Aadam Mulla, an undergraduate in the EE program bursts with enthusiasm when discussing his love for teaching. So far, Mulla has TA’d for three courses during his time at Penn. This includes: Professor Sid Deliwala’s ESE 1110 Atoms, Bits, Circuits, and Systems, MATH 2400 (Calculus III), as well as Professor Saswati Sarkar’s ESE 2240 Signal and Information Processing.
Mulla, a Boston native, traces his love for teaching back to experiences long before college. In high school, he taught Hindi at a local Hindi school and mathematics to prisoners through the PrisonEd Foundation, a local reform organization. Those experiences exposed him to students with incredibly different educational backgrounds and learning styles. “Teaching taught me that every student approaches material differently,” Mulla explains. “As a teacher, you need a strong understanding of the subject itself, but you also need empathy for students seeing the topic for the first time.”
According to Mulla, one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching is that it constantly pushes him to learn as well. “Students ask questions I would have never even thought to ask,” he says. “It challenges me to think more deeply about concepts and forces me to understand the material at a much higher level.”
At Penn, Mulla sought opportunities to continue teaching. After completing ESE 1110, he became a TA for the course and worked with the instructional staff to introduce modern AI topics into the classroom experience. In collaboration with the Detkin Lab staff, Mulla helped develop and present an AI-focused lecture and lab component designed to make rapidly developing technologies more approachable and engaging for students.
This semester, Mulla is TA’ing both MATH 2400Calculus III as well as ESE 2240 Signal and Information Processing. In MATH 2400, he especially enjoys leading recitation sections and supplementing lecture material through worked examples and interactive problem solving. “It’s a lot of fun to lead recitations,” Mulla says. “You get the opportunity to revisit lecture concepts from a different angle and help students build intuition for the material.”
Mulla describes ESE 2240 Signal and Information Processing as “[his] favorite class at Penn.” According to Mulla, “ESE 2240 taught me the data and information science side of electrical engineering. Many professors at Penn work in that area, and it shifted my interests toward machine learning, AI, and data science applications within EE.”
Now serving as a TA for the course, Mulla has worked alongside the teaching staff to redesign portions of the lab experience to better reinforce lecture concepts and increase student engagement. According to Mulla, the adjustments have already led to stronger attendance and participation from students throughout the semester.
This semester, Mulla also delivered three lectures to the ESE 2240 class on graph signal processing, an advanced topic that extends classical signal processing ideas to graph-structured data and networks. “I really enjoy the process of building lecture material and figuring out how to teach complicated ideas clearly,” Mulla says. “That process is really exciting to me.”
Outside of the classroom, Mulla enjoys creating educational materials and videos inspired by platforms such as Khan Academy. When he is not working, he enjoys cooking, playing the guitar, learning new languages, and playing badminton.