Interview with the IT Workshop Leader – Tuğba Nur Öztürk

This week we would like to introduce you to Tuğba Nur Öztürk, a fourth-year Concordia PhD Candidate within the Physics Department, and the IT Workshop Leader for GradProSkills. Tuğba enjoys helping other students discover how to code and visualize their data, which stems from her own experience using scripting languages such as Python, R, Bash and Octave for her research, and her fondness for teaching within interdisciplinary fields. Her own research involves working on the molecular modelling of a calcium channel using Molecular Dynamics simulations. “I like the idea of membrane proteins being complex little machines to study,” she states, “both experimentally and computationally.”

Tuğba is from Turkey, where she completed a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a Masters in Computational Science and Engineering. Her decision to move to Montreal was based on a desire to work with someone who was doing computational research on biochemical problems. “When I was [in Turkey] all the computational studies were towards engineering and material sciences, not natural sciences,” she explains. This led her to find her supervisor, Professor Guillaume Lamoureux, from the Department of Chemistry.

About Tuğba’s Position as the IT Workshop Leader for GradProSkills

What made you apply for the IT Workshop Leader position?
Tuğba: Before working with GradProSkills I participated in a lot of workshops, so I already knew how the organization worked. I saw that every workshop I attended was very well-prepared and useful.

I’m interested in teaching. Most of the things I’m using professionally right now are the things I learned by myself. I like the fact that I’m self-taught. With my workshops, I show people how I learned and they can modify the path based on their own needs. I think it’s really important as a graduate student to be able to find resources and learn something that is going to be useful for your own project, and it’s something our professors expect from us. In my case, the minute I realize I have to learn something—I do it. I applied for this job mainly for that. I just thought if I designed a workshop, I would show people the steps to learn something even if they are working alone.

What is something you've noticed while working as the IT Workshop Leader?
Tuğba: Being a female physicist, I’m not the stereotype. People come into the workshops and realize that I’m a female and sometimes they ask a lot of questions just to see if I’ll be able to answer, but soon after they realize that I can. As female scientists, we tend to have to prove ourselves more than our male colleagues. A couple of times people have come up to me and hugged me because they are so glad to see a female physicist and they didn’t even know there is a Physics Department at Concordia! Hopefully, with the new R workshop at Loyola, we will bring people from both campuses together more often.

What programs do you teach in your workshops?
Tuğba: When I was hired, they already had a Python workshop but there were some issues with its mechanics, such as installing the program on laptops. I designed the workshops in a way where you can come to the room and have Python or R installed on your laptop, or you can go to a webpage I give you and there is an online compiler where you can write your code. I also select the examples I use based on the audience that is attending. If I know 70% of people coming to the workshop are from the computer engineering department, then I can put more technical examples.

The workshop on Python is more about thinking computationally, learning how an algorithm works, and how to code, basically. In these workshops, we have two sessions. In the first session you’re mostly learning fundamental things. The second session is more advanced and you’re learning things you’d need in your daily life while you’re coding, especially as a graduate student.

I, then, designed a second workshop on R that is going to be at Loyola campus this semester to collaborate with the Physics Department and its students. We chose R because it’s a high-level, dynamic and open-source programming language. It is really based on data manipulation and visualization. It focuses on what most thesis-based students would need. It’s not going to stress how to code as much; the focus will be how to use this tool to plot something nice for a meeting or for a poster. R is more popular for statisticians and psychologists.

How does the IT Workshop Leader position relate to your graduate studies?
Tuğba: In the workshops, what I’m showing people is how I’m easing up my own work. I try to keep the examples more general because not everyone is a physicist. I think the two workshops we have are giving a taste of how things are done in the industry as well as in academia. My research is about being a data scientist and the workshops are also about that. 

What it Means to be Part of the GradProSkills Team

How would you describe your experience working for GradProSkills?
Tuğba: Everyone at GradProSkills is doing something they love and something they are patient about, I think that’s why it works so well. The structure is defined, so you know if something goes wrong who to contact and who will help you. The staff are all very involved and engaged.
 

How has working with GradProSkills prepared you for future employment?
Tuğba: During previous workshops I attended for teaching, I never understood how someone could sit down and prepare a lesson for a specific timeframe. In my research, you never know how long something is going to take. I now know how to plan lessons, thanks to GradProSkills. I know how to sit down and prepare a learning environment for a certain amount of time and for a targeted audience.

I used to dislike public speaking. I’m teaching a first-year course this summer, Physics 204 on Mechanics with more than 150 students. Even though the GradProSkills IT workshops are small classes of about 20 students, all of the good experiences there gave me the confidence. I’m less stressed when I present for a public audience. I overcame my anxiety of public speaking because of GradProSkills workshops including the Toastmasters. 

What did you discover about yourself while working at GradProSkills?
Tuğba: My experience as a participant in the workshops and as a person who facilitated the workshops, has further developed my skill level at multitasking. This year my supervisor told me a couple of times that I’m good at multitasking and my reaction was, “You think so? That’s amazing!”

I think that being involved with GradProSkills taught me how to work well as a team member. It’s not a thing I would develop in my PhD because I work alone. With GradProSkills I worked with other people, I learned about all the other departments and about different graduate experiences.

Do you have any recommendations for other students considering applying to work or getting involved with GradProSkills?
Tuğba: I don’t think people should see enrolment in a team like GradProSkills as something that’s time-consuming. It’s not something that would slow you down, it’s the other way around. It motivates you. Being part of something that functions well is actually kind of rare. You don’t necessarily have to work at GradProSkills, you can volunteer by being an ambassador or by attending workshop trials. I think participating in workshops is something that would for sure improve your soft skills.

GradProSkills is a part of Concordia where your feedback is really counted. Things are changing based on your feedback. When I was designing my workshops I went over the previous year’s participant feedback forms.

The R-Ladies Programming Group in Montreal

What is R-Ladies?

Tuğba: R has a big community around the world and they try to promote collaborations or free learning locally. A part of this is the R-Ladies meetup groups. They are a non-profit organization launched in 2012. It’s a group where a couple of females using R come together to build their own community in the cities they live in.

What has been your experience at the R-Ladies Group in Montreal?

Tuğba: Three women organized the Montreal chapter: Corinne, Erika and Kathryn. There is a broad range of members. Some are post-docs, some are people like me doing a Ph.D., and there are people who are business owners, consultants, and artists. It’s still very new, just started in April.

The R-Ladies group is very open. Right now, we are having short workshops and talking with each other. R-Ladies as a part of R community doesn’t care about gender, sexual orientation, race, and so forth. It’s a diversity initiative creating a community that comes together for a certain purpose and in our case, it’s coding. When I was searching for the local scientific meet-ups, I noticed there are a lot of people coming together to do machine-learning or programming language groups, but they are all male-dominated. I think this is the only group that, as a female, you are supported to achieve your programming potential. It is really about trying to change the viewpoint of the technology field being very male-dominated.

I tell students that after taking a workshop if you want to keep learning, sometimes you need some sort of community. You need to find people similar to you that can guide you and just sit down and learn with you, and that is what the R-Ladies community is. All skill levels are enthusiastically encouraged to attend! If you are interested, you can contact us through Twitter (@RLadieMTL), meetup, and GitHub page.