Friday, January 15, 1999
Despite myth, grad students don’t always love their job
VALUE: Though placing time constraints on TAs, work opens many
doors
By Durrell Bowman
David Miller suggests in "’Invisible Hand’ determines value of
TA labor" (Viewpoint Dec. 7) that every teaching assistant (TA) has
necessarily concluded that "X dollars are worth more to me than the
benefits I would have from not doing Y work" and that working as a
TA "is the best thing I can do with my time."
He also suggests that "No one in the university ever said that
this job (being a TA) is required of graduate students." These
assumptions are all relatively unfounded, at least for Miller to be
stating them so unilaterally from his dubious perspective as a
complete outsider.
While working as a TA and at other jobs for a total of about 25
hours per week (including summers), I have also completed all of my
doctoral seminars, written and defended the examination portions of
my degree requirements, written and defended a dissertation
proposal, read several papers at academic conferences, submitted
articles to academic journals and reference sources, started to
write my 250-plus page dissertation, and applied for various
assistant professor positions in my field.
The kind of work we do as graduate students – whether our own
research or working as a TA – is not something we choose, as Miller
believes, instead of doing something equivalent in the private
sector. For many of us, there is nothing equivalent in the private
sector.
Working as a TA is a useful activity in "proving" oneself as a
teaching, examining, administrative and otherwise potential future
colleague of one’s professors, but only up to a point.
In my department, working as a TA is basically required of all
graduate students and there is no such thing as a "surplus" of
qualified potential TAs.
Working as a TA has never been "the best thing I can do with my
time." Indeed, it eventually becomes quite necessary to get beyond
all of this and write one’s dissertation, the successful defense of
which is the main factor in whether or not one is considered for a
professorial position down the road.
For example, I would much rather have worked on my dissertation
in the past two weeks than grade 160 undergraduate essays, with a
further batch of 160 or so coming my way tomorrow, and perhaps half
as many again (in the form of extra-credit assignments) in about a
week.
In fact, working as a TA is no longer worth the money to me, and
I am about to give up an entire quarter’s worth of 50 percent TA
income in order to do nothing but my own work for the first time in
my graduate school "career."
Bowman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Musicology.
He can be reached at [email protected].
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