Vasisht Natamai wins Bowers Excellence in Teaching Assistance Award

Graduate student Vasisht Natamai has been honored by the College of Science and Engineering with the 2026 John Bowers Excellence in Teaching Assistance Award. Natamai is being recognized for his outstanding work as a teaching assistant and is one of only two teaching assistants (TAs) to receive this honor out of approximately 900 who served in the College this past year. Here he shares how his interest in teaching began and how it has developed alongside his academic journey as a student. 

How it all started

Natamai traces his earliest foray into teaching to his time as a volunteer cricket coach and social studies tutor with School of India for Languages and Culture (SILC), a Twin Cities non-profit organization. The experience left a lasting impression on him. He saw that he could play a critical role in a teaching environment in ways that could support student learning.  

"Academically, I was also interested in Math from a very young age. I did Kumon for about 5 years before I started volunteering as a tutor at Kumon and once I turned 15, this became my first “official” job. In high school, I decided to do PSEO to try and get a “head start” on college. My favorite class, to this day, was my Calc 1 and 2 class taught at Anoka Ramsey. The professor for this class was really good at teaching the material and actually one of my inspirations to teach as well. He recommended me to become a tutor for math at the college and this became the first “TA-ish” position I held at the age of 16." 

"If you are teaching someone who doesn’t understand something, and they're super confused, and then you see the moment it clicks in their head, and you can kind of tell it clicked, that feeling is, like, oh yes, I did that."

Embracing challenges

When it was time for college, Natamai wanted to pursue a major that would offer him several career options and yet be math intense. So he chose electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. 

"In my first few semesters in EE, I felt completely fried because I would break every circuit. So I realized I might not be doing circuits at all, that analog might not be the right move. But I took a digital design class [Introduction to Digital Design, EE 2301], and that class was super fun because it basically was software, but not all software. So I switched over to computer engineering, which allowed me to keep all the math that I really liked and then apply it. Because of my PSEO credits, I finished college in 3 years and was able to start the master’s program in fall 2025. And right now as a master’s student, I work on AI focused hardware design, which is my area of interest."

During the summer of his junior year, even as Natamai waited to hear from employers on internship opportunities, he reached out to his digital design instructor for summer research opportunities and was referred to Professor Tom Posbergh.

"Professor Posbergh offered me a month-long project for the summer where I had to redesign the EE 2301 labs to work on a new FPGA [field-programmable gate array]. At that point my only experience using FPGAs was from one introductory class, EE 2301. So I wasn’t confident about accomplishing this goal within a month. But I took the project to challenge myself. I taught myself Verilog and gained a lot of technical knowledge just by applying myself to something new. I was able to redesign all six labs  for the course within a month and Professor Posbergh was very impressed with the progress."

For Natamai EE 2301 was formative in two key ways: he really enjoyed the course, and redesigning the labs for it made him realize that he wanted to lean into his previous tutoring experiences and become a TA in ECE. 

"Professor Posbergh put in a recommendation for me to become a TA for the fall semester of my senior year. This is how I got my first TA job at the University, as a TA for the Microcontrollers course [EE 2361]. In fact, he has been critical in shaping my path starting from my junior year to present day. The summer project also played a role in inspiring me to pursue research projects in the ASIC/FPGA field.

When I started the graduate program in fall 2025, I was asked to be a TA for the EE 2301 course so I could apply what I did in the summer and begin implementing the new FPGA in the actual course. Over the past two semesters, my lab sessions have been using the new board. This allowed me to identify all the key issues in my documentation and set the course up for success when we transition completely to the new board next fall."

Teaching philosophy 

"I want to be a TA who improves the learning experience for students. Typically, we are required to provide a 15-minute lecture, and I believe that the more you can teach at the beginning of the lab, the better the experience. When working with the other TAs, I recommend that we expect to spend more than the time that we think we need to make sure that students know how to do things right. Another thing is to teach by example. So I do the lab in front of them. 

You can't expect a student to always do the pre-lab prep before coming to the lab. Students are very busy and I remember doing some of the pre-lab work when I was a student in EE 2301 on the day of the lab. As a lead TA, I tell our team that you have to teach the way you want to be taught. 

I let students work in teams all the time. I think it's better to work in a team than to work alone. You're never going to be working completely alone in industry. So you have to know how to collaborate. And in the lab, the team can move faster as they can cross check their work unlike while working alone. They don’t have to wait for me. 

Even with grading, I focus on whether the students have understood a concept. If I see that a student has learned something, even if the answer ultimately is incorrect, I do reward them for having demonstrated that they are learning."