By Julia Robins, Staff Writer
“I think there are two strengths of being a good teacher that you have to have,” says Stephanie Smallegan. “One is real world experience,” she says, and the other is “the ability to take something you learn in the classroom and apply it abstractly.”
That’s why the Virginia Tech Ph.D. candidate decided to combine teaching with engineering research for her two-year graduate research fellowship with Virginia Sea Grant (VASG). This spring, while she’s studying the effects of storm damage on barrier islands, she will also assist with teaching at Radford High School in Radford, Virginia. In the meantime, Smallegan has been keeping busy with another teaching endeavor.
This fall, Smallegan is teaching Fluid Mechanics for Civil and Environmental Engineers at Virginia Tech. She’s had some experience teaching before, occasionally filling in for her faculty advisor’s classes, but, she says, “This is the first time that I’ve ever had to grade anything, make assignments, hand them out, come up with notes for every class, and teach every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
While for most, that may sound like quite a daunting list, Smallegan ends her list with a smile, adding, “It’s really exciting and I love it.”
Smallegan plans to teach engineering at a university in the future, but perhaps with a stop in private industry first. She has found that university-based research alone won’t give her all the engineering skills she needs.
“Even now with the undergraduates, I’m having a hard time teaching them about design or approaching an engineering problem when I’ve only ever done research,” she says. “I don’t know what it’s like to work for an engineering firm or in any kind of private setting. That’s really why I think it’s important to be well-rounded.”
Smallegan’s advisor, Virginia Tech professor Jen Irish, took a similar path, becoming a professor after 10 years of experience with the Army Corps of Engineers.
Irish is seeing promise in Smallegan’s classroom skill: “She’s a natural in the classroom. I can already tell she has a really good rapport with the students. The class is not easy; in fact, it’s probably one of the harder ones we offer, but the students seem to really like her, and she’s able to keep their interest despite the difficulty.”
In the spring, Smallegan will work with a physics and earth science teacher from Radford High School, developing classroom activities for the students based on her research and experiences. She notes that living in the middle of Virginia makes it harder for students to experience coastal and marine science, but she is excited to bring both topics into the classroom, as she did when she participated in middle and high school outreach events during her undergrad at The Georgia Institute of Technology.
“I’ve worked with some middle schools and some high schools back in Georgia, and that was a lot of fun because a lot of the kids had never been to the beach,” says Smallegan. “Telling them about a bigger world and how they can fit into that is really cool.”
Smallegan’s teaching work will fulfill the outreach requirement of the VASG graduate fellowship. But for her, getting the chance to work with students and out of the office isn’t only something she looks forward to, it’s something that helps her see the big picture.
“It’s easy to sit behind your desk and get swallowed up in whatever your little problem is,” says Smallegan. “The processes I’m looking at are only maybe, maybe, 5 meters wide. So if I just sat behind my desk, then my entire world is about 5 meters wide. But when you have to translate your research into something a high school student can understand, or convey it to a policymaker,” she says, “Then you’ve done a good thing.”
