Teaching

University of Michigan, Primary Instructor

BE300: Applied Microeconomics, Fall 2019

  • Core applied microeconomics course for business school undergraduates.

  • Taught one section of 77 students.

  • Selected quotes from student evaluations (emphasis added):

    • “Professor Organ was incredible! He’s very articulate, super nice, and a great professor. I would highly recommend.”

    • “The instructor is very knowledgeable and extremely patient at explaining concepts. The instructor is hands–down the most patient instructor I have ever encountered.”

    • “Paul is quite gifted at explaining the material in an easy–to–digest manner.”

    • “Professor Organ is the best BE 300 lecturer in my opinion. He explains material clearly and incorporates plenty of practice problems to aid our learning.”

    • “I felt like Professor Organ was always prepared for class and knew exactly what he was teaching. He broke down concepts and always provided ample practice problems.”

    • “Paul Organ was a great professor that ran the course well, was always prepared, and answered questions well.”


University of Michigan, Teaching Assistant

BA480: Senior Thesis, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022

  • Full-year thesis course for seniors in the business school

  • Served as the PhD student advisor, offering general advice to the full class and 1:1 mentoring to individual students

  • Although the course evaluations did not ask about my performance, I solicited feedback from some of the students with whom I worked most closely:

    • Student 1: “After taking courses across all disciplines during my four years at the University of Michigan, I can confidently say that Paul Organ was one of the best TAs I have had the pleasure of working with. At the forefront of Paul’s one-on-one advising strength is his exceptional empathy and communication ability. Earlier in the year, I fell a bit behind on the recommended schedule for securing a thesis advisor, and I came to Paul for advice on how to best move forward. While most TAs would either singularly stress on the issue at hand or on alleviating the student’s concerns, Paul reinforced the urgency of the matter while also helping me feel secure in my next steps.

Paul is also quite generous with his time, stemming from his understanding of how busy students are; I never had any issue connecting with him, and he always replied to emails within several hours. His EQ is unparalleled, and this caring quality coupled with his vast knowledge of course and university resources served as a major reason why my peers and I felt so motivated to succeed. I chose to speak with Paul at several key decision moments of the course, knowing that he’d have fantastic advice for me. Paul helped narrow the scope of my problem area, suggested numerous professors and campus advisors to reach out to, and re-engineered my project methodology when a certain route proved to be a dead end, to name a few.

What was particularly impressive was Paul’s ability to harness objective thought frameworks across unfamiliar subject areas; my research was initially focused on implicit bias measurements, and though Paul had no background in the area, he took the time to research the methodology and offer viable pivot points drawn from his prior experience. I ultimately followed one of his suggested paths, and I can’t thank Paul enough for his advice and insight during my time in the course with him.”

  • Student 2: “Paul’s guidance throughout my senior thesis process was invaluable. He taught me how to code in R, clean my datasets, and set up plots for analysis that ultimately produced my thesis results – all with more patience than I probably deserved. He would be an excellent professor and I oftentimes (as well as our thesis cohort) reflected on how instrumental he was in setting us up for success while making the research process accessible to many of us who had never done it before. After working with Paul for the year, I now consider obtaining a PhD myself.”