Last semester marked the third semester that I had been a TA. I learned a lot and made a lot of links during the process. It matured my social skills and my presentation ability. But there were times that I hated being a TA. I will describe my journey as of now:

First semester: Computer Workshop

This was my first experience teaching something at class in university. It started off with me wanting to make a change:

Make university a geekier place

Well, looking at it right now, I didn’t really succeed… But that’s something I will be discussing later on in this blog.

With the intention above, I sent a message to my first-semester professor and requested to present at the Computer Workshop classes. And since our professors love free labor (our university pays a dime to TAs and professors don’t really do anything besides presenting at classes), she agreed.

I was quite excited for this position, I thought I could change every freshman to a FOSS enthusiast in one semester. I was basically the professor at the class I taught at every lecture instead of the original professor. I even brought my good friend Nima as a guest to the class. (you can find links to the material I made for the course here)

I made a lot of good friends there, who later on join me with the student association that I am a member of as of today.

I might have not made them become FOSS enthusiasts, but I met a lot of great students.

Second semester: OOP Course

The next semester, I was responsible for designing the assignments for students learning object-oriented programming. I was the Head TA of the assignments section meaning that I had to manage a group of other TAs to deliver quality assignments to students.

This wasn’t as fun as the previous semester, I had to deal with a bunch of unmotivated TAs that just wouldn’t do their responsibility properly and since I wasn’t that socially able, that meant I had to do a lot of the labor myself.

I tried to make the assignments fun for the students, I even remember dropping hints to a TOOL song once.

Third Semester: Computer Workshop + Basic Programming

Last semester that went by, I took on the same role of being a professor (literally) for the same Computer Workshop course and being a Head TA for the C programming course.

This time, it was pure disaster. The Computer Workshop turned out to be a very grueling experience. The students were absolute soulless humans. They were literally ChatGPT wrappers that would cheat and copy-paste their homework from LLMs.

Due to this whole tedious process, I didn’t really have a drive to put my full effort. Assignments would be released late, The cheating had become ubiquitous.

A huge part of the blame was on me though, I wasn’t really prepared for such a big responsibility and I underdelivered my promises.

What I learned

DISCLAIMER: The lessons I am about to talk about is based on my experience in a university, which doesn’t pay their Teaching Assistants and this impacts the performance and attitude of TAs.

Pick your TA team right

Being a Head Teaching Assistant is mostly a management role. You have to act like a boss sometimes. The roles have made me explore some sides to life that I never anticipated one day I would.

I wasn’t and isn’t (fully yet) a good manager by any means. I can’t really request work from others and, I always preferred to do it solo, all by myself. But as you get busy with other courses and life, you can’t really handle it all by yourself. Eventually you will burn yourself out cause a big decrease in course quality.

So, this is when picking the great people for your TA team comes into play:

Prioritize the people you are familiar with

The people who you have regular communication tend to always be a better choice for your TA team. You can comfortably request work from them, and you can easily do a follow up multiple times if they are not delivering. You usually know about them more too compared to a stranger TA candidate.

Assign correct roles

It’s always a good idea to take advantage of your member’s capabilities. Assign a big role to someone who doesn’t have the capability, and you will suffer.

Split the work

Make sure to split the work evenly! Don’t assign too much work to yourself! Also, don’t be afraid to assign tasks to people. Nobody has forced them to become a teaching assistant.

Management

One of the greatest lessons for me as a teaching assistant was the importance of management in life. It was one of the first serious management skills that were given to me. This will probably go on to help me out in my future life experiences. It has also made me consider management as a career path as a whole. (I still love creating things with coding but being able to achieve big goals with proper management fascinates me)