Today I had the opportunity to teach LaTeX for the first time. Caleb Crumley, an RA for the DigiLab at UGA, has been working on a dissertation template in LaTeX that conforms with UGA’s formatting check. He finished it, and it’s got the stamp of approval from the Graduate School. To advertise the template, Caleb, Jonathan Crum, and I put on a three-part series to introduce the template and teach a little LaTeX as well.
As always, marketing these workshops is tricky and it’s rare to get more than about a dozen attendees. But, with some persistence from the DigiLab’s coordinator, Emily McGinn, the Grad School agreed to advertise a little for us, and sent out the information to the approximately 6000 grad students at UGA!
Within minutes, we had dozens of people registering for the workshop. After day or two, we doubled, and then tripled the registration cap! Sure enough, the DigiLab was fuller than I had ever seen it, and we decided to host repeat sessions of the three workshops as soon as the first cycle is over.
Knowing there would be so many people there, I was a little nervous prepping the workshop because I’m not as comfortable with LaTeX as I am with R. I’ve been dabbling with it for a couple year but I’ve only been using it seriously for about a year. All things considered, I think it went well, and I enjoyed it a quite a lot.
This'll be my first time teaching LaTeX, but I had a lot of fun putting this workshop together with @CalebCrumley and Jonathan Crum. The materials for today's workshop can be found at https://t.co/uyGNAq1EMe https://t.co/uhnz7sptRz
— Joey Stanley (@joey_stan) January 31, 2020
You can see more details about the workshop series here, the handout for the workshop on my github, and the UGA LaTeX dissertation template that Caleb made on the DigiLab’s github.