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Can I TA for You? (A Page for Prospective TAs)

Mar 19, 20252 min read

I sometimes receive requests from grad students looking to TA one of my classes. Thanks for your interest!

How do TA assignments work?

You might be curious to know how this process works on the department side.

  1. Every quarter, the department sends me an email asking who my TA preferences are. I send them back a list of TAs that I would prefer to work with.

  2. As far as I know, the department also sends out a survey to potential TAs. TAs indicate the courses that they would like to TA in the upcoming quarter.

  3. The department runs a process that matches TAs to instructors. Instructor preferences are one of the inputs to this process. I assume the preferences of folks wishing to TA are also included. I don’t know any more about the algorithm than this.

  4. TA assignments are announced to TAs and instructors.

My control over who TAs for my classes is limited to expressing my preferences to the department. In other words, I cannot guarantee that you will TA my class, even if I really want you to. In some quarters I have received the TAs I requested, in other cases I have not. This is to be expected — the department has multiple objectives to optimize for and must make tradeoffs.

How do I decide which TAs to request?

  1. My number one criterion is past positive experience working with a TA. The TAs at the top of my preference list are those that I have worked with before and had a good experience with. This accounts for the large majority of my preference list.
  2. My second criterion is word of mouth. After TAs that I have worked with myself, I prefer TAs that other instructors have spoken highly of. This accounts for a minority of my preference list.
  3. Relevant experience. This accounts for a minority of my preference list, even less than word of mouth. The reason this factor is ranked low is that the TA survey already asks TAs to list their experience, and I assume that the department’s matching algorithm already uses this information.

Feel free to send me your resume, I do appreciate the interest I get from prospective TAs! I feel it’s only fair to warn you that if you have not TA’d a class with me previously, you will probably not be at the top of the preference list.