I am interested in understanding the science behind learning and teaching. At CMU, I nurtured this interest through my role as a Graduate Teaching Fellow (GTF) with the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation. In some universities, this role is known as graduate teaching peer consultant. The GTF program has two main goals. First, we supported the professional development of the CMU graduate student community in their teaching. Our responsibilities included providing classroom observations, facilitating microteaching workshops, providing feedback on teaching strategies, and facilitating early-course feedback focus groups in classroom. Second, we ourselves gained deeper professional development in pedagogy through consultation training, as well as pedagogical reading and discussions. Our regular GTF meetings were led by Dr. Emily Weiss and Dr. Jessica Harrell. More details about the center can be found at the Annual report for 2014-15 and on their website. The most interesting part of this role was that I got to work with students in various departments at CMU - philosophy, language, history, design, other areas in engineering, and experienced diverse approaches to learning and teaching.