Teaching
April 5, 2018
When the mentee becomes the mentor
As a grad student, you may have the opportunity to mentor an undergraduate student, or even a beginning grad student. But how do you make the most of this opportunity? As a mentor, you are in a position to provide intellectual, professional and social guidance to your mentee. If you are working with an undergraduate…
December 12, 2017
The Grad School Guru – Equity in the Classroom: Putting names to faces
“How can I learn to recognize my students whose ethnicity is different from my own? I feel bad that it takes me much longer to remember their names and faces, and I have even mixed up some of the students, calling them by the wrong name. They deserve better! I do study the photographs we…
September 21, 2017
Fostering Inclusive Classrooms as a TA
How do we, as TAs or RAs, work to include all students we work with, given the difficult times the nation is in? — Anonymous This week’s answer is courtesy of Gonzalo Guzman, pre-doctoral instructor in American Ethnic Studies and the College of Education. To say we live in “difficult times” would be an understatement. This is…
September 13, 2017
Postdocs Rock! Here are 5 Reasons Why
Postdocs are vital members of the University of Washington ecosystem. During National Postdoc Appreciation Week (September 18-22), we here at the UW Office of Postdoc Affairs (OPA) in the Graduate School wanted to point out just a few of the many reasons why: Postdocs are often the first point of contact for graduate students and…
May 4, 2017
Should You Pursue An Academic Career?
“So what do you want to do when you graduate?” There is no better way that a well-meaning family aunt or uncle strikes fear into the heart of an unsuspecting grad student or postdoc over slices of turkey at the holidays. Although this question is well meant, it often makes you squirm and feel uncomfortable….
April 20, 2017
From an Overworked TA
The class I am a TA for requires 12 hours of student interaction and about half a day of preparing materials. Every week. This is way more than the 20 hours/week that I am paid to do. The instructor knows this and had originally requested twice as many TAs as we have, but the department, being…
June 1, 2016
Bad Teacher
Hello, Older graduate student who has had a career already so have a little life experience. I took a class with a teacher who was incredibly condescending both to the undergraduates and the graduate students — I pushed back a bit on this but got nowhere. Unorganized, due dates and test dates were “fluid” (as in they…
April 28, 2016
Mentoring 2.0: Finding and Working with Faculty Mentors
Throughout the year, we offered you strategies to get the mentoring you need to thrive in graduate and professional school—and we will continue to do so. We have suggested that building a mentor team of peers, faculty, departmental staff, friends, work colleagues and community members can help you recognize and meet your needs and goals as a…
March 24, 2016
Hours and Hours of Office Hours
I am a TA for a graduate level class this quarter, and my professor is asking me to hold 4 hours of Office Hours. I feel this is too much. I had TA’d the same class last quarter, and I had five hours of Office Hours, way more than any other grad class in my…
February 25, 2016
Gratuitous to Grade Grammar?
I’m a TA for a graduate-level course, and many of the students are not native English speakers. I am grading assignments with significant grammatical errors: incorrect tenses, wrong plurals, missing articles, etc. I’m struggling with the tension between not unfairly penalizing students, since English isn’t their first language, but also holding them to a high standard…
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