New faculty member Dr. Susanne Bradley aims to teach students how to learn
Susanne Bradley, Ph.D., joins UBC’s Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor of teaching
Susanne Bradley’s first love was math. As a child, she entered math competitions and later, when she got into the B.Sc. program at Queen’s University, she didn’t question what she wanted to major in. But when it was time to apply for graduate school, her pragmatic side steered her into computer science. She figured that math and computer science were similar enough that she could still enjoy the same type of analytical thinking as math, but with wider job options.
“I wasn’t really interested in putting together machines or hardware, but the algorithms and scientific computing parts of computer science really appealed to me,” she says.
She joined UBC’s master’s program in computer science under the supervision of Dr. Dinesh Pai, building algorithms to learn how muscle activation relates to movement in the human body. Afterwards, she joined Dr. Chen Greif’s group as a Ph.D. student, doing mathematical analysis in scientific computing problems.
Throughout graduate school, she worked as a teaching assistant. But one year, during her Ph.D., an unexpected staffing issue threw her into an instructor role, where she had to lead a course for the first time. There, she discovered her passion for empowering students to solve problems.
“I really like coming up with problems that are the right degree of challenge to help students learn,” says Dr. Bradley. “You don’t want to give them a problem that’s too easy, that they can already do. And you don’t want to give them a problem that’s impossible.”
Her knack for teaching computer science earned her numerous teaching awards, including UBC's Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. After her Ph.D., she continued teaching in the department as a lecturer, which led to her current role as an assistant professor of teaching at UBC.
For Dr. Bradley, the goal isn’t just for students to learn computer science — it’s to learn how to learn.
“I want to facilitate their growth as independent learners,” she says, “Computer science is changing all the time, and they will need to pick up new skills.”
To help students learn how to solve complex problems, Dr. Bradley’s approach is to help them get on the right track and to provide support — but not reveal the solution too quickly. She encourages peer learning and collaboration, which will help students develop important teamwork skills on top of the technical skills they will learn in these courses.
“In the real world, your boss will give you a problem and they won’t have the solution key to help you with it, but you will have coworkers,” she says. “If you learn how to get help from a peer, that’s a more transferable skill than knowing how to get help from a professor.”
In addition to teaching students, Dr. Bradley is also eager to help faculty members become better teachers through UBC’s Instructional Skills Workshop. She participated in the graduate student version of the workshop as a graduate student and then was chosen to lead the next workshops. Now, she facilitates the faculty workshops, helping professors from various departments learn different teaching techniques.
“The theme of the workshop is to encourage professors to shift their mindset from thinking about what they are doing to thinking about what the learners are doing,” she says. “We think about how we can get the students to engage meaningfully with the material and grow from that.”
For computer science students, Dr. Bradley’s advice is to not shy away from things that are difficult.
“Don’t only do the things that are easy and comfortable, because you’re probably not learning much,” she says. “Everything that is meaningful is going to be challenging. If your goal is to get a high-paying job, you need to have skills that not many people have, which means you will have to learn to become good at some things that are hard to do.”