Yusuf Ozkan - ECE PhD Student of the Month - January 2023
Yusuf Ozkan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Helen and John C. Hartmann Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NJIT. He is a teaching assistant and a member of the Elisha Yegal Bar-Ness Center for Wireless Information Processing (CWiP). He is working under the advisory of Professor Joerg Kliewer. His research focuses on LDPC codes and reinforcement learning.
What is it like to be a member in a big group at a research center?
It is awesome to be a member of a big research group. It gives me the opportunity to collaborate with other scholars. The Ph.D. program has so many challenges. It can be really hard to find people who understand a Ph.D. candidate's struggles unless you are in a big group. I am grateful to be a member of a big research group.
You joined NJIT in Fall 2021, which was the first semester after the campus re-opened from the pandemic lockdowns. What have you observed while students and faculty adjust to the re-opening?
Since it was the first semester after the campus re-opened, there were not many students around until the third week of the semester. And then, everything suddenly changed. In person research meetings and center meetings followed one another for everyone in the group.
As one of the many international students coming to NJIT from foreign countries, please tell us about your feeling when you obtained the visa and booked your flight. Excited? Feeling uncertain?
I completed my masters in the USA, so I was familiar with the visa process and the country. Nevertheless, this time was different. I was super excited coming to NJIT. Even after the visa approval, I had worries about any random and unexpected thing that could prevent me from starting my program on time. Thankfully everything worked out well.
What have you learned from being a Teaching Assistant?
I see teaching as one of the most important duties of scholars from Ph.D. students to established professors. Thanks to the TA experience, I have learned how to be a better public speaker. Good teaching requires outstanding communication skills as well as excellent knowledge of the subjects. Careful preparation for lectures and lab sessions is vital and takes a good amount of thought. I learned how to get better prepared before the labs, so I could answer all the questions of the students and cover all the lab experiments. Class management is another skill that I learned. Not being aware of it can profoundly disrupt the development of student progress.