Teaching
I am grateful to have taught excellent students and courses during my time as a graduate student. I was a teaching fellow for ECON 1640: Industrial Organization (undergraduate) and co-created a computational PhD course ECON 2003: Computing for Economists with Toren Fronsdal and Jesse Shapiro.
ECON 2003: Computing for Economists
The course consists of twelve modules and introduces concepts in software engineering and scientific computing that are essential for modern economics research. We created lecture slides and recorded videos which students watched in advance of class sessions. Class sessions were then devoted to supervised group work on coding exercises (which we also designed).
Lecture Slides
- Lecture 1 — Software Engineering and Version Control
- Lecture 2 — Data Wrangling
- Lecture 3 — Introduction to Unix and the Command Line
- Lecture 4 — Nonlinear Equation Solving and Derivative-Based Optimization
- Lecture 5 — Derivative-Free and Constrained Optimization
- Lecture 6 — Numerical Differentiation and Integration
- Lecture 7 — Parallelization and Big Data
- Lecture 8 — Numerical Simulation and Monte Carlo Methods
- Lecture 9 — Introduction to Algorithms and Combinatorial Optimization
- Lecture 10 — Dynamic Programming
- Lecture 11 — Machine Learning Methods
- Lecture 12 — Bandit Problems and Reinforcement Learning
ECON 1640: Industrial Organization
As a teaching fellow, I created section materials and held office hours to review the core concepts of firms competing in markets with imperfect competition.
Selected Teaching Evaluations
"Ruby might be the best economics section leader I have ever had [...] I have taken many FOCs in my undergrad degree and solved many different micro problems, but I still feel like I walked away with a better micro foundation from this course, in no small part because of Ruby's sections [...] She cares a lot for her students and this is abundantly evident to how she approaches teaching [...] She's such a kind, wonderful educator that it's hard to not be excited to learn economics during her section. I am so excited for whatever university gets to have Ruby on their faculty!"
Ruby was seriously a great teaching fellow for this course. She [...] held great enthusiasm for the material and her students. I found the sections to be helpful in enforcing the lecture material, being able to ask questions there as needed.
"Ruby was an AMAZING TF and was incredibly available to help discuss course materials when I needed. She explains things super digestibly, and knows her stuff very well."
"Ruby is an excellent teaching fellow. She is very responsive to emails and questions in office hours and is good at breaking down the complicated concepts introduced in lecture. Her section notes are concise and help to reinforce what has been taught through the lecture."
"Very knowledgeable and very good at explaining the assigned topics – both in section and office hours. Facilitated relevant discussions during section and available and helpful during office hours. Excellent section leader!"