Mark Voorneveld: MSc Teacher of the Year

In November, Mark Voorneveld received the Education Committee ́s MSc Teacher of the Year award. He is currently an associate professor at the department of economics. UU gave the following motivation for the award:

“Mark is an incredibly engaging, organized, and thorough teacher. It is clear from his lectures that he has a deep understanding of theoretical mathematics and he makes his students' entry into this world easier from the structure of the course. He gives every student an opportunity to do great, and to be great. Mark is truly great at creating interest in what he is teaching, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Moreover, he is really funny! Thank you, Mark!”

Right from the beginning of his own education, Mark has had an admiration for his teachers and the breadth of their knowledge. This was an early inspiration for him to enter the teaching profession himself.

“When you are young, your teachers seem to know everything... they know a bit of mathematics, geography, biology, it seemed that they were an endless source of knowledge, and that seemed to be something to strive for.” He continued: “So, that is a very egoistic answer because I have not even mentioned the students!”

The other main motivation for Mark is to teach what he finds fascinating to others. He enjoys teaching in the university environment, as the students are there of their own volition and are motivated to learn. Already as a PhD student in the Netherlands, Mark started teaching at his university. After teaching at two Dutch universities, Mark moved to Sweden where he first taught at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, KTH.

“They wanted to offer a course in game theory, but didn’t have anyone who could do it themselves.”

Besides teaching, he conducts research at SSE, mostly related to game theory and decision theory. He is currently engaged in a project with researchers at Bocconi and the London School of Economics, this involves combining machine learning and game theory. Returning to the topic of teaching, Mark said that the most important traits for a teacher are clarity and understanding:

“Clarity in a bunch of different dimensions. Partly what is expected from students, partly in my explanations. Trying to understand where the difficulties are, and part of that is thinking back to when I learned this for the first time, what I found difficult.”

Mark outlined his use of analogies to simplify complex concepts. For instance, when explaining set theory to his students, Mark compares certain concepts to umbrellas. To make it easier for students, he also tries to give them the right resources. One example of this is providing elaborate solutions to all the exercise questions of the course, something that he says many modern textbooks lack, for one reason or another:

“If you look at my lecture notes, roughly one third of it is a solutions manual for the exercises. Because it facilitates self-studies... I think, and I hope, that it is something the students find helpful.”

A couple of years ago, Mark switched to open book exams as the standard for his courses. He believes this makes the examination more akin to what students will encounter in real life situations, where they have ample resources at hand to solve complex problems.

“I don’t think it is the right use of human resources to sit and learn a lot of things by heart, that even I would look up if I needed. It’s more important to understand how to use it, and that is really something that comes from practice... I really think mathematics is not a spectator’s sport.”

During his tenure as a researcher and professor, Mark has developed another aspiration, which he shared as follows:

“For the past couple of years, I have been thinking about collecting the material I have for different courses and try to make that into a book manuscript, to get that published. I want to write some new material as well, there are very good books around and you want to have some unique selling point. There are some things that I already do in a lot of detail in my notes that are not done to the same extent in other textbooks. There are other topics in modern mathematics that are so new that they have not found their way into textbooks yet.”

In doing so, he hopes to improve the material that his students have access to, and reach out to other universities who may be interested in new resources on these topics. Mark left us with some advice for new teachers:

“Try to imagine yourself in the students’ place. What would you be most helped by? What parts did you struggle with when you learned it for the first time? And don’t be afraid of giving silly examples.”

Talking about the analogies he uses, he says that they are sometimes the things that really help students learn and remember concepts:

“When I meet [students] a couple of years later, the strangest examples are the ones that they still remember! And that’s good news, because I made up those examples precisely to illustrate something that was difficult. So, if they remember that five years from now... that’s quite a nice feeling as a teacher.”