Preparing the Professoriate has been a tremendously valuable experience. Working with a professor in my department who specializes in teaching and curriculum development has not only given me insight and ideas in how to continuously improve my teaching, it has cemented my desire to pursue an academic position after graduation. In the past year, I've performed a set of tasks that relate to the responsibilities of research, teaching, and service that are expected of professors. Having to manage my time between them has been a challenging learning experience that has clearly shown me where my limits are and where I need to draw the line to avoid overexerting myself, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to experience this in graduate school before I go on the academic job market.
Over the program, the most obvious improvements have been in my teaching and course management. Being tasked with the responsibility of a complete section of a course on my own, I've had to learn all of the invisible parts of running a course that one doesn't always think about until the job starts. Teaching is about more than lecturing and grading, and a lot of work goes into planning the structure of a course and the layout of assessments that isn't always straightforward. Even more importantly, this experience has given me a concrete set of experiences upon which to base a teaching philosophy which has, up until now, been based solely on my perceptions and assumptions about what teaching would be like. In some ways, these responsibilities have been a sobering experience that have forced me to face reality about the nature of higher education and the profile of the students I work with. Yet it has also given me a chance to think about the elements of teaching that I hold most dear and take most personally, which is apparent in the revised teaching philosophy that I developed as a deliverable of this experience.
Furthermore, teaching in this capacity while serving as Vice President of the University Graduate Student Association and still pursuing research for my dissertation has been an exercise in time management and prioritization. This is one of the first times in my life where I've felt that I've had more than I can handle, which encouraged me to let go of the reigns and delegate responsibilities to my teaching assistants. It's in my nature to want to do it all, but I realized that I can (and must) trust the rest of my teaching staff to be able to perform tasks when I'm not around. This is especially important because I served as the system administrator for our autograding server, which I will no longer be in charge of next year, showing me how important it is for me to document my processes for when I can't be around to run them "my way".
Finally, I've learned that it isn't realistic to want to drastically overhaul a class from scratch alone. There are too many other responsibilities to have the added challenge of doing something entirely new for a semester with no other institutional knowledge available to help. Changes have to be made incrementally, such as the introduction of a new security lecture or the deployment of an autograding system, so that they can be evaluated in the context of how the course has been taught in the past. It's easy to think about how one would change a course from a blue-sky perspective, but this experience has shown me how to change a course little-by-little in a way that is manageable. Some things didn't work, like my encryption homework assignment. But the things that did work, like integrating Github and the grading server, made an impact that everyone involved could recognize.
The PTP program is one of NC State's crown jewels that make the graduate program stand out. Being a part of this program has shown me first hand why other universities are using it as a model for graduate education in their own institutions.