<p>I love michigan so far, and all the profs are great, but beware of bad TAs should you choose to come here. For my bio discussion, I expected to have a smart TA, as she attends the school with possibly the best overall graduate program in the country, but I actually found otherwise. For example, she didn't know the difference between southern, northern, and western blotting, and she's a GRADUATE STUDENT in BIOLOGY...grrr....</p>
<p>Patience Nirvana. TAs are hit or miss. That's the case everywhere. You cannot expect every instructor to be a teaching-oriented full-time professor. At least, not at a research university. Luckily, once you hit the 200 levels, you will have very few TAs. Once you hit the 300s and 400s, you will no longer have TAs.</p>
<p>No my point is that the TAs should be competent...I don't care about having them, I just want them to be intelligent.</p>
<p>Sorry for asking, but is a TA a Teacher Aid or a Tutoring Aid...or is it neither?</p>
<p>TA stands for Teacher Assistant. In many large intro classes at major research universities, like Penn, Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, Cal etc..., the lecture is led by a professor, but the class is later broken down into smaller discussion groups led by Teacher Assistants. Those are PhD students. Some classes that are very generic, like intro to Calculus or intro to College Writing are handled completely by TAs.</p>
<p>oh ok, thanks</p>