Perhaps it is fueled by how close I am to graduating, but this semester more than ever I have really come to realize the grueling demands and hard work of my teaching assistants.
This being my last semester at the University of Wisconsin, I decided to venture outside my engineering box, as I so often like to do, and take a couple liberal arts courses. The ones I chose were in the departments of astronomy, sociology and comparative literature. The first week of classes, I instantly acknowledged the large amount of students in them, yet so few teaching assistants.
My comparative literature class consists of 172 students and three TAs. My sociology class has 166 students, two TAs. My astronomy class, worst of all, has 122 students and just one TA. I remember as a freshman I was in a general chemistry class of about 300 students which had, as I remember, eight TAs. My engineering courses have had about 50 students and two TAs.
For the breakdown of students per TA for the aforementioned classes it turns out as follows, from lowest to highest: engineering – 25 students per TA, chemistry – 37 students per TA, comparative literature – 57 students per TA, sociology – 83 students per TA and astronomy – well, no math needed for that one at 122 students per TA.
Each professor since my freshman year has made it clear to the students that the majority of problems in the class should be addressed to the TAs. If you are that astronomy TA, for instance, that is a lot of problems for one person to handle. Moreover, let’s not forget the research that all of these TAs are doing outside of teaching discussions and dealing with undergraduates’ problems. Yes, let’s not forget the Ph.D. they’re after doesn’t just fall into their hands after five years.
Before I continue, I want to address two important points. The hopefully more obvious point is that I am speaking on an average scale and as an undergraduate observer. I can’t properly evaluate every exception on campus on a classroom-to-classroom nor person-to-person basis. Also, I acknowledge that graduate students have different TAing allotments coming into graduate school – some 50 percent, some 33 percent, most somewhere in between. It’s very possible that a TA handling 120 students came into it knowingly and has no complaints. But, even so, I, speaking as an undergraduate student, do.
I think it has gone all too unrecognized how much work graduate students put into this campus. Some are slaves of their research, others of their undergraduate students. All of them, however, I think deserve a big round of applause and then some. It nerves me how so many undergraduates and, perhaps even more importantly, university and state officials seem to take this for granted.
Speaking as a student who has submitted her applications to graduate school, these issues are important now more than ever to me. My peers have repeatedly called me crazy for wanting to get my Ph.D. While I am fueled by my continuing desire to dive deeper into the depths of my field, push the frontiers of it and teach others about it along the way, others feel like the excessive work hours aren’t worth the measly pay. For instance, take the computer science professor at the University of Utah who states, “You’re only dumb
enough to get a Ph.D. once” ().
Also notable is the ex-UW graduate student who publicly divulges how “…jaded, irritable, forgetful, angry…” her graduate studies made her.
It has been a struggle that in my opinion is undeserving for such deserving people. For instance, one of the most significantly unsettling issues currently facing students is the state’s re-budgeting. With deep concern, the TAA has organized a Valentine’s Day event to rally support for preserving funding to UW which falls under the headline of “I Heart UW: Governor Walker, Don’t Break My Heart.”
It’s a cause certainly worth the attention of the state.
Victoria Yakovleva ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in chemical engineering.
