Interview Practice Flashcards
To help practice for my ICC interview!
- What are your strengths relating to music and the auditory domain?
strong musical background, teaching students aged 5 - 70 privately and at schools. Playing professionally in bands.
some good digital signal processing (DSP) experience.
Example: having worked to create professional music technology tools for iPhone and iPad, using bluetooth specifically - BLE low energy for wireless headphones (company called audio wings) and Kurv guitar (a successful funded kick starter project).
- What programming language do you feel most comfortable using? And how have you used it?
I am very experienced in using python for data science in mixed methods research and have used this approach continually in my PhD.
I also used Python scripts during a recent funded internship at a health startup called GripAble. I worked closely with the hardware team to try out 2D to 3D algorithms mapping recorded data onto sound in a number of ways. I also built a small apllocation to provide real time feedback on position.
- Can you provide an example of how you prepare for teaching students new topics?
Yes I remember when I was preparing a workshop for Masters and PhD students on HCI methods. I had to make sure I was delivering specific learning outcomes that can be tough to learn for some students. ( e.g. quant vs./qual/.pearsons correlation, effect sizes).
I prepared a presentation and ran through it several times, made adjustments, got feedback from other lecturers in the area.
I created code examples that were very simple to understand, clear to explain, rather than complex examples, so that students could see what to do when they came to try on their own etc.
We created a dataset in realtime and then analysed the results using a Google form.
- What is your approach to teaching programming?
The way I teach programming is to start with variables and data types, move on to conditionals (if statements), then loops. After this, I introduce functions. Once students get used to this, they are usually ready to start creating their own classes, but you can’t have the basics enough as they are so easy to forget. Variables, Conditionals, loops, functions, classes - usually in that order”
- What is your most relevant research for this position?
I won first prize in the CHI student paper competition in 2015 in Seoul South Korea. This research made use of rapid prototyping and running iterative workshops with 43 stroke patients from community settings.
Physical computing. Soldering, pressure sensors, MaxMsP.
- How did you overcome challenges when teaching? Can you provide an example?
Yes I can tell you a time when I had to monitor a large cohort of online learners and there were lots of challenges that I had to navigate:
I had to fix bugs in code examples and help students understand the issues. Working closely with module leaders.
I was given good feedback by superiors on fixing bigs with variables, loops etc.
- Can you tell me how you help students who struggle with debugging?
Yes in person when working as a TA in labs I helped students regularly by asking questions. Not simply giving them the answer. I get students to draw out with pen and paper the issue - for example array indexing or the value of variables in a loop. Thinking through the logic.
With other bugs encouraging them to use reference documents online and stack overflow. Try and find out the bug themselves. Also encouraging them to print out the variable values or at specific points in the code to work out where the bug or failure in the system is.
- What challenges have you overcome working as a team?
I have helped setup and run a full NHS pilot rehabilitation programme as a direct response to Covid-19. We had a serious issue using documents that only permitted one person to edit at a time leading to data going missing.
I took lead to setup collaborative documents in Teams. I created training resourses as staff where finding the data input to be a barrier. Resourses included short video tutorials and instructon leaflets to help consolidate a training session I led with the team members. Working together with the core team we designed and implemented a new database from scratch to store and collect ongoing data that has been written up into our recently published paper in a high impact journal.
- How do you organise projects?
Process is very important. In all my group work as a charity trustee, workshop leader in the 3rd sector I encourage and help to ensure we have an agreed process to track progress, document our work and reflect on our performance. Simple tools and shared files are used to help organise and keep track of projects. Creating toolkits (readme files) for each core theme has helped in ensuring clarity of organisation and process
For example when working to get full NHS ethics for my PhD research I had to keep multiple versions of tracked and clean versions of documents when working with the NHS committee. I really like this approach and have used this for multiple collaborative paper writing.
- How do you work with others?
I work well in a collaborative way on a whole range of academic, commercial and third sector work. I won a public engagement award for my work with stroke/brain odysseys where I led workshops with neurologic patients, professional singers and dancers.
I naturally collaborate and help train NHS staff new technology from commercial companies such as GripAble and Evolv Rehab.
I make good connections with senior academics from Imperial, UCL and Queen Mary - and have run a successful conference where I achieved 4k of funding to help cover the costs of keynotes and room hire etc.
- You are finishing up your PhD - how will that work with this new role?
I am planning to have completed my PhD by the time I start the position if I am successful.
- You do not have a teaching certificate how does that make you feel?
Well, I have had a lot of experience with undergraduate teaching in my TA roles both in-person and online. The online MOOCs I worked on were attended by around 50k students and I edited and improved content with the course leaders and worked directly with students and the course coordinators of Coursers to improve the student exerpeicne.
13: If you are teaching a group of students and some of them are being very rowdy, How would you deal with them?
If online I have had direct experience of stopping students who have very negative comments that are not helpful for the positive learning environment. We had the power to make the comments invisible to the other students but still be viable to the author.
In-person I would have to ask them politely to focus and stop disrupting the class. I would give them on more warnings and if they were still causing a big scene I would call security to remove them as the other student’s safety and learning is critical.
- How would you deal with a student who is monopolising the lecture - they may be asking good questions but are taking over the lecture.
I would politely ask them to hold their questions and share them in the online forums to encourage further discussion after the lecture. Another thing I really like to do is poll students in real-time over chat or even an app such as poll anywhere.
- Your research is really interesting are you not worried that with the teaching load your research will be taking a back seat?
I am under the impression that despite having a heavy teaching load that I would be able to achieve 1 day a week of research a week.
I see this as being an incremental approach to extending my research interests that can co-exist with this amazing opportunity to teach.
Co investigating with the other excerpts here in CCI such as Mick Grierson and Rebecca Fiebrink with their fantastic outreach work continuing the use of interactive machine learning approaches would be a really exciting opportunity.
And I would be really interested in the possibility of project supervision of creative computing students
I have so many networks and have maintained food relationships with two commercial companies, a number of charities working in the health field alongside the NHS, at Queen Square, and also other academic institutions like Imperial and Goldsmiths.
We could consider funding where I take a co-investigator role alongside Mick Grierson, Professor Nick Ward and Emeritus Prof Jane Burridge from South Hampton medical exerts in rehabilitation and keen to use technology for good. This was also talked about extending existing research from Imperial. I think it could be exciting to foster cross-university knowledge sharing and outputs.
