Erik Helin

Served as a judge during Meeting of the Minds in April, 2026

Organize informal chess games with faculty, staff, and students.

Manage Language Bridges including recruitment of instructors and learners, conducting placement tests, training of student and staff instructors, scheduling of classes, classroom observations, learner assessments, and organization of end-of-semester celebration (coordinate with FM).

Project management

To make the course Tutoring for Community Outreach possible, I need a community partner and found one in SEK International School in Qatar. The school's principal, Mrs. Veronica Sanchez Ruiz and her colleagues have been very generous and cooperative with CMUQ and we have now successfully completed three (3) semesters there and my students have been able to complete their tutoring practicum part of the course.

Management

Administration

As a faculty advisor, I support the student board members with all activities related to StuCo (teacher recruitment, interviewing possible instructors, etc.), and I also meet individually with all StuCo instructors during the build-up of their courses to support them with course design, content, and with their StuCo teaching practicum.

I support the StuCo committee member throughout the year in activities such as recruiting of new members and new instructors for StuCos, interviewing, and mentoring the new student instructors as they are preparing their lesson plans, syllabus, assignments, and assessments for upcoming semesters.

Organize Spanish Hour for informal conversations on everything from A to Z with current and former students (now working at CMUQ) and Spanish-speaking faculty and staff.

Operations

Spanish Hour is a weekly conversational hour in Spanish at the CMU-Q cafeteria which I started in 2006. During this hour, students talk, play academic games, meet new Spanish speakers, all with a focus of putting to use the Spanish grammar that we learn in the classroom. In 2019-20, some of our visitors included: Oreste Sandoval, former ambassador of Panama to Qatar and current liaison between the Qatari government and Latin America, who spoke his professional experiences and provided the students with excellent language input; Lida Valenzuela-Vásquez, piano teacher from Cuba who talked about Cuban immigration to Spain and to other countries; Nicolas Stone, a Chilean-American CS student at MIT (student of our former English professor, Andreas Karatsolis); Nikita Bortnichek, Spanish-speaking Russian college tennis player at William & Mary (was penpal of one of the Elem Spanish II students); Alessio Sendino, former football professional, now coach in Doha for the Juventus Football Academy; Hamsa al Masri, class of 2013 (BA) came to talk to students about her work with Qatar Museums.