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 TA Program
The Teaching Associate Appointment
The second initiative of the Future Professoriate Program creates a new kind of pre-doctoral teaching appointment: the teaching associateship. Teaching Associates are specially qualified graduate students with at least one and usually two years of experience as teaching assistants. Associates are given more independent teaching assignments and, under the guidance of a faculty mentor, normally have primary responsibility for a course or section. Advancement to a teaching associateship is not automatic but rather depends on documented accomplishments as a teaching assistant that demonstrate readiness for a higher level of teaching responsibility. Currently, except in the sciences and engineering, the teaching assistantship is the primary means of support for doctoral students; indeed, in many fields it is not uncommon for doctoral students to hold such appointments for three to five years. It makes excellent sense, therefore, to regard these years as preparation for a college teaching career and to create the teaching associateship as a position to which advanced graduate students can aspire.
Teaching Associates, having already served as teaching assistants, engage in a more advanced teaching apprenticeship paralleling their training in research and aimed at preparing them more completely for a full-time faculty position. Like teaching assistants, they attend professional development workshops and seminars sponsored by both the Graduate School and their own departments, and in addition many of them elect to pursue the Certificate in University Teaching.
Anyone interested in becoming a Teaching Associate should contact their department's Primary Faculty Liaison.
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