Jimmy Zhu

Teaching is not only about conveying course materials, more importantly is to inspire thinking and learning passion. Encouraging students to think and to link things together have been the central focus in organizing my teaching effort.

In the summer of 2020, together with Prof. Greg Kesden and a team of three senior ECE students we re-developed ECE freshman course 18-100, Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering and completely redesigned all labs in this course. This new version of the course greatly expands its scope to provide insightful ECE contents. From Boolean logic circuits to von Neumann computer architecture; from wireless radio communication to data encryption; from computer network to machine learning, the course opens students' eyes to the broad spectrum of ECE. The lectures are filled in with mind-intriguing real life engineering and technology examples to bring each subject to the students. The nine labs are designed to captivate curiosity and imagination with portability and flexibility such that students can do them anywhere. Over the past three years, this revamped course has been well received among freshmen over the entire college as the class has been running in full capacity every semester with 150 enrollments each semester. Though not required, the classroom attendance of the lectures has been consistently over 90% since we returned to in-person teaching.

Another course that I have developed over recent years is 18-310 Fundamentals of Semiconductor Devices. Since it was first introduced in Spring 2017, the enrollment size has grown from 12 to 73 in S23. The 3rd course that I have developed is 18-715 Physics of Applied Magnetism, a graduate level class that introduce students to the modern spintronics along with basic magnetism.

My passion in teaching arises from the opportunity for making positive impact to the growth and development of our students. To be able to make a difference in their lives fulfills my heart and is worthy of all the hard work spent.