SCHNEEFLOCKEN - Vis - ETH Zürich

41
Coming to the dark side -
and finding no cookies
Hubert Ritzdorf - now makes funny noises when he is breathing
I came to the dark side last year as I got my master's degree and started as a PhD student. I had
high hopes and big plans, but as usual things came out differently. In particular I wanted to
be a really good teaching assistant(TA) but I had to realize that this is not as easy as it seemed
from a student perspective.
After becoming a PhD student in June 2012,
I gained first experiences as a TA in the last fall
semester. Alongside other, more experienced
assistants, I was assigned to the System Security
course, one of my favourite courses as a student.
However, from my own student memories, I felt
that there might be ways to slightly improve the
course. I wanted to make it a little better by getting
rid of the things I hadn't liked: delayed or
incomplete feedback and imprecise questions
and solutions.
Before the semester began, we redesigned
some of the exercises, making them more convenient
for students and removed some rather
imprecise questions. However, these supposedly
small improvements took more time than I
had expected, a notion that would stay a common
theme throughout the semester. As the
exercises began, I started to realize the full extent
of the weekly working cycle: preparing slides
introducing an exercise; answering student
questions about the exercise; looking through
the submitted solutions to figure out a grading
scale; grading all exercises and finally giving
some feedback to the students.
Thinking about these tasks all of them appear
quite manageable in terms of time consumption,
however, their combination and their
weekly repetition started to take quite a bit of
my working time. And this is where the actual
problem kicks in. While being a TA you already
have a full-time job as a PhD student and being
a really good assistant does not get you closer
to your degree. So given the time constraints
(24 hours on most working days) the trade-off
begins: answering student mails or reading degree-related
work, preparing additional slides
for students or progressing on a project, short
being a nice TA or doing your job and thereby
moving forward.
I had heard before that handling this tradeoff
can be tough, but this was my first encounter
with it. And so as the semester went on and the
schedule remained packed, it happened - I realized
assistant-me was increasingly behaving in
a way student-me would not have appreciated,