A story told at the campfire
Data C8 course staff
Data C8 is where most Berkeley students meet programming and statistical inference for the first time, in the same class, with 1,500+ classmates. I took it, loved it, and came back to teach it.
As course staff I lead tutoring sections, hold office hours, grade homework and projects, and sit with students in lab until the pieces click. At that scale no two questions arrive at the same level: in one hour I might explain what a function is, then why bootstrapped confidence intervals behave badly on tiny samples. The job is meeting each question where it actually is, not where the syllabus says it should be.
What keeps me signing up is a specific, repeatable moment: when someone stops asking “what do I type?” and starts asking “wait, why does this work?” That shift from following instructions to being curious is the entire point of the course. I get to watch it happen a few hundred times a semester, and it hasn’t gotten old yet.