Today my teaching duties restart once more - this semester I’ll only be teaching Classical Thermodynamics for the Mathematics BSc. Last year’s course was very successful, and I hope to be able to replicate the success this year. Since I will be teaching mathematicians, for today’s first lecture I decided to set the record straight and openly admit that, yes, we physicists do simplify differentials and treat them as fractions. Hopefully this helped break the ice! Once more, all my teaching material will be made publicly available, while being regularly updated, on the English and Italian versions of my teaching page.
Teaching ends today (for now)
My teaching duties for the autumn semester end today, with the final lecture for the cosmology course focused on deriving the angular power spectrum of CMB temperature anisotropies (a lecture I always particularly enjoy, even though students seem to find it particularly difficult). Unlike the previous semester, this one was much lighter, as I only taught my cosmology course. It was once more very rewarding to interact with a bunch of bright students, whom I really hope enjoyed the course, and whose feedback I look forward to. While the next two months will be devoted to exams (teaching restarts at the end of February), I’ll be able to focus almost entirely on research, with the goal of wrapping up a few papers which are nearly done but just need a final push. So, once more, stay tuned for some interesting work which hopefully will appear in the coming months!
Teaching committee
I’m extremely pleased to have been nominated member of the new Teaching Committee (Commissione Didattica) - “new” given that we just elected the new Head of Department, and this implies a reshuffling/re-election of all committees, councils, and boards. The other members of the committee will be Albino Perego (teaching coordinator and chair of the committee), Stefano Azzini, Roberto Iuppa, Matteo Leonardi, and Marco Zanatta. Our tasks will include taking care of all things teaching-related, and in particular I will be responsible for the theoretical courses at both BSc and MSc levels. It will undoubtedly involve a lot of work, but I am very happy to put myself on the line to help improve our teaching activities, for which we are among the best Italian Universities. I look forward to working with my fellow committee members over the next years!
Teaching feedback
I just received the feedback from students of the courses I delivered last semester (General Physics I part 2 and Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics). The feedback was excellent, with a satisfaction index of 100%! Given the amount of work I put into preparing the courses, and the enthuasism I tried to instill, I was really happy to read the students’ comments, especially for the Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics aka Cosmology course (see below) - the students really appeared to appreciate my efforts to always help them not lose sight of the big picture, even when the latter risked being obscured by the complexity of the calculations (especially when it came to deriving the Boltzmann equations). I do indeed find it important (not only in my work but also in my research) to, so to say, “not lose sight of the forest for the trees”. I found the feedback really rewarding, and the comments will motivate me to do even better in the coming semesters!
Teaching restarts today
Today my teaching duties restart again. Fortunately this semester I’ll have a much lighter load, both because I’ll only be teaching one course (again Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics, following the same program as last semester), and obviously because I already delivered the same course previously. Last semester’s course was a great success and was truly satisfying, with a number of excellent students attending (many of which will end up doing their MSc theses with me), so I hope this semester will be as successful. And there will definitely be much more time for research this time! Once more, all my teaching material will be made publicly available, while being regularly updated, on the English and Italian versions of my teaching page.
Teaching ends today (for now)
Today marks the end of the teaching period, which will restart in September. Now of course it’s time for exams (already the coming Monday)! While it was truly nice to be able interact with many bright young minds, teaching two and a half courses was also particularly heavy, I’m not gonna lie, so I really look forward to a couple of months where I will be able to mostly focus on research. So, hopefully, several new papers should come out in the next months. Stay tuned!
Teaching starts today!
Today marks the start of the new semester, and with it of my teaching duties. I have a particularly heavy teaching load this semester (as a result of my having started mid-semester in October, which implied I obviously could not teach classes in the previous semester), where I’ll be lecturing General Physics I part 2 (basically Classical Thermodynamics, roughly following Zemansky) for the Mathematics BSc, Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics (which, despite the cryptic name, is an advanced course in Modern Cosmology, which will more or less cover Chapters 1-8 of Dodelson) for the Physics MSc, as well as within the Percorso di Approfondimento in Fisica (PAF), a supplement lecture series for the Physics BSc aimed towards particularly capable and motivated students. Needless to say, I already know that throughout the semester research will proceed on a very low gear in the best of cases (and I hope my collaborators won’t hate me for this! 😝). However, despite the overall heavy load, I really look forward to teaching and interacting with bright young minds! As an aside, all my teaching material (notes, slides, exams, solutions, and so on) will be available, while being regularly updated, on the English and Italian versions of my teaching page.
