Before and alongside my master studies I worked as a medical microbiology analyst as a side-job and therefore already gained lots of practical and theoretical experience on the go. However, I’ve wanted to try out teaching because I’d always received positive feedback when I presented or explained something to an audience. Therefore, this project was a perfect opportunity to further develop my didactic, presentation, and organisational skills further and receive some mentorship. In my own biomedical master curriculum there was the possibility to pursue a biomedical ‘Education’ specialization, however I preferred to pursue a research speialisation because I didn’t see myself teaching at a high school later.
I asked my mentor (a colleague at the time) if I could give some lectures for her minor course Microbiology. She was excited about the idea, and she asked me if I could give a lecture about antibiotic susceptibility testing. My mentor let me design the lectures and we met a few times to talk about the progress and feedback. I started working on the project about two months before I actually started teaching it. I could spread the work out over these months, so I only spent a few hours per week designing and preparing the lectures. My role was to design one lecture and give 2 practicals to a cohort of 20 students. In the planning stage I discussed my ideas with the more experienced lecturers. For the practicals, I made a student manual with questions and utilized a MentiMeter quiz to examine what the students learned from my lecture.
During this project, I learned two major things. First, I learned to think in terms of solutions instead of problems. At the beginning of the project, it was a bit overwhelming as lots of things had to be arranged before the deadlines and a few things were not working out the way I had planned it. Second, I learned that I get a lot of satisfaction from teaching. It made me proud when I noticed the students actually learned something from my lectures.
