Teaching
I’ve taught a lot of classes over the past decade. Here are a few higlights:
At the University of Texas, Austin
Data Science
An applied and hands-on class where I taught 150 students how to use R from data wrangling with the tidyverse to machine leaerning with tidymodels. We covered regression, general linear models, recommender systems, random forest, K-nearest neighbors, XGBoost, Shiny, and causal inference.
Statistics
An applied and hands-on undergraduate statstics class that taught students about data visualization, hypothesis testing, and (perhaps the best topic of them all) regression.
Hypothesis Testing cheat sheet
Tradeoffs, Data, and Incentives
A class on politics, philosophy, and economics that teaches students how to evaluate policies. Technical material taught includes regression and causal inference such as difference-in-differences.
Intro to R for M.A. Students at McCombs School of Business
Teaching M.A. students how to use R.
Talk on How to Read Academic Papers
This talk was born out of my journey to learn how to read academic papers. The tl;dr version is read the intro, section headings, and conclusions the first time through. See if you can answer the six questions (see below) - if not - read again! The second time through read everything focusing on the larger picture. If you have time for a third read, combine the technical and the larger picture.
The questions:
- What is my question?
- Why does it matter? (i.e. why write the paper?)
- Why is doing this hard? (i.e. why wasn’t it done before?)
- What did I do?
- What did I learn?
- How does this contribute to the literature?
At New York University
The American Presidency
The President is often the single most important figure in both the American and global political systems. His powers to shape society are vast; he can, among other powers, declare war, his agents can set prices for drugs that affect insurance rates worldwide, and he can shape legislation to avert (or inadvertently cause) global financial crises. While we refer to the President as a singular person, he sits on top of a vast bureaucracy employing millions of people that make his policies come to life. The goal of this class is both to teach you about the presidency and to hone your ability to intelligently discuss and create academic research. We will do this through covering topics such as how the President conducts foreign and domestic policy, appoints officials, shapes, and is constrained by, the courts and Congress.
STATA for Undergraduate Research