Teaching computing and its consequences
Victoria Dean teaches computer science at Princeton, with a focus on machine learning and ethics, and advises undergraduate research. Earlier work in computational biology and computer vision helped lead Dean towards robotics as an application with difficult open questions. Teaching now offers another way to explore how people understand and use computing.
More feedback is not yet more learning
Dean describes a student-led project using a language model to suggest written assignment feedback. Teaching assistants still assigned the numerical scores. The project produced more comments, but Dean says the sample was too small to determine whether students subsequently performed better.
Finding a teaching path
An all-girls high-school robotics team offered chances to lead programming and mentor others. During the doctorate, Dean questioned both the research and what career should follow. A pedagogy course and contact with teaching faculty helped reveal a route centred on teaching, beyond the research-focused paths that seemed most familiar.
Sharing knowledge about applications
Dean describes having parents who had both attended graduate school as a source of guidance about academia and applications. Recognising that others do not have the same access, Dean helped create a graduate-application feedback programme. The account points to a concrete kind of support: making unfamiliar expectations easier to navigate.