17+ Years Teaching Circuits and MATLAB: Engineering PhD & Profess

Jignesh S.

I hold a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and have taught engineering at the university level for more than seventeen years, currently as a Teaching Associate Professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University, where I also served as a Research Assistant Professor from 2009 to 2021. My teaching and research center on circuit analysis, power systems, and microgrids, and I work in MATLAB and Simulink daily in both my courses and my research. I have also served as General Chair of the 49th North American Power Symposium and chaired IEEE Power and Energy Society committees on student activities and microgrid control.
Most of my teaching has been in classroom and laboratory settings with undergraduates in their late teens and early twenties, in courses covering circuit analysis, electronics, and power systems analysis, along with graduate courses and doctoral student mentoring. Alongside lectures I have run hands-on laboratory sections and held weekly one on one office hours across those seventeen years, and that individual work is what I enjoy most: sitting with one student, finding the exact point where the reasoning breaks down, and rebuilding from there.
When I tutor circuits, I begin by asking the student to walk me through a problem they are stuck on, so I can hear how they are thinking rather than guess at it. Most circuit trouble traces back to a few fundamentals: sign conventions, Kirchhoff's laws, and knowing when to use nodal versus mesh analysis. We rebuild those first, then move on to transient response, phasors, and op-amp circuits. I teach MATLAB the same way, starting with what each line of code is actually doing instead of memorized syntax, then using plots and simulation so students can see that the equations they solved by hand and the behavior on the screen are the same thing. My goal is that a student leaves each session able to solve the next problem without me.