Teaching Assistant for ‘Natuurkunde met elementen van Wiskunde I’
Undergraduate Course, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, KU Leuven, 2022
After a year-long break due to my long research stay at the California Institute of Technology, I resumed my work as a teaching assistant for this course for one more academic year (2022-2023).
The title of this course can be translated into English as ‘Physics with elements of mathematics I’ (taught in the first semester). It was an introductory physics course for the first-year students in the bachelor of science in pharmaceutical sciences at KU Leuven, which was taught in Dutch.1
We started out by refreshing the students’ knowledge of (Belgian) secundary education-level mathematics. Following this introductory chapter, we taught the students the typical introductory physics topics, such as Newtonian mechanics, waves, and the basics of thermodynamics, electrostatics, quantum mechanics and diffusion (among others). All of these topics were approached with an emphasis on linking physical laws with the pharmaceutical sciences.
As I was a native speaker of Dutch and a PhD student in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at KU Leuven, I was not eligible to become a teaching assistant for a course taught in English (at the master level/teaching astronomy-related topics). ↩