Many faculty awards come as happy surprises, seemingly out of the blue. Such is not the case for the prestigious Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, for which one must apply. A campuswide awards committee reviews the entries and makes its recommendation, which, in the case of the Regents award, bestowed by The University of Texas System, normally becomes the winner.
After being voted best teacher of computer engineering multiple times by students at The University of Texas at Austin, Ramesh Yerraballi decided to apply for the $25,000 award. He did not win. “I was really annoyed!” he says. The next year, he was asked to serve on UT Austin’s awards committee, and he saw from the inside the level of competition. “How vain of me to think that I deserved to win!” he says laughing. “Some of these nominations were so impressive that I cried reviewing them.” At the same time, he realized that the winning faculty members really told a story with their applications. “You don’t just do a data dump on them and say, ‘This is who I am.’ You have to present yourself. So the first thing I realized was, ‘You’re not that good,’ and second, ‘You didn’t really bother to present yourself.’”
Understanding the landscape and the process better, he applied again, and again he was passed over, though now without the indignation. After his third try in 2022, Yerraballi was named the latest winner of the award. He celebrated the next day by taking cookies to his classes. Writes one former student in an evaluation, “He really cares and knows the key to our hearts is free cookies.”
Other Yerraballi alumni have written, “Dr. Y is one of the best instructors and lecturers I’ve ever had. His teaching makes even the most obscure concepts simpler and easier to understand.” And “Dr. Y was an impeccable prof, who went above and beyond in teaching the low-level aspect of computers in EE 306. His lectures were intriguing, and his teaching style was unequivocally the best of any teacher I have had in my life.”
Others go further still: “Yerraballi is a god.” Another writes simply “Yerraballer!”
So what is it about his teaching that students love so much? For that, we must return to the mid-1980s and south India.
