This Thursday morning I will be proctoring a two hour long exam covering the last few weeks of material in the senior-level undergraduate genetics course I’ve been TAing for this past quarter.
I’ll watch as my fifty students struggle through the same test questions I struggled through when I took the exam yesterday. I’ve ushered them through the last ten weeks of “quiz sections” and “activities” – hoping to impart some reasonable method for approaching these problems, despite the nagging feeling that I should be telling them “none of this is important, except in the context of the exam we are about to give you.”
I don’t mean to sound negative. This quarter has been eye-opening for me in more ways than one, and for that I am thankful. I’m also thankful that my fifty undergraduates are so positive and intelligent. It has been a pleasure to be around them these last ten weeks.
TAships are a traditional requirement of science department graduate students around the country. Different departments and programs place different demands on their grad students – often seeing these TAships as a kind of “exchange” for the money they put into funding students before they officially joined a mentor’s lab (at which point the mentor takes over funding). In other programs, the TAship is an accepted lesson in preparing one for teaching or professorship later on. TAs can sometimes receive payment for their service on top of a stipend, which when you’re living off of a $30,000 stipend per year, an extra $8-10 grand can go a long way.
In my case, we are expected to TA two quarters, as “payment” for our rotations. Therefore I receive no extra funding as a result, despite being on an NSF fellowship. I am in no way disparaging my program, university, or the system in place – I am simply laying out the way things are for a PhD student in my department. Your TA quarters are often some of the most dreaded and demanding quarters of graduate school. I started it off ten weeks ago with this philosophy in mind: “I’m not going to think about it, I’m just going to do it…one foot in front of the other, eight hours at a time.” And trust me, that philosophy helps. But here is why TAing is so hard in PhD programs. Imagine, you are a second or third year graduate student. You’re coming up on your general exam, your first committee meeting – maybe, like me – you’re trying to write your first paper or manuscript. You’ve established yourself in your lab after a years worth of classes and lab rotations. You’re finally, finally starting to get into the swing of things. And suddenly, you are expected to teach a course for ten weeks or a semester.
Teaching is hard for graduate students because, lets face it – we all harbor that perfectionist streak in us. We all want to be excellent at pretty much everything we do. I speak for at least the majority of my colleagues in saying that within our field, it hurts our ego and our personality to know that we’ve given less than our best. When we step into that classroom – we want to have a perfect grasp on the material. We want to perfectly explain every question and every problem our students are having. We want to perfectly guide them through this class, and hopefully have them come out on the other end with a greater appreciation for the thing we love the most – science! But now, we’ve already gotten into the swing of things in our lab…maybe we can finally do western blots. Maybe we’re finally coding in R. Maybe we’re involved in team projects and our PI’s have deadlines and expectations and grants. We want to keep doing all of those things perfectly too.
The inherent problem and resulting dread of TAing is that we as grad students want to keep doing everything really well, and that’s a lot of pressure we and others put on ourselves.
I’ll be honest though – I have loved teaching my students. Thinking and talking through the best way to explain science has really furthered my understanding of these genetic concepts we covered this quarter. But, I still feel like I’ve failed them a little bit. I didn’t have a say in the design of the course or the material really, but I felt like I didn’t get to really relate to them what is happening in the field of genetics today. I felt like I didn’t give them enough material that was really relevant genetics. I would have loved to see them have their minds opened to the amazing pace and publications that have come out in this past year alone. A lot of the material we covered in the course felt more like “historical genetics” as one friend put it. That seems really accurate. No one I work with calculates chi-square on paper. Most scientists who aren’t ordering primers every day might have to look up the correct sense and antisense oligos to use. We have incredible software resources that help us calculate statistics that are far better than what researchers without computers once had to rely on.
I’m not saying a little old school math isn’t valuable, because in the end I think it is. I think these basic approaches and lessons are wonderful in that they are simplistic, they are things we can test on, they are methods that are meant to build confidence and understanding and an approach to genetics. I just feel frustrated when my smart and wonderful students point out to me that certain parts of this approach don’t make sense, and my only response is “I know, and I’m sorry.”
In the words of a very accomplished genetics scientist, “Even I had to look up the definition of a “non-parental gamete”. I thought it must mean “the postman did it”. What a stupid term. As far as I am concerned, every gamete is from a parent.”
I don’t want to end this on a negative note because I loved my senior-level genetics class that I took at UC Berkeley in 2008, which I accidentally enrolled in as a sophomore. I loved that class, that class gave me hope – I loved the professors that taught it, one of which went on to be a very important mentor to me. It had almost the same curriculum as the class I’ve been TAing here. And it helped remind me why I loved science, even if it wasn’t the most relevant material. The professors sprinkled in enough modern science to reveal that there would be more behind the curtain.
I was taking my second quarter of prerequisite organic chemistry at the time, and I honestly was ready to give up on my dream of a career in science. I felt like a failure that year – probably for the first time in my life (or maybe ever). Those pre-requisite classes, the pre-med students, the exams, the feeling when you got a grade back that was below the class median…the intense pressure and focus on the “curve” and GPA. I was so unhappy and truly saddened that this was what a career in science was demanding from me. Gone was the wonder, curiosity, and creativity I was allowed in my high school science courses. In high school I felt so sure and motivated and thrilled to one day work on real projects and in a real lab. But that basic genetics course pulled me out of some hole that I had dug myself in. I reached out to the professor who taught the class, inquiring about an internship in his lab. And since then I haven’t looked back.
So, if my students ever read this, I want them to know. I didn’t ace that genetics class. But I love what I do. And it’s not about the test or knowing exactly how to calculate a chi-square (except it will be this Thursday, and I want you all to calculate it perfectly!) Science is so much more than that, and so much more exciting and thrilling in the real, relevant world we live in today. I just hope the exams, the pre-reqs, and the curve don’t discourage any of our extremely bright and qualified geneticists of the future.