WUSA’s Teaching Award is a yearly award that celebrates professors who have displayed quality teaching, shown commitment to student success, and looked beyond the classroom. This is also the only award presented by the University of Waterloo Senate selected entirely by undergraduate students!
Nick Ray is the winner WUSA Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
“Nick is a brilliant professor. He engages us with humour and personal anecdotes to help us better understand the concepts we are learning and to prompt our critical thinking. His class is the kind of class you WANT to participate in and as a result, our class is doing very well. He really makes the class his own rather than merely regurgitating the basics – diving into films like Ex Machina and allowing us flexibility in our projects and assignments as well as assigning us frameworks to submit information (such as online blogs and collaborative PechaKuchas). We are allowed to choose any area of focus for our projects which interest us whether it be animal minds, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars etc.
Depending on your interests, Nick will also recommend sources outside of the ones provided in class for you to further your learning. He clearly wants to see us succeed and makes himself easily available to us. Additionally, he set aside time to coordinate Library Workshops with the librarian so that we can learn how to engage academically in the correct way with writing/research and gave us class time to work on group projects.
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"Thank you, Nick, for [your] contributions to our minds about minds. It has been a privilege to attend a class of yours.”