Jaisohn Kim, a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the GTA Excellence – Assistant Award by the Virginia Tech Graduate School. Kim was recognized at an awards ceremony on March 24th.

In his role as GTA, Kim provides support for classes in numerical methods. In addition to the assistance he provides engineering students at Virginia Tech, he also creates content for a YouTube channel which currently has 213 subscribers and more than 38,000 views.

He enjoys teaching, and often adds his own review lectures to the coursework, inspired by open-source educational resources such as Khan Academy and Coursera.

“Many students have a meager programming background upon enrolling,” said Kim. “Seeing the light bulbs illuminate when they understand a code snippet or run their own program successfully is probably my favorite part of teaching.”

Kim is finishing his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering during the Spring 2022 semester, and plans to pursue his PhD also at Virginia Tech. His research is in the field of transportation, working to fulfill the lifelong goal of full-scale autonomous vehicle implementation.