Pelin Sayar

Where do you attend school, and what what are you studying?

As a Computer Science major at the University of Virginia, there are a lot of exciting extracurriculars I take part in. Two of my favorites being the Cavalier Autonomous Racing team, where I work on programming a self-driving race car to compete against other universities, and theCourseForum club where I work with a group of students to add features to a student made and led website for course and club evaluations used by over 20,000 students at UVA. In high school, I was a part of the programming subteam of the FIRST robotics team at my school as well.

What have your teaching opportunities been outside of Fairfax Collegiate?

In high school I was a tutor in various honor societies such as the Computer Science Honor Society, Math Honor Society, and Science National Honor Society. Aside from that I also tutored students to help them learn English as a part of the ESOL Peer Tutoring club. For the past few months, I have also been working as a private tutor for middle school math.

What sort of experience have you had in the subject you’ll be teaching this summer?

I have a strong foundation in math and computer science. I took math courses up to multivariable calculus and linear algebra in high school and have taken various computer science courses such as Computer Vision, Software Development, and Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms in both high school and at UVA. Outside of the classroom, I have built projects ranging from making websites to analyze and compare food ingredient regulations across the US, EU, and Asia to deep-learning AI projects such as detecting clinically rare anomalies. At UVA I am also a computer science research assistant in the department of engineering, an autonomous vehicle software engineer as a part of Cavalier Autonomous Racing, and a software engineer as a part of theCourseForum.

What excites you about teaching and working with students?

The curiosity and passion of my students to tackle complex ideas and grow the scope of their knowledge excites me the most! In my experience, teaching has always been very fulfilling.

Outside of work, what are some hobbies you enjoy?

I love listening to music, making new playlists, spending time with my friends and family, playing mobile games such as Geometry Dash, Piano Tiles, and Pokemon Unite, going rock climbing, playing badminton, indulging in photography, playing card and board games, and binging any good TV shows or movies!