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by hombre_fatal 745 days ago
Meanwhile almost every TA I had at uni didn't really want to be there. They were there for their PhD, not as a professor in training which would have made your position more understandable. And to boot they rarely spoke English very well. I had a few TAs that I understood so poorly that I stopped attending their labs.

The TA system feels like a hack where university gets to get free labor out of PhD students, but the undergrads suffer for it. I don't think there's much to glamorize. Nor do I think there's much to salvage from the days where you needed to attend office hours to get help. You see it as this critical human experience in uni but I don't.

That said, half my professors at uni also prob didn't want to teach. They were there for research.

1 comments

> They were there for their PhD, not as a professor in training which would have made your position more understandable.

Right. Not all TAs become professors. But at a first approximation all professors have TA experience; it's generally their first experience of teaching.

I was paid for my time as a TA, in the UK. It would be illegal for them not to pay.