DoC Research Student Nominated for Prestigious GTA Award

Research Student Tristan Allwood Nominated for Graduate Teaching Assistant Award

The Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year Award was introduced by Envision to recognise the achievements of outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistants in the Faculty of Engineering. This year nominations were open to all current research students who have acted as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the 2009-10 academic year.

Tristan was nominated for this prestigious award along with representatives from the nine other departments within the Faculty. Tristan's nomination is highley deserved as can be seen from his citation below. Well done Tristan!

Citation

Tristan has been instrumental in the development and delivery of a series of Advanced Programming lectures for first-year students. These are optional lectures designed to challenge the most able students and to introduce them to topics that lie well beyond the scope of the first-level taught courses. These lectures are hugely popular with around the top third of the class, and the attendances are consistent across the Autumn and Spring terms, when the course runs. In the past several years, Tristan has delivered many of these lectures himself.

This year, he has taken on more of an organisational role, recruiting various other PhD students to deliver lectures on a broad range of topics, some even addressing state of the art research topics in Computing. Thanks to the considerable time and effort that Tristan has put into this, we are now able to meet the intellectual expectations of our most able students. Before the introduction of these lectures, these students often complained of being under-challenged.

Written by: rsi