Master’s graduation and two free optimization courses
On September 29, I received my master’s degree in industrial engineering from Seoul National University!
It’s been a wonderful two years. Despite the challenges of social distancing, I was able to take a diverse assortment of courses in optimization, economics, and human factors; participate in research projects in two different labs; present at a conference in Jeju; and write (in both Korean and English) a thesis I’m rather proud of.
As part of my duties in the Management Science/Optimization Lab, I had the opportunity to serve as the course TA for two of my advisor’s optimization courses, both of which have now been published as free online courses:
- 선형 및 비선형 최적화 (Linear and Nonlinear Optimization) is an upper-division undergraduate course on linear programming and convex optimization.
- Introduction to Optimization is an edX course targeted at undergraduates and working professionals, which we created with the support of a grant from SNU’s center for teaching and learning.
Developing the edX course was especially fun: edX has an open platform for online courses that lets you create an interactive classroom with videos, captions, automatically graded exercises, and plenty more. Setting up the student activities with automatic grading in a way that is both user-friendly and rigorous was a neat challenge. I hope these courses can bring the theoretically grounded, practically oriented education that I received at SNU to a wider audience of optimization students.