National teaching assistant award recognizes Oswego student researcher

Kaitlin Farrell recently became the first student in all of SUNY to ever win the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from NAGT: the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

A May 2026 meteorology graduate, Farrell earned the award for outstanding work in supporting faculty member Aryeh Drager’s MET 350/351 classes (“Meteorological Experimentation and Lab”) in the spring.

Farrell, who is interning this fall at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire, took the initiative of reaching out to Drager the semester before the class, knowing it was his first time teaching it and because she has a keen interest in research, instrumentation and sharing her knowledge. 

“I love helping people,” Farrell said. “I was grateful to be offered the position.”

Drager knew her already, as Farrell was vice president of the Meteorology Club and ran the forecasting competition for GLASS student meteorology conference on campus. But once the class began, Drager quickly realized that Farrell’s efforts and skills would exceed every expectation.

“To say that Ms. Farrell did an excellent job would be an understatement,” Drager wrote in his nomination for the award. “Ms. Farrell also proved to be a capable, clear communicator: she did a wonderful job both with various lab presentations and with her guest lecture on precipitation instrumentation, which was  noted as a highlight in feedback I received from students.” 

“What I did was pretty much help set and run experiments,” Farrell recalled. “We had Tuesday and Thursday groups, so we split the labs, and I was there for both those days. I would come in a couple hours early to set up for the lab.”

Drager noted that Farrell served as a valuable additional instructor during the labs, helping students learn the instruments and perform data analysis.

“She was always around, always willing to help,” Drager said. “She put in tons of hours, way more than a typical TA would.”

"This really helped me understand this is something I do want to go into, working with experiments and instrumentation," Farrell noted.

Dream school, dream opportunities

For Farrell, who grew up in nearby Central Square, SUNY Oswego’s meteorology program was the plan for a long time.

“Personally, it was a school I always wanted to go to because of the meteorology program,” Farrell said. “I knew from a young age this is what I wanted to do. When I was back in middle school, I wanted to get my bachelor’s in meteorology from SUNY Oswego.”

In addition to TAing and serving as an officer for the Meteorology Club, Farrell took advantage of some of Oswego’s distinctive research opportunities.

Over the summer, Farrell gained additional experience as a teaching assistant and driver for SUNY Oswego’s summer storm-chasing class, which uses forecasting and research skills to find the most likely places for activity in America’s Tornado Alley, then sets out to observe and measure tornadic activity.

“I was head of the equipment team,” said Farrell, who was a student researcher on a previous edition as an undergraduate. “I was in charge of all of the meteorology equipment, so I taught students what to do, watched over them to make sure they could put the instruments together and stayed within an ear’s reach if they needed help. I was also able to help everybody learn how to decode any issues, how to account for that and how to do any manual fixes.”

She also served as head of outreach for SUNY Oswego’s participation in the National Eclipse Ballooning Project, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, In this role, she led reaching out to K-12 schools for opportunities to present in classrooms, showing schoolchildren the instrumentation and talking about the importance of the research.

Farrell also was part of the university’s groundbreaking Lake Effect Electrication (LEE) project, funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate an unusual and underresearched lightning phenomenon connected to lake-effort storms.

All that prepared Farrell for the “incredible opportunity” of interning at the Mount Washington Observatory, known for its own extreme weather activity including the highest wind speed (231 miles per hour) ever recorded in the United States.

“Oswego has been such a great experience and helped me get this internship as well,” Farrell said. “I knew that this internship would really help me get a more of a foundation, a taste of what’s out there.”

For the NAGT award, the organization has recognized outstanding teaching assistants in geoscience education with up to 30 awards annually for more than 20 years. Graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants are eligible for the award. 

“I really want to thank Dr. Aryeh Drager for the opportunity to be a TA,” Farrell said. “He’s really been there with help and support to guide me toward having a good future.” 

Drager believes Farrell’s work – including writing weekly reflections on what worked well and suggestions for continuing to enhance the class – will have a positive impact on current and future Lakers.

“Our entire classroom community benefited from Ms. Farrell’s expertise and skillful instruction,” Drager wrote. “Likewise, future students in MET  350/351 will surely benefit from Ms. Farrell’s contributions to my own learning, as well as the reflections and suggestions she logged for future years.”