not clear when I will be ready.
All conditions have been created in the CS center: a minimum of bureaucracy, convenient moments like video recording, which are organized in such a way that the lecturer does not waste time and effort on them. There are even auxiliary tools like feedback through a student survey. And, of course, the lack of compulsory course: if the student is not interested, he will not attend the course. As a result, all listeners are well motivated.
Misha Slabodkin
In addition to the CS center, I taught various mathematics at mathmech, in the Lyceum 239 circle, at the Academic University and at the ITMO-JetBrains master's program. Sometimes I give “entertaining” mini-lectures to colleagues or friends if I learn something interesting about mathematics. If there are no sudden moves, I plan to continue.
The CS Center has excellent curators who turn all the formalities into simple and pleasant minutes and help teachers think only about preparing classes. Organizing celebrations, board games, and souvenir T-shirts is also very important - it helps to introduce students to each other and to teachers, and implicitly makes classes more enjoyable.
The main feature is teaching in rarely held exams: reporting depends only on seminars, and lectures seem less important to students. Because of this, part of the material is quickly forgotten, which sometimes interferes with practical exercises.
And finally, advice for those who want to teach
Kirill Brodt
Do not forget to talk about things that are obvious to you to students for whom it may not be obvious. Perhaps after that you will realize that you yourself do not understand anything and you will have to dig deeper.
Leyla Khatbullina
Throw away any doubts 🙂 If you want to share knowledge with someone and it brings pleasure, then go for it, even if it is a course "How to weave baubles". There will always be an audience and they will definitely say “thank you”.
Source: www.habr.com