Graduate Teaching Assistant

If classes were boats, most elementary, middle, and high school classes would be kayaks, small enough and simple enough to be paddled by a single Teacher. Because they can have hundreds of students in them, many college classes, on the other hand, would be battleships, so large and sophisticated that it takes an entire crew to run them. A Graduate Teaching Assistant is part of that crew, assisting the Captain — the Professor — with his or her teaching duties.

A Graduate Teaching Assistant is often known simply as a “TA.” As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, you’re a graduate student who’s actively enrolled in graduate school, working in the classroom in order to help pay for your education while also getting practical college-level teaching experience in the subject you’re studying (which is great, since you probably want to become a Professor once you’ve completed both your master’s and your Ph.D.).

Just like the Professor you assist, your duties include giving lectures, leading discussion groups, developing teaching materials, planning classes, writing course syllabi, creating and administering tests, grading homework, scoring exams, and holding office hours for the purpose of meeting with students and advising them. In addition, you may be asked to tutor individual students outside of class, and to pinch-hit for the Professor when he or she is absent by serving as a surrogate Instructor.

A bridge between Professors and students, you’re like Professor “Lite”: A substitute for the real thing, you taste a lot like the original, but you have fewer calories and a smidge less flavor (that is, fewer scholarly credentials and less academic authority).