Job Description

Teaching Assistant

Haochen Shi

It is always exciting to share something that you are passionate about to people around you. Today I would like to share my experience as a teaching assistant for the FBE (Finance and Business Economics) department at the Marshall School of Business. Working as a teaching assistant is an excellent part-time job for students while they are completing their college. Maybe after reading the article, you would want to become a teaching assistant as well.

Teaching Assistant is a part-time job offered by the university that every student can apply. At the Marshall School of Business, a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course would have two primary duties: help with grading various assignments and assisting with office hours. Last semester, I worked with professor Juhani Linnainmaa for his upper division investment class. There were two teaching assistants, me and another Ph.D. student, who facilitate professor with the course material. My chief task was to grade all the assignments and exams for all three sessions, and my coworker was mainly responsible for hosting office hours.

There are three aspects that I would like to discuss that would help you understand my experience better:

•        Job Application Process
•        Grading Work
•        Working with Professor and Students

I will explain each of the three aspects in detail.

Job Application Process

People always have the misconception that it is challenging to become a teaching assistant. In fact, there is only a little prerequisite for someone to apply for the job. Everyone is eligible to apply for teaching assistant if he or she has completed the course with a decent grade. The only actual requirement for the position is that the student is interested in the subject area. I took the investment course taught by professor Linnainmaa during my sophomore year. And I was fond of the subject covered by the class. I also enjoyed the teaching style of professor Linnainmaa. Therefore, I reached out to the professor to see if there was any available position for his teaching assistant. Luckily, the department and the professor were looking for new hires.

The next procedure in the application process was to negotiate the pay rate with the professor and fill out the paperwork. Although teaching assistant is only a part-time job, its pay rate is decent, usually from $15 to $20 per hour. As an international student, I filled many tax forms and labor forms before I could officially begin my work. The school also helped me apply for my social security card, which is an excellent benefit for international students.

Grading Work

Grading is the most basic task for a teaching assistant. It is a task that is at first glance simple. There are three criteria that you should always keep in mind when grading assignments:

•        Maintaining fairness throughout your grading
•        Grading with scrupulousness so that you don’t make any mistakes
•         Grading with speed

At the beginning, it took me a while to learn how to grade works from students properly. The most challenging part for me to learn was to keep my grading standard consistent throughout the entire assignment, mainly when I must grade almost two hundred homework by myself. Sometimes I would forget how many points I took off for a particular type of mistake. I would have to go back and make sure that everyone received same treatment for same kind of error. Trying to uphold a consistent grading standard was the key; otherwise, there would be lots of complaints from the students. Speed is another key metrics when it comes to grading. It is a matter of practice to increase your grading speed. When I first started, I was a slow grader; and I also made lots of small mistakes when calculating and entering the grades. I felt embarrassed when students would email me and tell me that there was a calculation mistake for their grade. Then, I became more careful and scrupulous when I was grading. After I have familiarized myself with grading papers, I was able to finish all the work for an exam in two days.

Working with Students

In my opinion, grading is the dull and vapid part of the job. On the other hand, interacting with students is the more exciting part of the job where my passion lies. Due to excess workload from my other classes, I couldn’t host many office hours that would allow me to meet students as much as I wanted. But I occasionally would show up and help with answering questions from students, especially during the exam period. Before each midterm, I would receive many emails from students asking me questions regarding the exam. I always loved to help them with their questions. I remembered one time I was responding emails from a student late at night until I was sure that the student understood the problem he had. I felt accomplished and fulfilled when I was helping students resolve their questions. I felt even happier when I saw students who have improved their grades throughout the semester.

Takeaways

As you can tell, I loved the work that I did as a teaching assistant. And there are many things that I learned from my position. Being a teaching assistant helped me become more organized as a person. And it also honed my interpersonal skills. Hopefully, you would want to become a teaching assistant after reading this article.

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