Question: What led you into lecturing? Are your students usually impressed with what you're teaching them?

Grant Campbell answered on 13 Mar 2013:

Hi pmedwards25. I’ve just come back from a lecture, which my students seemed to enjoy – it was about designing heat exchangers (which are widely used in industry, including for pasteurising milk and beer), but I also showed them a video of the model internal combustion engine my daughter and I made at the weekend – they seemed to enjoy that part of the lecture the most!

I kind of fell into lecturing by accident – a job came up and I was invited to apply for it, because I had a suitable background for what they were looking for (it was to help set up a new research centre for applying chemical engineering ideas to study food and non-food processes based on cereals such as wheat, and I had a background in bread as well as in chemical engineering). Once I started lecturing, I found I really enjoyed it and my students seemed to enjoy my lectures. Some examples from recent feedback illustrate how I try to lecture and what my students seem to enjoy:

“Grant Campbell…is so enthusiastic which encourages us to want to learn and he brings in real life situations, pictures and objects to help demonstrate his teaching which makes things much more interesting and helps to apply what we learn and its relevance. His lecture notes are well written and easy to follow which makes following lectures and revising so much better. He paces his lessons well and explains each step thoroughly and is very helpful when people have a problem. His cheerful manner also helps brighten up the subject.”
“Grant Campbell… makes me want to come to learn his subject, but because I want to, not because I feel I have to.”

That is my aim in lecturing – to incline students to want to know this stuff.

Regarding the material itself, sometimes the students are impressed with how clever or elegant it is. What I’ve been teaching today involves some really clever engineering, and I try to help them appreciate just how clever, elegant and powerful this type of thinking is. Occasionally we have a round of aplause, not for the lecture itself, but for the ideas that it is presenting.