While Associate Professor Jordan Poler is widely regarded for his effectiveness in teaching and mentoring students, he says he is most proud of the successes his students have attained. Poler’s chemistry students have won awards for their theses and top prizes for conference presentations; they have attained high quality jobs in industry; and two are successful tenure-track faculty in Nanoscale Science.
Connecting with his students is important to Poler. He recognizes that inexperienced students need more resources to be successful. For the past eight years, he has offered a week-long boot camp for rising first-year students that he developed called Summer Intensive Chemistry Orientation. The boot camp helps improve student success, increase retention, lower withdrawal rates, and improve overall GPA.
Trevor Stacy, a senior majoring in Mathematics for Business, said, “Dr. Poler put all his effort into teaching my Chemistry 1251 class, and I really understood chemistry for the first time. He cared about our success and praised us when we did well while addressing us when we didn't. He really made me reevaluate my work ethic, take school more seriously and apply myself further.”
Poler also teaches physical chemistry to junior and senior chemistry majors, and graduate courses in chemistry and nanoscale science. He recently developed dual-cohort international graduate courses, building on the partnership he developed as a 2014 Fulbright Fellow at Southern Federal University in Russia. He also is a mentor to undergraduate and graduate students in his research group, where he has contributed over 200 conference presentations with students as co-authors.