Teaching assistant in US university

[starxlit3]

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How difficult is it to land a teaching assistant position in an american university as an undergrad? I notice a lot of applicants mention TAing in their ECs, giving me an impression that it is almost very common.

 

[SN12357]

How difficult is it to land a teaching assistant position in an american university as an undergrad? I notice a lot of applicants mention TAing in their ECs, giving me an impression that it is almost very common.

This is something that varies a LOT from school to school, and within that, department to department.

 

[kyamh]

This is something that varies a LOT from school to school, and within that, department to department.

Definitely true, many schools don't have TA positions or maybe call them something else. At my school, the way to go about it more successfully is to befriend a professor and have them take you on as a TA - everyone who applies via the proper application channels never gets a chance.

I think the major reasons you see so many students who TA on SDN are that students here generally do well in their courses, want to show off leadership to med schools, see teaching/tutoring as a pretty easy way to make money during the semester.

 

[BABSstudent]

Definitely true, many schools don't have TA positions or maybe call them something else. At my school, the way to go about it more successfully is to befriend a professor and have them take you on as a TA - everyone who applies via the proper application channels never gets a chance.

I think the major reasons you see so many students who TA on SDN are that students here generally do well in their courses, want to show off leadership to med schools, see teaching/tutoring as a pretty easy way to make money during the semester.

I definitely miss my TA pay. Each lab was a set 5 hours of pay per week at $21 an hour.

Granted, the work sometimes took 10 hours a week to do but I only got paid for 5 hours of it, but it mostly worked out to be about 5 hours per week per lab on average. Still good money, especially when I was teaching 5 labs.

The route to be a TA for one of the classes was just to talk to the professor a lot and then request to be a TA. She picked people that got high grades and showed an interest in the class.

Another class, I had to take the class and get an A, then tutor the class for a year and then each student of the class ranked their favorite tutors and wrote reviews of them. The top 3 out of the 40 of us become TAs to replace the TAs that left. So that one was a lot harder to get to TA for.

 

[freakingoutabit]

I went to a large research university, and the only TAs were grad students. I didn't even know undergrad TAs existed until I started reading this forum.

 

[terrifiedcarrot]

At my school (large state school), there's about 30-40 new undergrad TAs per school year for bio classes. We have a special program for UTA's so it's not so uncommon.

 

[ready2go2]

I go to a small liberal arts school, so obviously grad student TA's are not really an option, so that's why you can become a TA for my case.

 

[rosaceae]

I went to a large research university, and the only TAs were grad students. I didn't even know undergrad TAs existed until I started reading this forum.

Same here. I also went to a large research university and the only TAs we have are grad students.