- TEACHING CERTIFICATE PROGRAM
Our NRT trainees leaning towards academic careers will need skills that will enable their excellence in research scholarship, teaching, and mentoring. Therefore, in addition to the convergent research training with the primary and secondary advisor, we offer a two-part teaching certificate program. The first part of this program will be a two-week ‘Effective teaching’ workshop with NRT core-team faculty member Prof. Joshua Enszer, who brings key expertise in pedagogy to our team. The goals of the workshop are to teach the trainees effective oral and written communication skills in a classroom, as well as effective usage of tablet and whiteboard; inclusive teaching practices and instructor etiquette in the classroom; and successful engagement of the students in a classroom through active learning exercises. Trainees will also be taught how to draft measurable learning outcomes and design effective assessments of learning. The second part of the training will be a ‘teaching fellowship’ over a semester after their NRT capstone design course either in 3rd year or 4th year, in one of the NRT related core/elective courses in the home department. During this fellowship, the trainee will plan and deliver about two weeks’ worth of a course material, including designing the way the class is run and the related assessments. The trainee will apply what she/he/they learned in their summer teaching workshop towards their lecture design, preparation, and delivery, individual and small-group active learning, and will conduct consistent and efficient assessment of student work. This two-part teaching certificate program is embedded in the training timeline and is modeled after grassroots efforts like the Russell Teaching Fellows program in UD chemical engineering that improve graduate students’ preparedness to communicate and teach in STEM.
- INDUSTRY / NATIONAL LAB INTERNSHIP
For NRT trainees leaning towards careers in industrial R&D or national laboratories, we offer three modes of interactions between trainees and mentors/collaborators from industry and national laboratories.
For current external partners from chemical industry and national laboratories visit this page. These confirmed partners will interact with trainees in one or more of the following three modes:
►Career counselor: As career counselor, these partners will remotely/virtually meet 2-3 trainees each year (~1 hour/trainee) to advise them on the day-to-day responsibilities they have and to answer their questions about their roles within their company.
►Hackathon project mentor: As project mentor in the NRT hackathon course these industry/national lab partners will bring in one or more integrated materials-computing-data science problem(s) to our hackathon course and serve a contact points and mentors to each team of 2-3 HPC, DS, and MAT trainees who will tackle and solve that problem during that semester.
►Internship advisor/mentor: Each partner will hire 1-2 trainees as summer intern(s) for 8-weeks in their company; this is assuming the company has the funds at that time to hire our NRT trainees as interns. Each partner will have their expected pre-internship training (to take place in May in our weekly community hours) and different set of work expectations/requirements for interns. Trainees should have completed relevant leadership, teamwork, ethics related workshops offered by UD Blue Hen Leadership Program that meet these pre-internship training requirements. For each intern-partner pair, we will also create an internship agreement for companies and students to outline goals, expectations, and evaluation mechanisms. On-site orientation for these interns will take place in the partner institution.