University Times

Winners of the 2012 Tina and David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award are Sunil K. Saxena, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Cynthia Skrzycki, senior lecturer in the Department of English.

The Bellet teaching awards were established in 1998 and endowed in 2008 with a $1.5 million gift by Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences alumnus David Bellet and his wife, Tina, to recognize outstanding and innovative undergraduate teaching in arts and sciences.

Full-time Pittsburgh campus faculty who have taught undergraduates in the Dietrich school during the past three years are eligible. An awards selection committee appointed by the dean’s office evaluates nominees’ teaching skills based on student-teaching and peer evaluations, student testimonials and dossiers submitted by the nominees. Candidates must have at least three nominators.

Each award recipient will receive a cash prize of $5,000. The winners will be honored at a dinner April 5.

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Sunil Saxena joined the Pitt chemistry faculty in 2001 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2008. In 2004, he received a secondary appointment in molecular biophysics and structural biology.

Saxena earned his BS with honors in 1989 at St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi, India; his MS in 1991 at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, and his PhD in 1997 at Cornell, all in chemistry.

In 2004, he was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which led in part to his redesigning the instrumental analysis curriculum and to organizing a number of career-development workshops in the chemistry department.

Saxena’s undergraduate courses include Physical Chemistry, Instrumental Analysis and General Chemistry, the last a course he taught in the University Honors College. He also has led undergraduate research seminars and co-organized a number of career development workshops for chemistry undergrads.

In a letter supporting Saxena’s Bellet award nomination, departmental colleagues described him as one of the strongest teachers in the undergraduate chemistry program.

“Sunil’s teaching performance has been ranked very highly on opinion surveys. He is one of the few instructors that students consider to be both very challenging and excellent in overall teaching effectiveness,” chemistry faculty members David H. Waldeck, George C. Bandik and Ericka Huston wrote in a joint nominating letter.

“Recently, Sunil has been teaching our course in Quantum Mechanics and Spectroscopy — which is notorious for its difficulty — and received the highest student evaluation scores that we have seen for this course. Sunil demands the highest quality performance from his students, but he also provides one for them.”

The faculty members added that Saxena’s undergraduate mentoring, academic advising and research training “clearly show his impact as a teacher reaches far beyond the traditional classroom role.”

Saxena told the University Times, “I was honored to receive the award.”

Saxena began gravitating to the field of chemistry as a career dating back to his undergraduate days.

“Participating in research as a senior undergraduate helped me grasp how and why chemical knowledge is gathered, and allowed me to appreciate the connection  between theory and practice,” he said.

He credited his graduate school experience with pushing him toward a teaching career. “Seeing great educators in action in grad school was a huge motivation for me,” he said. Good teaching, he said, “means walking away from a lecture with the knowledge that you connected with the students.”

While some people believe good teachers are born and others believe that good teachers only develop through experience, Saxena said: “I think it’s a bit of both. You need to have the instincts to see the material from the vantage point of the students and their backgrounds and training. You also need experience to be able to act on it.”

In his statement on teaching, Saxena wrote: “My aim in teaching is to help students discover and understand quantitative models of chemical systems and processes so that they learn to apply them with intelligence. In addition to formal lectures, term projects are designed for students to gain familiarity with these areas.”

He added, “I recognize that I need to be approachable so that students can feel free to ask questions. I also make an effort to memorize the names of the students.”

But effective lectures are the mainstay in his teaching, Saxena  said, adding that ordinarily he lectures without using notes. “In order to do this successfully, I have to be in complete command of the lecture material even before I enter the class. Since I am not busy looking over my notes, I can closely interact with and monitor the students to make sure they are following along,” he said.

“I attain these teaching aims by effective classroom lectures and by the design of handouts, assignments and examinations that emphasize key concepts. By augmenting curricula, I expose students to modern trends in chemistry. I work to motivate students by relating course material to the everyday experiences of chemists,” he explained.

Saxena said he was particularly proud of the fact “that these undergraduates have consistently deemed my course to be much harder than normal, and yet have stated that they learned much more than in the normal course.”

Cynthia Skrzycki joined the English department faculty in 2003 as a journalist-in-residence. She earned a BA in English at Canisius College in 1976 and an MS in public affairs and journalism at American University in 1980.

Since 2008, she also has been employed as a business columnist for GlobalPost.com, a Boston-based news service.

In 2005-09, Skrzycki also was a weekly regulatory columnist for Bloomberg News. She was a business columnist and investigative reporter for The Washington Post, 1987-2006.

In addition, Skrzycki was an associate business editor at U.S. News & World Report, 1983-87, and a Washington correspondent for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 1981-83. She also previously worked in the Washington bureau of the Fairchild News Service and was a business writer for The Buffalo News.

Skrzycki has taught a number of journalism courses at the Dietrich school and the University Honors College, including Great Modern Journalists: First Drafters of History, a course she created; Introduction to Non-Fiction; The Pitt News, a career-development course for writers and editors on the student newspaper staff; Intensive Reporting; Women in Journalism, and The Words of Wyoming: The Literary West, a course she taught for Honors College students as part of their summer program in Wyoming.

Her journalism experience, Skrzycki said, has served her well in the classroom. “The jobs are not dissimilar. Creating a syllabus and presenting it takes research, patience, digging, presenting the material in an effective, understandable way and exciting your audience,” Skrzycki maintained. “I have come to learn that the skills I brought to this [journalism] mission — clarity, seeking truth, straightforwardness and the willingness to revise over and over again — apply to teaching everything from how to write non-fiction to why it’s important to understand how the press covered the Civil War.”

Teaching, she added, is a profession of discovery for both student and teacher. “A liberal arts education is about thinking, and there is no better way to train the mind — not to mention the soul — than to write. Teaching students how to search out information, find meaning in it and convey it to others is the single most important thing they may learn here.”

Whether she’s teaching intro to non-fiction, a historical survey course or a hands-on newspaper writing course, Skrzycki said, “Teaching students how to regard written expression as an essential part of their education is what I have set out to do.”

In a letter supporting Skrzycki’s Bellet Award nomination, David Bartholomae, Charles Crow Chair in the English department, called her a brilliant and distinguished teacher who had transformed the department’s journalism program. “In my 35-plus years in this department, no one has so dramatically changed the culture on our campus, and no one has done as much for our students in so short a period of time,” Bartholomae wrote.

“Cindy’s courses are impressive; her work with individual students is exemplary. She is an outstanding classroom teacher. Her teaching evaluations are always at the top of the charts; her students regularly win awards in the most competitive of our school-wide writing competitions; her classes are in great demand,” he stated.

“Her general principle in teaching is that good students will be inspired by good writing  and serious reporting. She assigns challenging projects, she is a demanding editor and she provides excellent models,” he added.

Bartholomae also credited Skrzycki with redesigning introductory writing courses and aiding in the department’s curriculum revisions. “She also played a key role in our winning a renewable grant from the Heinz Endowments to support student internships,” Bartholomae wrote.

Skrzycki told the University Times that when she learned she had won a Bellet award she felt “a bit of shock and awe. [Becoming a teacher] is a path I began down slowly when I moved to Pittsburgh a decade ago. I became enamored of working with students, challenging them and seeing them succeed. I value the liberal arts and appreciate my own college education at the hands of professors — and a group of Jesuits — who made me someone who expects teachers and students to excel. And, as most people do, I had some exceptional teachers, such as one in fifth grade who introduced me to Henry David Thoreau.”

Are good teachers born that way? “Every syllabus, every class and every meeting with a student is instructional to teaching,” Skrzycki said. “I have tried to take the listening and writing skills I developed in an earlier profession to experiment with ways to best reach students, stimulate their thinking and get them excited about an area of study. I’m sure some people have something of a teaching gene in their nature, but even if they do, it takes the desire to constantly be learning something new yourself to be able to teach others.”

Good teaching, she added, “means having students who would not dare doze off in class because they might miss something; having them show up for extracurricular enrichment; seeing them in multiple classes where their interest has been piqued enough to make them deep learners in a subject area, and having them return over the years for more direction.”

Writing, on the other hand, is traceable to her early life. “I have been a writer all my life. It is my passion,” Skrzycki said.

“I delight in helping students acquire the skills to become deeply educated, lifelong writers and seeing them succeed at the highest levels of the profession, whether it is in academia, book publishing, digital entrepreneurship or journalism.”

—Peter Hart