Did you all become TAs as masters students or PhD students? Were you students in that specific department in which you become a TA for? I know schools that won't even hire masters students as TAs (since its something like a tuition waiver of sorts), which I think is unfair.
No, my UG did not have a PhD program in chem (which is where I TAed) or bio. It did have MS in both but I know for chem, there were only 5 MS TA spots which had tuition waivers of some kind...not exactly sure how it all worked, and were also paid by the hour. So 5 grad students wasn't enough to staff the department.
Department did have a policy that TAs had to be chem majors or minors, but I'm not sure how much that was enforced. I initially was not a chem major, (was bio) but ended up switching but that was after I had been TAing for the department. And there were a handful of other bio people TAing chem as well. Don't know if it is specific to my UG, but the school didn't have that many chem majors. Most graduating classes had around 10 chem majors (BS), bio usually had ~150. But bio students have to take gen chem and orgo, so there are lots of labs that need TAs.
As for getting the job - a friend that worked there told me they were looking for more people, introduced me to the boss and I was hired. That's all it takes is a recommendation. Prof recommendations usually carry more weight, but I can tell you that near the end of the year, my boss would ask me and the other TAs if we had any standouts to hire. There were definitely people I recommended that were offered a position, though not everyone accepted.
Fakesmile said:
Does that include preparation time, like reviewing concepts to be able to teach to students as well as preparing materials for tutorials? (Or did you have to conduct a tutorial at all? From what you said, it seems that marking and being a lab TA were the only jobs you had as a TA.)
In terms of reviewing concepts, I usually did that on my own time, but some classes did have weekly TA meetings to go over concepts and what was expected of lab reports. But whether a meeting was held or not completely depended on who the the lab director for the course was. And because of schedules, there is no way everyone can attend the thing. They usually lasted 45-60 min.
Each class had separate tutors for 'course material' but TAs were encouraged to hold an office hour once a week for lab material. Some TAs would just make office hour by appointment only as demand was often not high, and the class tutor could easily handle lab material. Also, at my UG profs were very accessible, so if I had a question, I would just go straight to the prof. One term I had a whole 2 people come to my office hour, and neither one was one of my students, or even in the class I was TAing, I of course still helped them, but there comes a point when it seems pretty useless. Lots of TAs were also doing research and would just hold their hour in their research lab. We also gave out our emails first day and some questions were handled through that.
The department did have lab preps who were responsible for making solutions and providing any needed equipment. That was a job separate from the TA, though some people would do both jobs, for gen chem and orgo. But in the upper level classes like biochem, and pchem, the TA was also the lab prep. In those courses, the faculty did all the grading, so it's kind of like a trade off.
sorry for such a long reply
