U in the Ring

Tallinn Katari 0:04
Hello. And welcome back to uwindering, a show where we dive deep into topics on UVic and life on its campus. Today, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Trevor Bazett, a teaching professor here at UVic, and the host of a beloved and successful channel on YouTube teaching mathematics concepts. Being a stem student myself, I know how challenging math courses can get sometimes, which is why I'm so grateful that there's someone like Professor Bazett who uploads high quality educational videos for anyone to access on YouTube. Professor Bezos YouTube videos have been a lighthouse for all the poor souls lost in the treacherous waters of calculus and algebra. So I was very happy to sit down with him and pick his brain on various subjects, like his adventures in YouTube and optimal learning strategies for students. Professor, thank you so much for joining me today. Could you tell me a little bit about your academic journey and how your interest in mathematics began?

Professor Trevor Bazett 1:02
Absolutely. Well, I actually started here at UVic for my undergraduate, so I've come around full circle now that I'm a professor here at UVic as well. And I think when I started at UVic, I wasn't 100% sure what I wanted to do. I sort of liked a lot of things that were either math or math adjacent. But I was interested in computer science. I was interested in physics, and ultimately, for my undergraduate, I thought of myself a little bit more as a physicist. I did one of these undergraduate combined programs in both physics and mathematics. And the reason for this, basically, was that to be a physicist, you need to do a lot of math courses. And I was taking so many math courses, and it wasn't that much more math to add in a minor, and it wasn't that much more math to actually make it a combined honors between the two programs. So I started doing this, and I really thought of myself as a little bit as a physicist. But sometime in the split between second year and third year, a couple of things were happening. First of all, I was really enjoying the math courses. I had to take these courses because of either computer science or physics, but I was just enjoying them. I was having a lot of fun with them. Particularly some of the ones that were involving a little bit more proofs and the theory behind it, as opposed to just doing computations. And so then as time went on and it was time to decide, well, okay, I'm going to go off into graduate school. What do I want to go into? I actually realized that it was the mathematics that I was enjoying more. Some of my favorite moments in undergrad, where I'd be in a physics course would be, oh, there's actually some really cool math here that I want to explore. So I went off and did my master's, my PhD in mathematics, and I went around and a couple professorships, and then here I am back at the University of Victoria.

Tallinn Katari 2:36
Where'd you do your master's and PhD?

Professor Trevor Bazett 2:38
Both of those were at the University of Toronto. They're sort of stuck together in one program. You do a master's for a year, and you go right into the PhD program.

Tallinn Katari 2:46
Did you always know you wanted to be a professor at the end of it?

Professor Trevor Bazett 2:49
Not really. That wasn't the intention at all, and particularly because I'm an Assistant teaching professor, so a large portion of my job has to do with teaching. I didn't realize that teaching was something that I wanted to do really at all. In some ways, it was sort of like just sort of following the path of, like, what's next? So when I was an undergrad, I didn't necessarily want to jump right into the workforce and take my bachelor's in physics and apply it to a job that had nothing to do with physics. And so sort of going and getting a master's was like the next thing to do, and I was enjoying it so then going and getting a PhD was the next thing to do. And then, you know, applying for jobs in academia at that point, again, I could have thought to go into industry, but I was enjoying what I was doing. And it wasn't until sometime in graduate school, part of being in graduate school, what you have to do is you have to spend to help pay your way, as far as part of your sort of financial compensation is that you're doing a little bit of teaching. They start you off as a teaching assistant, and by the end of your PhD, you can actually be teaching courses as well. And I didn't really expect that, like at the very beginning, it was almost a little irritating, like, oh, okay, I can't do the thing I want to do. I have to sit and be this tutorial leader. But I actually really enjoyed it. And so by the time I got to the end of my PhD, I was then applying exclusively for teaching focused jobs, because that's what I was most interested in.

Tallinn Katari 4:09
How would you describe your first experiences teaching? Did you find it frustrating that you had to teach a bunch of undergrads? The thing you just learned when you had such a drive for advancing in mathematics?

Professor Trevor Bazett 4:19
I think I always did enjoy it from the beginning, it just wasn't what I was like most motivated by. I actually remember quite early on, I had to do this really obnoxious evening tutorial. It was something like seven to 9pm and for those students, because it was so late, there was only a few of them who were showing up, but they were students who actually weren't able to go to their regular class time. And so even though it was a tutorial and we were just working on problems, it felt a little bit like I was actually teaching them. And it was, it was really very small, maybe only 10 students, but I actually felt that we developed like a really good vibe over the course of the semester, that they were really appreciative of it. And so that was part of what sort of hooked on, like, Oh, I'm actually making a difference in their lives, like me being a good tutorial leader is actually helping them get through their I think was a differential equations, course, if I remember correctly. And so that would just sort of made me open my mind. I'm like, Okay, this is actually kind of nice. And so I tried to do a good job of it. Tried to think, you know, what do the students most need? How can I best support them? And the more I did that, the more, the more I love that. I'm like, Okay, I'm happy doing that side of things.

Tallinn Katari 5:18
You know, I've had the pleasure of sitting in Professor Bazett's and watching his YouTube videos. And I must say, the passion that you have for teaching really shows through. And I have to thank you for helping undergraduates like myself get through these courses. What motivated you to make and upload your first YouTube video?

Professor Trevor Bazett 5:39
You know, I got started without really any intention of, sort of having a big YouTube channel and, you know, being watched by lots of people. It was that I was working at the University of Cincinnati, which was sort of my second Professor job. And at that time, this is before the pandemic, we had an online math course. And the goal was, I think I had 23 students in this class. It was just to have a place where students who were maybe working throughout the year could go and take this sort of online course asynchronously at whatever they wanted to do. You know, now that we've had the pandemic, this kind of thing is quite common, but, but it was sort of a little bit less common back then. And at the time, the university systems didn't have any nice way of hosting videos, like we at UVic have echo 360 and all these tools to be able to do that. So I just put the videos on YouTube. I didn't expect anything else to come from that. And not much did for a while, the only people that watched the videos were the 23 students in the class, while probably not even all 23 of them, let's say, but a few of them, for whatever reason, got picked up by the YouTube algorithm, and specifically the YouTube search algorithm. So that would be people typing in something like Bayes theorem, and they would find these videos. And so I had a couple of videos that were sort of anchors that literally, one of them was when I've gone on to get millions of views now, mostly because it does well for that one search. And so I thought that's like, that's really interesting, that there's actually that even at that time, let's say 2017, or so, there's tons of videos on YouTube that there's still space for a math explainer video to be helpful for people. So for a number of years, I just was making either online courses, or flipped classroom courses, where students would watch videos before coming to class, and I would just take the videos I was making for my students and putting them on YouTube and this sort of grew up to, I don't know, say, 50,000 subscribers or something like this, not really within a ton of intention of being a YouTube social media person, but it was sort of like, I'll take the things I'm already doing and would do regardless and post them online. And it did well. And so more recently, I've now completely switched, which is to say, Okay, well now there are clearly lots of people who are really interested in mathematics online. What if, instead of just course videos, videos that they were taking a course they needed to learn something, and they, you know, didn't follow the explanation for their instructor, or they were sick that day. What if instead, we tried to make videos that were for the purpose of outreach, so that the people would fall in love with mathematics, or sustain their enthusiasm for mathematics, or discover an appreciation for mathematics, something where there was something kind of like cool and interesting there, and it was in that social space. So that's now mostly what I do these days. I don't make really big courses. I make these sort of more broad I'll call them math outreach videos. So that's what I'm doing now, and which I really love to do.

Tallinn Katari 8:28
It's so cool to hear that this started out as a way to reach just your 23 students, and now it's become the massive channel that it is. How do you juggle the responsibilities of being a professor with running a YouTube channel, and how did the two roles complement each other?

Professor Trevor Bazett 8:44
Oh, that's a really good question. Well, it's a little bit hard to find the balance for it. I'm actually transitioning right now. I've been working really hard as a professor. Let's say I've been not. I've been a very bad YouTuber for the last year. I think I've made one video in 2024 but I'm actually transitioning to study leave, so that I'll have about 16 months where I'm not teaching and I can focus a lot more of my work on building up the YouTube side. So that's actually something that's literally just going to be starting basically right now, as exams are being graded, and I'll be able to focus a little bit more, because it's hard to do both. I mean, being a professor is a big, full time job that takes lots of hours and, you know, hours sort of outside of nine to five as well, and doing really well on YouTube. I mean, some of the biggest people in this outreach space will have full time jobs with whole companies of people working on it. So it is a lot, but what I will say is there's a lot of synergy between them. So I think I became, like I first certainly leveraged my ability to teach and be in front of a classroom, to be able to teach and be in front of a camera. Those experiences I had as a professor helped me be better at the sort of math explainer side of YouTube, but it also really worked the other way around. When I was developing as someone who would post on YouTube, and all my initial videos are kind of terrible by my current status, as you could imagine, but when I started thinking a little bit more about like, what works in this medium? And seeing the analytics, which are very, I don't know how to put it, they're very harsh, right? They just tell you other people like something or that they don't like something, but you learn from that and and that really, I brought a lot of lessons back into my own teaching, like, for example, the importance of just telling a compelling story. Sometimes in our classrooms, we're just giving fact after fact after fact. It's on the syllabus the students need to learn this to, you know, to pass this course. But on YouTube, that doesn't work as well. You really want to tell a compelling story. So it's an example of something I now try to do in my teaching is to think, well, I've got a 50 minute lecture. How can I make a great story in this lecture time? That's what would work on YouTube. But then you bring it back to teaching.

Tallinn Katari 10:54
So what would you say is your process for creating a video on YouTube? You said you started on making these, like math outreach videos, and how you want to structure a narrative. So could you give me a little rundown of how a video on your channel is made?

Professor Trevor Bazett 11:11
Yeah. I mean, it all really starts with trying to find a good idea. And actually, we were just talking about story. When I think about it, what a good idea is that would work in the context of something like YouTube, is there needs to be something about it that's visual or interesting, as well as some sort of narrative arc, or storyline, like a tension that we want to resolve, an interesting question that you'd be somewhat curious about. So for example, I did a video a little while ago about if you look at the back of a giraffe, it has this really interesting pattern. And the pattern that's on the back of a giraffe actually has a very similar pattern that appears on dragonfly wings and the canopies of forests and in many other places. And so something really visual there, you could probably imagine the kind of pattern that I'm talking about. And you then could ask, why that pattern, how does it show up? Can we figure out some formulas for this? Can we mathematically explain this?And can we take that model for why these patterns appear and have it be useful to us to explain some other phenomenon? And it turns out that in this case, you can. So that's a good example where I'm trying to find an idea, because there's lots of great ideas in mathematics. But that idea is one that has a visual element to it and has a storyline element to it. So I think I've got something there. Okay, so then how do I actually make that into a video? So I really try and think about... I have this very broad audience, so some people are kids in high school who are just sort of trying to learn some mathematics. Some people are at university. They're in their core courses. So I try to think that that's kind of somewhere in there is where my audience lies. They're interested in STEM subjects. And so I think, How can I tell this story that had some mathematical sophistication to it? It's not just fluff. We're gonna do some actual mathematics. That's why we're here. But in a way that's really accessible, so that lots of people with lots of backgrounds can really sort of follow along and understand and learn things. And maybe I do some more advanced ones and some some less advanced ones, but I've got all that. So I kind of do a bit of a storyboarding. I went for a while, I've tried to see how people sort of write books and do other types, write skits and all these things and and I try to make a little bit of a storyboard of what are the key graphics, the key beats in the storyline that I'm going to try to get to, and I lay them all out, and I make a big presentation that houses all the images and all of the animations and all of the equations and everything else that I have. And I go and film it and come back and try to edit all together into a video.

Tallinn Katari 13:44
So you do everything. Everything on the YouTube channel is 100% done by you?

Professor Trevor Bazett 13:49
Everything is myself. Yeah, it's sort of a one man band, because you sort of, you're an editor and you're an animator and you're a script writer and all of the things. But you know, each of those little pieces I got slowly better at over time. So, for example, even just something like editing, you know, the first times I was recording videos, I would screw up all the time. And so my editing was just a simple matter of, I said something wrong four times in a row. I'll cut all of those out, and then I'll just be able to go through it. But now I've sort of learned some of the tricks of the trade to be able to do a little bit more advanced stuff, and to try and think about, how do I actually want this to look in a really polished and nice way? I don't do a great job of it, but I know enough to get by.

Speaker 1 14:31
So you initially said that the goal when you first started YouTube videos, it was for the 23 students. Today, and moving forward, what do you think your goal is for the YouTube channel? Every time you make a video, do you have the ambition, Okay, this has to get as many views as possible?

Speaker 2 14:50
The classic influencer thing. I sort of don't care. I mean, I definitely don't get those kind of views. It's not that I don't care at all. I would prefer that a video performs well. That helps build the channel. This is a good thing to have. However, I do know that sometimes I come in and I'm not trying to address a very large audience, I'm coming in with something which is a little bit higher level. And for example, one of the things I really like to do is to show mathematics that students might not see until third or fourth year or graduate level, and rephrase those to a student who's seen first year calculus and second year linear algebra, but that's still a much smaller group than sort of everybody. So I am being quite narrow, and I'm actually okay if I have a video that has a narrower potential audience for it and doesn't do as well from a view perspective, but does great among that particular audience. And I remember had one a little while ago. I was disappointed by it at the beginning, and it was something called gradient descent. It's used in machine learning. Like I thought it'd be a really great video, it totally flopped in the YouTube algorithm. And so I was like, Oh, that's a little bit disappointing. But it turned out that it got picked up by search, and people who are searching this topic as they're trying to learn machine learning kept on doing it, and now the video has done fine, and it's helped a lot of people. And so I'm like, totally okay with that in the end. So I try not to think too much about the views. It's not nothing, but I'm not somebody who has a big sort of generalist audience. And also, the truth of the matter is, there's lots of great mathematical stories out there that have storylines that are visual, like I was talking abou. But often a lot of the content does get into the weeds, gets a little bit technical, and is sitting there deep in some calculation. And I have lots of sometimes choices like, do I want to really dive into this calculation? Do I want to provide just a little bit of a link and sometimes I think it's actually better to dive in. I know it's not great from the perspective of maintaining your average watch time, people will click away, but for the people who it's good for, it is really good for. So I try to leave those things in even if I know it sometimes hurts me a little bit.

Speaker 1 16:49
I know it must be a pretty daunting experience being a professor in lecture halls, lecturing more than 100 students. But how would you say that's different from teaching in your YouTube videos that I watched by hundreds of 1000s of people.

Professor Trevor Bazett 17:05
Yeah, you know, I somehow don't, I don't worry about is more I'm still much more nervous going into the first day of a class into a big lecture. Even though I've been doing this now for well over 10 years, I still feel a little bit right, like it's a little bit nervous, it's this whole group of people, what are they going to think of me? And I find that more nervous than on YouTube, because on YouTube, if I say something stupid, I just cut it out, right? Unless I've really missed the boat. I don't have very many errors that would show up on the YouTube video, but I make tons of errors. You were in my class. You know, I do stupid things on the board all the time. But the point is, yeah, I've always found that sort of in person, where you have a little bit less control, you never know what the student's gonna ask. They could ask something that stumps you on the spot, which is totally fine if they do, hopefully they do. I've always found that more nerve-racking with the camera it's just myselfand just sort of externalize that it gets viewed by lots of different people, but that doesn't really phase me as much. But I know some people really don't like being on camera. That's just never really bothered me one way or the other.

Tallinn Katari 18:04
What advice would you give to anyone out there who wants to start creating something else? Whether it is, you know, something in academics or something like academics adjacent? What advice would you give people who are struggling to click that upload button and just let that video out into the wild.

Professor Trevor Bazett 18:24
You know, I think that that first time, in some sense, you just need to do it. It doesn't really matter. All of my first videos were terrible. In fact, I have a whole playlist of videos that I released that are now private. They were so bad, and they've been replaced by a new series in that exact same course. So they have no value. And they weren't good because I had no intention of making them good. They were just sort of by the seat of my pants, but I got so much better at producing videos through them. So I think if you just get started making something, probably the first thing you make is the thing that's going to be seen by the least number of people, and it doesn't matter how terrible it is, but if you can take something from that, and you can think of some aspect where you could improve for the next one, well maybe you've made a little bit of impact, and maybe you've gotten a little bit better. And I would also say that, particularly in the more sort of technical disciplines, there are so many random niches out there. You know, even within mathematics, I've made over 500 videos, but this is a tiny fraction of like, the potential math topics to which could be done in videos, even if I was just thinking about, like, what's normally taught in undergraduate science and engineering courses that have to do with mathematics, so much stuff. And the reality is that there isn't great existing videos on all of those topics right now. That's just the simple truth of where it is. So if you choose a niche, and you sort of niche down, I'm going to be doing this bizarre sort of tangent within machine learning or whatever, and I'm going to explore all the mathematics of that, whatever it is that you want to study. Then there are people who will find you via the algorithm. That's what they try to do. Connect people who are interested in something and content that is that thing. So I would just say, basically, just get started on it and improve every time, and see where it takes you.

Tallinn Katari 20:14
So you've been a professor for 10 years, teaching professor for 10 years, correct?

Professor Trevor Bazett 20:19
Yeah, I have taught for more than that. Let me see, I got my PhD in 2016 and so it was right after that where I got my first professor job, but I had been teaching for a couple years by that point.

Tallinn Katari 20:31
So while you've been doing your job as a teaching professor and juggling YouTube, is there anything about the way courses at universities are conducted that frustrates you? If you had an invisible hand that you could wave and change, something about how the material is delivered to students or how the students are assessed, is there anything that you would like to change?

Professor Trevor Bazett 20:59
There's a lot about a basic university structure. I don't really mean this in a right way or a wrong way. Because universities are structured around courses in semesters that, for the most part, are going to have homeworks and then some tests and some final exams. There's a lot of structural factors that are bought in there. And for example, it's it's quite hard, like when I think about what I try to do on YouTube, is I try to create a real appreciation for mathematics, because I don't have to focus on preparing students to achieve a particular set of learning objectives at a particular standard of difficulty that I know the final exam is going to be held at. And as a result, it's sometimes, I think, can take a little bit of the love out of it, because you're sitting there taking this course, and even if you're passionate about the subject and interested in and of course, not everyone's going to be that about every single course that they take. Bunch of people are doing it there because they have to for a prerequisite, or whatever else. And because we're focusing on some of these things, it's sometimes harder to share the love and the focusing on the parts that really would grab people and have them be really interested in. You're having to do these other things. And I, for example, I really hate having to give grades. I know why we have to give grades. I'm not saying we shouldn't give grades, necessarily. It is a struggle when you're teaching a very large class, which a good example this first year calculus. I often coordinate first year calculus courses. You got over 1000 students there. You know, we have to give them some grade. There has to be some mechanism to do that. And it sucks, because I know people are struggling right now for a lot of reasons, often not to do with their own academics. Because when you have 1000 people, you have people in every stage of life crisis between themselves and their families and friends. So a lot of people are struggling for lots of reasons, and I'm still giving out an F grade, which feels a little bit weird, whereas on YouTube, I don't have to worry about that, right? If someone doesn't want to watch a YouTube video, they don't watch a YouTube video. I don't care, they don't care. It doesn't matter. I'm not having to really deal with that side of things. So it's a little unfortunate, that is the reality. But of course, it is also credentials. I understand why it's there as well.

Tallinn Katari 23:05
So we talked about how you acknowledge the fact that there are students struggling in these courses. You know, I've always, felt compassion for people who say that they're just bad at math, which I totally never believe that. I've always felt that anyone's ability to do math comes from the practice they do and their foundational knowledge on whatever, for whatever they're learning, their foundational knowledge has to be concrete. Whatever they're learning, the basics of that should be bulletproof. What do you think if someone was enrolling themselves in a four month math course at a university, what do you think is the optimal learning strategy that they should employ?

Professor Trevor Bazett 23:50
That is a really good point, and I just really do want to emphasize that like I also share this belief that I don't think that anyone... like a lot of people, proudly say I'm bad at math, but I don't really believe them,pushing back on on people that would say it this way. Because, you know, my experience is that that lots of people can have, for example, a lot of bad prior preparation in mathematics. People can have bad habits of learning mathematics. They can have bad experiences with mathematics and they can find the process of doing mathematics really stressful. All those things are totally true, but isn't necessarily the same thing as as bad at mathematics. So I've always believed in having a growth mindset, especially a decent amount of literature behind this idea that if someone has a growth mindset about the ability to improve at mathematics, that these people actually tend to do better at mathematics and improving at mathematics. If you think that you're bad at mathematics, and this is something fixed about you, like the you know, the color of your hair, or something like this, well then maybe you're going to take actions in the classroom, like, for example, I'll just memorize a bunch of stuff without understanding it that reflect that because you don't necessarily believe that you're going to have that growth. Whereas, if you believe that wherever you're at right now, you have the potential to grow and learn, and that's basically my experience with any student I've ever seen, is that they they all do, have exactly that potential, then I think that you can take learning behaviors that are a little bit more effective. So I'll give you an example of one that I always encourage is the difference between being a passive learner and being an active learner. So ironically, because I do YouTube, I encourage a lot of passive learning by mistake. So passive learning is when you just sit there and you just lean back and you watch someone else perform mathematics or whatever the subject is. So this is the case if someone's doing a traditional lecture in the class, you're watching the expert present information to you watch the YouTube video, you read the solutions, you read the textbook, all that's very passive. And there's a rule for passive learning. We have lectures for a reason, and then there's nothing wrong with that, but there's a huge importance in active learning, which is when you're in the driver's seat and you're trying to struggle away at these problems. What's going on? How can I figure out something? You're the one who's sort of taking the more active role. And the big gains in my experience, in learning, pretty much any subject happen, the more active you are. It can be supported by passive learning. That can be a part of it, but you have to really put that active role in so often, when I work with my first year students, who might be struggling with mathematics, they might have had a bad prior experience, they might have had poor preparation and poor learning habits in the past, is that as they focus on doing more active learning, they really can very often, really change that around, and that's one of the big pathways for success in a lot of these courses. Put yourself in the driver's seat.

Tallinn Katari 26:36
So we spoke about how, you know, the leaning back and then taking in a lecture is one way of learning. Do you feel like there is a particular way that a person should approach studying for an exam, as opposed to when someone is learning without the without the syllabus and stuff. What is do you have any particular tips that you think students should know when it comes to preparing for a final examination.

Speaker 2 27:05
You know it's kind of interesting. One of the, I guess, advantages of being a professor and having, you know, written many, many, you know, constructed many exams, is that, that it's easy to say, is that to the professor, the exams, sometimes I feel like they almost write themselves, whereas to a students, they feel like this complete mystery, where they could be anything. And I think it's a little bit of a see in the forest for all the trees kind of issue. Is that often for myself, I think, okay, I know there's gonna be a question on this broad topic, a question on that broad topic, and all the questions are kind of sort of the same, because I've been doing this for a long time, that's how it feels. But for the students, you think, Oh no, all those possible little variations, some of them might have crippling problems that feel really, really, really different. So one of the biggest strategies that I have, I mean, you've gotten your basics. I say you've learned your definitions, you've gone over your notes, you've done some practice, you got the basics. One of the things I often suggest for the people who are really striving to go and push and, you know, try to get an A in this class is to think, can I make some real predictions about what the final exam is going to look like? Let's go section by section. What would an easy question and a medium question and a hard question on this subject look like? What would I do if I was the professor and I was writing the test? And I've done this actually a few times in classes where I've made students try to come up with to come up with these questions, and the students come up with really good questions. You can almost use them as the final exam questions. They're that good. So if you really spend that time at that sort of prediction, because prediction is a really high level learning skill, right? You somehow learn the subject matter well enough that not only are you just copying. You're sort of, you're doing that higher level of analysis. What connects different questions together? What would make a question in this theme, hard versus easy? What kind of complications can I add if you're doing that kind of thinking, then you're really well set for it. You probably get to the final exam, you're like, oh, okay, that is the standard question on this section. Whereas if you haven't done it, you might be like, That's a weird question. Where did that come from? So I really like that prediction game. If you've gone through the basics, do that next,

Tallinn Katari 29:07
As we're reaching the end of this podcast, I wondered if there's anything you want to clear up to the students at universities about what their professors expect from them and what they can expect from the professors. Is it you do you want to let them know to stop asking you questions that are clearly stated in the syllabus. I've told you, the final exam is on the 16th of May, read the syllabus.

Professor Trevor Bazett 29:31
Oh, that is, that is a classic frustration of professors, but, you know, it's not a big problem. I would always prefer people to ask questions than than not ask questions, even though, yes, it can sometimes be frustrating that you post information in places and students don't notice it. But that's okay, because I don't notice those things when I'm involved in things as well. You know, I think that the one of the big things that I observe is that not enough people take advantage of office hours and interactions with the professors. And this is something that for myself, I also didn't do until sometime around maybe fourth year university and transitioning to graduate school, where I realized, oh, actually interacting with experts in a particular field can be really good, not just for your learning, but also for your motivation, and seeing whether this is an area you want to go to, and because as you go on in academia, so much of higher level learning is collaboration and conversations between people and working together. That sort of idea that maybe I'm a little bit too scared. I don't want to talk about Professor. I do get it because I was that exact person. But I think that there's a lot of benefit of being able to go in, go to office hours, get your questions answered, and also maybe find things that you didn't expect the conversation of which course should you pick up next, or do you want to take a minor in something like this? So take advantage of your professors. Almost always, professors are actually really, really happy to speak to students, because they all were students, and they all went through the same kind of system that's going on right now. And so I think we all feel like that's part of our real duty here is trying to make those one on one connections versus the 200 on one connection that happens in the big lecture.

Tallinn Katari 31:07
These are lovely to hear. You know, I think it is true that a lot of students are hesitant to come and talk to the professors. And maybe, you know, maybe they had, like, one bad teacher in high school or something, like, oh, I don't want to talk to my teachers, but yes, I totally agree with you. Going to office hours is something that I've started doing now, and I can really say that really just helped change the trajectory of a lot of my courses. So thank you so much for doing this with me. I just want to let you know how much your YouTube channel has helped me, as well as a lot of my peers, and I'm really happy to be putting this podcast out, because I feel like this is going to teach a lot of people about learning strategies, as well as give them a lot of more confidence in their professors. I think a lot of people fear that maybe their professors aren't there to help them as much. But I think listening to your talk and seeing how warm and compassionate you are about teaching, people are going to be a lot more ready to take the courses more seriously and really dive deeper into what it is they're learning.

Professor Trevor Bazett 32:05
Well, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it.

Outro 32:09
You just listened to U in the Ring, a podcast that dives into UVic stories. This episode is written, produced and directed by Tallinn Katari. Check out this episode and prior seasons on cfuv.ca/podcast.