Is it okay to send a thank-you-for-teaching to a professor who taught a course a few semesters ago? In my first semester of Ph.D., I took a course about machine learning (ML), because I find it very fancy and interesting (however, my field of research is theoretical physics, far away from ML).
The professor who taught ML was an old and super cool guy. He made this course a real fun to learn. Now after one year, as a side project, I wrote a &quot;deepfake&quot; ML algorithm (of course, it had already been done, and I took a lot of help from GitHub), but still, the content that I learned in my ML course was very helpful in all this process.
I was about to write an email to the professor who taught the ML course. I wonder if it is okay to send something like, &quot;Professor, I am really very thankful to you for putting all the effort into making the ML course easy and fun. Here is what I have achieved from the content that you taught me [attachments]&quot;?
Yes, it is entirely appropriate and will be appreciated. Let the person know a bit about your current activities - especially successes.
Even better, if it weren't for the pandemic, would be to pay them an in-person visit during office hours. Too few people get a chance to thank their important mentors, I'm afraid.