<p>Firstly, I don't think I'd get picked for a TA position, because getting into the program I'm applying to is already a long shot. But even if I was confident that I'd qualify, I wouldn't do it. I have no desire to and thus, don't think I'd be very good. However, I keep thinking about it because of the financial aid. I feel somewhat unambitious (and even a little selfish) for not trying, and a bit like an outsider because it seems like everyone I talk to who is planning to go to grad school really hopes to be a TA. It's a great opportunity, I understand completely, but the financial aid is obviously a huge incentive. I don't mean to imply that most people do it only for the money, but I wonder how many go on to teach and don't try to take advantage of this opportunity simply because it's open to all grad applicants. I don't know... who else plans to go to grad school but not deal with undergrads?</p>
<p>Being a TA is actually quite fun! :D</p>
<p>Being a TA is like being professor's slave.</p>
<p>For those looking for a future position as a professor, TA experience is a necessity. No one wants to hire a professor with no teaching experience.</p>
<p>Besides, going into debt tens of thousands just to avoid undergrads is not something I want to do.</p>
<p>Please don't become a TA if you don't love it. This is my 2nd semester being an undergrad TA and last semester I had the whole bunch of "I need the money but hate my job" grad TAs and it was MISERABLE. This semester all of the grad TAs love teaching and are very patient with the undergrad students etc and it is MUCH better. So do the professor, the other TAs, and the students a favor and don't do it if you don't love the job.</p>
<p>I TAed as an undergrad and it was a good experience. It teaches you a bunch of things such as managing a variety of different personalities in the classroom as well as effective communication and consensus building. I think it's a good experience overall and at the UG level you will almost never have to deal with the type of crap high school teachers do, namely bratty, loudmouthed kids because in most cases students in UG have paid to be there. I'm sure there are the few ugly expections to this rule but I never came accross any particularly bad apples during my time as a TA.</p>
<p>Not all TA jobs involve teaching. In fact, I don't even see the students I TA for because another guy was assigned to hold hours. The workload is highly variable depending on what class you TA for though. Jmleadpipe, this isn't always true at state schools. Here, losing the HOPE scholarship is something kids whine and moan about because it's a tuition break and money for books. Everyone that goes here instate has this scholarship and a LOT of people lose it before the scholarship expires. I hear many stories of parents writing sob stories to TA's about how Johnny just needs a B to keep the scholarship so he can afford to come here.</p>
<p>Why don't you want to be a TA? What are your concerns?</p>
<p>I'm a lab TA right now and I love it. I mostly interact with first year graduate students and senior undergrads. It's a lot of fun since I meet with two students for three hours and teach them how to use a TEM. It's a lot of fun since we can talk about their other classes, what we find interesting in the various classes, what we like about our research, the area, and all those sorts of things. It's also a great way for me to reinforce my own knowledge of the material, since they ask me questions about things I hadn't really thought about before.</p>
<p>
Dude, how is that different from being a grad student in general?</p>
<p>Uh, how do you expect to go into teaching without "experimenting" as a TA? The last thing you'd want to do as an assistant professor is to appear completely clueless on how to handle a "simple" 15 person discussion section and grade papers efficiently. You really need to be able to hit the ground running as you work towards a favorable tenure review which does evaluate teaching abilities.</p>
<p>At least in the fields I've been in, grad students are rarely "just grad students" anyway. They aren't necessarily TAs - they might be RAs, they might be working part or full-time industry jobs (especially if they are part-time students), they might have a fellowship that requires them to take summer internships with a sponsoring agency, they might (at my undergrad university) be GRTs (my undergrad university's equivalent of residential advisors, except it was done by grad students and not undergrads), they might be doing more than one of the above. But the only students who were "just grad students" were those on full fellowships that precluded outside work. Generally, at least in sci/eng, PhD programs will only take students that they can fund in some way.</p>
<p>And most do TA at some point. Some do so more than others.</p>
<p>One of my grad programs was based on a medical campus, so we didn't have undergrads to TA -- you could (and were encouraged to) TA some graduate-level classes, but it would just consist of grading exams ... not much "teaching" in the traditional sense.</p>
<p>I worked as an undergrad TA for three years, and another year during my MS ... enjoyed every minute. But now that I'm a PhD student and knowing that only my research counts toward the degree ... well, let's just say that TAing has become a chore. And one I do quite unwillingly, even if my PI is the supervising professor.</p>
<p>This is my first year TAing....I'm my prof's slave but it's not so bad....I'm glad I don't have to teach tho....I just do grading and office hours. I actually like to teach but would rather teach ESL than an actual undergrad class.....in any case, I actually like my job and my boss isn't too bad.</p>
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For those looking for a future position as a professor, TA experience is a necessity. No one wants to hire a professor with no teaching experience.
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</p>
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The last thing you'd want to do as an assistant professor is to appear completely clueless on how to handle a "simple" 15 person discussion section and grade papers efficiently. You really need to be able to hit the ground running as you work towards a favorable tenure review which does evaluate teaching abilities.
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<p>Well, I wish it were true that universities really did value teaching ability when it comes to hiring and promotions. Sadly, I have seen too much evidence to the contrary. Not only is good teaching not rewarded at many places, it is often times actually punished.</p>
<p>Faculty who bring in large grants are more highly valued than faculty who teach well. Teaching excellence is so often undervalued that the late Ernest Boyer, vice president for Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, quipped that, "Winning the campus teaching award is the kiss of death when it comes to tenure."</p>
<p>Walter</a> E. Williams : Is College Worth It? - Townhall.com</p>
<p>*Proven skill in teaching is ignored or even stigmatized during [Harvard] FAS performance reviews, according to the report.</p>
<p>“Every teaching award earns a warning of how I should not wander off research,” the report quotes an anonymous Ph.D. candidate as saying.</p>
<p>Senior professors quoted in the report voiced the same concerns, worrying that a focus on teaching may prove detrimental to their younger colleagues’ careers.</p>
<p>“There are still pockets of [Harvard] University where winning the Levenson award for teaching as a junior faculty member is considered the kiss of death with respect to promotion,” the report quotes one anonymous senior professor as saying. *</p>
<p>The</a> Harvard Crimson :: News :: Report: Faculty Pay Should Be Linked to Teaching</p>
<p>*Wolfe's love for teaching prevailed even over MIT's rude and self-defeating treatment; he now continues to teach his popular Introduction to Psychology (9.00) course, as a visiting professor. The Baker Award, designed to promote undergraduate education, is now seen by many as the "kiss of death" -- any professor recognized for his or her excellent teaching is suspected of shirking research responsibilities and might be denied tenure, as Wolfe was. *</p>
<p>Undergraduate</a> Teaching at Institute Must Be Emphasized - The Tech</p>
<p>*Winning the "teacher of the year" award at a research university will carry very little weight when time comes to have one's contract renewed or to be voted on for tenure. In 1987, a Harvard professor whose credentials included such an award was notified that his contract would not be renewed. I personally know three other professors at three different institutions who were notified that their contracts would not be renewed after they had won "teacher of the year" awards. One referred to the award as "travel money." The issue of teaching versus research has been debated innumerable times and is unlikely to be settled any time soon. What is important to someone seeking good teaching is to find out where it is most likely to be found. At a top research university, where the professor knows that "publish or perish" are his career choices, it is unrealistic to expect that most will make teaching their top priority. To some, teaching is purely incidental. *</p>
<p>Sowell:</a> Choosing a College Chapter 2</p>
<p>I've heard that it's a policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for assistant professors whose teaching ratings are "too high" to be called to a special departmental meeting to discuss their future under the suspicion that they have spent too much time on teaching and not enough on research. In other words, you actually would prefer not to know how to be a good teacher.</p>
<p>sakky, I think that the perspective you present is valuable but one-sided. The critique you offer from the Harvard Crimson, for example, is taken from an article about a Harvard report recommending that pay be linked to teaching in order to address the problems you mention.</p>
<p>It seems to me that most universities expect faculty to strike a balance: to find a way to teach competently while making genuine advances in scholarship. To wit,</p>
<p>"evaluations of a faculty member's effective take into consideration the individual's contributions in the areas of teaching, research, and service. All three contributions are improtant in the vast majority of college and university settings, whether a massive Research 1 university or a small liberal arts college. In a recent, scientific survey of 'What Search Committees Want,' the single most desirable quality sought in a candidate was 'Potential for making a positive contribution to the institution as a whole,' which received a 5.36 ranking on a scale of one to six. Whereas a research university obviously emphasizes research first and foremost, liberal arts colleges tend to place more emphasis on teaching and service. As the survey would suggest, you should be wary, though, of the myths that teaching is unimportant in a research setting and that research is unimportant in a liberal arts setting. Neither is accurate. Assistant professors at high-powered research institutions are often informed that their tenure cases will be evaluated according to a weighted scale that looks something like the following: research 60 percent, teaching 30 percent, service 10 percent. But if one of these professors were to demonstrate utter incompetence in the classroom, no amount of research would be likely to earn him tenure.</p>
<p>"As a student in a graduate-degree-granting university, you can bet that your professors face considerable pressure to publish on a regular basis. But you should also remember that only about 10 perfect of universities are classified by the Carnegie Foundation as research universities. As the job market looms nearer and nearer, the trick will be to keep straight the fact that your university-research training—with its primary emphasis on publishing—may not be wholly applicable to all job settings (Semenza, Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century, 19-20)."</p>
<p>I teach at an R1. We don't hire ANYONE without prior teaching experience. And TAing counts.</p>
<p>Want to mention that a professor here that is pretty well known as being a great researcher (couple of papers in Science and other high-impact journals recently) just didn't get tenure. He's also known for being an abysmal teacher. No clue if the teaching ability matters (especially at this school...), but just a random tidbit.</p>
<p>(Alternatively while back at CMU I was asked to write recommendations for three of my professors for their tenure reviews.)</p>
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sakky, I think that the perspective you present is valuable but one-sided. The critique you offer from the Harvard Crimson, for example, is taken from an article about a Harvard report recommending that pay be linked to teaching in order to address the problems you mention.
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</p>
<p>Actually, I don't think it's one-sided in the least. For example, sure, that Harvard report regarded recommendations that pay be linked to teaching. But that's just the thing- they were just recommendations. So far, those proposals have not actually been implemented, if they ever will be. I am certainly not going to hold my breath. </p>
<p>More to the point, nobody is advocating that anybody should actually want to be abysmal as a teacher. The issue is, do you really need to have prior teaching experience, as was asserted by another poster. I can tell you that both Harvard and MIT have hired some new junior faculty that have never taught - not even once. Another issue is whether you actually need to be a good teacher, and although that's obviously difficult to prove, certainly a large perception exists that you don't really need that, at least at a major research university. Rather, the perception exists that you need to be a minimally passable teacher.</p>
<p>I can tell you from my own experience that I've taken classes under quite a few tenured professors who were mediocre (at best) when it came to teaching. It's a reasonable question to ask how exactly did they get tenure, if teaching is so important to the tenure process?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Want to mention that a professor here that is pretty well known as being a great researcher (couple of papers in Science and other high-impact journals recently) just didn't get tenure. He's also known for being an abysmal teacher. No clue if the teaching ability matters (especially at this school...), but just a random tidbit.
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<p>Actually, RacinReaver, I am bit surprised that you're telling this story. After all, you go to Caltech. So did my brother. I think we can all agree that not all professors at Caltech are great teachers. In fact, quite a few are rather terrible, which is a point that even a Caltech fan as Ben Golub has admitted. The Princeton Review has also noted Caltech for having the worst teachers. Heck, my brother often times would not even attend many classes because he said they were taught so poorly that he would be better off just spending that time in his room reading the book. {Note, he was hardly a slacker, as he actually graduated with honors from Caltech.} So, that begs the question of, if teaching abilities are so important, then how did these terrible teachers get hired by Caltech in the first place? Then how do some of them get promoted to tenure?</p>