Introduction & Working with Faculty

Bryn Mawr College and Graduate School and Arts and Sciences

Bryn Mawr College is a small liberal arts college, part of the Seven Sisters network of women’s colleges in the United States. Established in 1885, Bryn Mawr College offers students a vigorous education to the highest standard of excellence and prepares them for lives of purpose in all fields of endeavor. 

Academic excellence, civic engagement, and ethical commitment constitute the foundation of Bryn Mawr’s identity. The College offers a rigorous liberal arts undergraduate curriculum, distinguished graduate programs in social work, humanities, sciences, and math, and post-baccalaureate premedical program.  

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) provides Ph.D. education in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology; Greek, Latin and Classical Studies; History of Art; Chemistry; Math; and Physics. Bryn Mawr College’s liberal arts environment provides graduate students with a broad educational foundation and promotes the development of well-rounded scholars, including the opportunity to work as Teaching Assistants (TAs). 

This handbook is designed to provide graduate TAs with necessary information, help TAs to prepare for the semester, and share a list of campus resources and college policies with which TAs should be familiar. 

TA Responsibilities and TA Evaluations

According to the College policy, TAs may not work more than 17.5 hours per week on TA-related duties. Some professors know exactly what they will ask you to do. In other courses, the role of the TAs may not be clearly defined. It is to the TA’s advantage to have the professor clarify expectations before the beginning of the semester. If the workload or the nature of the work seems unreasonable, it is easier to negotiate before the semester starts. It may help to ask previous TAs what was expected of them and how much time it required. 

TA Responsibilities May Include but Not Limited to:

• Assisting course instructors (Professors) to teach courses 

• Leading discussions 

• Running and assisting with laboratory courses 

• Mentoring and supervising students in science research laboratories 

• Holding weekly office hours 

• Conferring with students 

• Holding recitation or review sessions 

• Grading 

• Lecturing (occasionally) 

• Occasionally covering a class for a professor who must be absent. 

For detailed information about your duties, contact the Director of Graduate Studies in your program. 

It is important that you find a balance between your TA responsibilities and your own research. If you find that your TA responsibilities are going beyond the required hours, you should speak to the professor that you are assisting. Your role is somewhere between student and professor, and you may become a buffer between the undergraduate students and the professor. You are a student to the professor you are assisting, but a teacher/mentor to the undergraduates. Thus, you will face expectations and demands from both your students and the supervising professor, and you will need to claim time for your own work. You should always remember that the professor is the one with final responsibility for everything in the course: structure, deadlines, most lesson plans, final grading, and any special circumstances that come up for the students. Having regular meetings with your supervising professor and asking them questions on any of these matters will help you balance your TA responsibilities.  

Being a TA means guiding learners, deciding how to communicate with students, liasing with busy faculty members, and considering your future role as a professional. While managing all your responsibilities can be challenging at times, the benefits of a TA position are impossible to deny. You will gain confidence, the ability to think on your feet, and the power of articulate communication. You will become familiar with the experience of helping students, making decisions, and coping with crises. Even if you do not make teaching your career, a TA experience can be rewarding and instructive. 

TA Evaluations:

At the end of each term, you will receive an email about TA evaluation from the GSAS office for each course that you served as a TA. Follow the instructions to distribute the TA evaluation link to students via email or Moodle. The GSAS Office will share your evaluation results near the close of the semester. The primary purpose of the evaluations is to document the contribution of TAs to the teaching of courses at the College and to help you become a better teacher. Frank and independent responses from the students are essential to achieving both of those goals. You may also ask your faculty supervisor to provide you with feedback on your teaching performance. In addition, these TA evaluations will be reviewed for determining teaching fellowships and teaching prizes. Your professors may also write letters of recommendation for you based on these evaluations. 

Financial Package for Teaching Assistantships

Teaching Assistantships carry stipends during an academic year, a health insurance subsidy, the possibility of Supplemental Summer Research Fellowship and/or Research Assistantship (RA), and a tuition award ranging from Continuing Enrollment (CE) up to two units per semester. Two units per semester is the maximum course load permitted to a TA. Teaching Assistantships provide stipends in exchange for a maximum of 17.5 hours of work per week in departmentally assigned TA duties. Teaching assistantships are available to students from their first year onward in Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics. In Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art, teaching assistantships are typically awarded to more advanced students. 

The Board of Trustees reviews and approves the annual budget during their spring meeting at the end of April each year. To provide graduate students with the maximum possible financial support, the GSAS office sends out the official financial support award letter to continuing students by May 15 of each year. Most departments finalize their funding recommendations for each student around April 15 (the deadline for prospective students to respond to admission offers) and submit the departmental recommendations to the Dean of Graduate Studies for approval. If you would like to know your funding decision earlier, you could contact the Director of Graduate Studies in your department in the second half of April. 

TA Payment: 

Your 10-month financial support for the semesters will be evenly distributed over the course of 12 months, mirroring the payment structure commonly used for tenure-track faculty in the U.S. You will receive bi-weekly payments during the academic year and monthly fellowship payments during the summer months (June, July, August). TAs receive their stipends biweekly during an academic year according to the student payroll schedule.

Please note that this schedule is different than the payment schedule for those on fellowship. 

Tax Information:

Teaching assistantships (considered as Internships for tax purposes) are taxable income for students and the College is required to deduct federal, state, and local income taxes from internship payments. At the end of the calendar year internship payments are reported as wages in IRS Form W-2. While fellowships are also subject to tax, there is no withholding by the college. This means that the paycheck you receive on a fellowship will differ from the one you receive as a TA, even if the total stipend is the same. 

More information on the College’s Fellowship and Internship Policy and Procedures 

Working With Faculty

Once you receive your TA assignment, you should set up a meeting with the faculty member in charge of the course. TA duties vary widely among departments and courses, so you can only get an exact sense of your responsibilities and begin preparing once you have met with the professor. 

Before the semester begins, we recommend that you: 

• Ask the professor for a course syllabus and about the types of students who tend to take the course: who they are and why they usually choose this course. 

• Discuss the major goals for the course and projected learning outcomes for students with the professor. 

• Clearly establish what your responsibilities will be. This may or may not include preliminary grading. If it does, discuss the professor’s grading criteria and standards. Find out how much autonomy you have in determining grades. 

• Find out whether the professor expects you to attend the lectures. It is usually a good idea to go to the lectures because it helps you keep in touch with what the professor is covering from session to session, and it may help you in responding to students’ questions. 

• If you are a TA for a humanities course, ask the professor to articulate how their theoretical positions represent, diverge from, or coincide with those of other scholars in the field. This may help you to decide how to approach a certain reading or how to place the professor’s perspective in context for the students. Don’t be afraid to refer student questions about a professor’s theoretical approach back to the professor if you aren’t clear on it.