Teaching and participating in outreach activities develop these skills. Our focus at this stage is to add these kinds of activities to the graduate program, with the same sort of mentoring that accompanies the development of research skills, without extending the time needed to complete a degree. Also, a new masters degree for those that find themselves insufficiently motivated to do research, but still loving physics, provides a route straight into teaching for these students at very low resource cost. Progress made toward these goals so far, and some of their impact on our undergraduate program, will be presented. Student evaluations of the class are very positive.
Former students say the class was very useful in further science and engineering courses.
The engineering faculty is highly supportive. The school of engineering is making changes. The math department is making changes. External project evaluations are very positive. To make this all work, we had to greatly improve the quality of the teaching assistants.