Professor Accessibility, TA's, and Relationships

molliebatmit
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:08:11 +0000

How are the english skills of the TAs?

At least in my field (biology), top programs like MIT’s contain much higher proportions of domestic graduate students than lower-ranked programs.

Thinking back, I can’t think of a TA whose English skills impeded my understanding of the subject matter. But as Piper mentions, if I’d had a TA whose English I couldn’t understand, I would have attended another recitation section.



Obviously an alum like Mollie knows exactly what she’s talking about, but I thought I’d put in a word – the one major difference between graduate students and undergraduates is that graduate students are there specifically to work on something or the other with the given professor. I can only imagine the professor being a little more interested in a student that is explicitly interested in him/her in a more specific way, and is committing to several years of work together.

I agree, but I think the “attention” that undergraduates and graduate students receive is different enough that I just flatly don’t understand the “grad students draw attention away from undergrads” trope.

So I’m done with classes (in my program we take classes during first and second year), and I work full-time in the lab of my faculty advisor. He and I have scheduled ~weekly meetings to discuss my research, I present at lab meeting, and sometimes we chat in the hallways. This is about the same for the undergrads in my lab, although they meet with him less frequently because they’re in lab less frequently.

The undergraduates in his classes, however, see him twice a week during class, can attend his office hours, can set up an appointment to come talk with him, and can email him randomly on any topic that crosses their fluffy little Harvard brains. They definitely get more of his attention than I do on a weekly basis, particularly when one considers the per-unit-of-useful-work rate of attention.

To be honest, from the point of view of the lab (including the undergraduates in the lab), him teaching undergraduates takes away quite a bit of time from us. I accept that this is an important part of his job. But knowing how this dynamic actually works makes me kind of aggravated when people talk about graduate students getting some sort of disproportionate share of faculty attention.