Flashes of Panic

In my discussions with the department last spring, they had mentioned to me a specific “assistantship,” neither an RA nor TA position. (Note to non-academics: “RA” and “TA” are frequently-used academic jargon terms for the two common jobs for funded graduate students: “Research Assistant,” a coveted position helping with a professor’s research, and “Teaching Assistant,” a position nearly everyone who has gone to a large university is familiar with, respectively. Tufts CS has a third category, sometimes called “System Administrator” but more often not labeled, which involves direct support work on the campus network and IT systems.) In fact, I’d actually been contacted by this other organization (a university support organization outside the CS department) about the assistantship; they put me on a conference call and I got a tag-team interview with them. I didn’t hear anything more about it, and assumed that was settled.

As usual, assumptions are a mistake; today I got an email indicating that I’ve been assigned to TA for CS 11, the Intro course. This opens up a whole slew of questions.

• The TA position requires more hours, and also pays better. It’s possible that the Department considers this a “better” position and put me in it when the spot opened up. It’s also possible that demand for RAs and TAs inside the department exceeded supply, and they decided not to send a grad student off somewhere else. How do these assignments get decided?

• CS 11 is both the most generic assignment possible, and maybe the only course I’m qualified to TA (assuming I am, which may not be a safe assumption.) Related to the first question, is this a generic assignment because they’re confused by the other-department position? Is it more solid than the last one?

• What happened to the other department’s position? Did the position vanish (possible,) or get given to someone else (also possible)?

• Do I like this development?

Even though I’ve been in town for a week now, I’ve largely avoided going in to the department, because I’ve had a lot to do here and I’ve been apprehensive that they’ll put me to work and suck up the rest of my “vacation” time. It seems like it’s time to break that silence and see if I can get some answers to the questions above, with the second and fourth probably being the most important ones.

It may not hurt to get an appointment with my newly appointed advisor (same email) and start sorting out my class schedule, now that I have at least one time commitment to work around.

Update, 8/25: Apparently the TA position is in addition to the other graduate assistantship, not in place of it. It’s five hours a week to bring me up to the usual 20 (with the corresponding pay raise, as well, though that might not carry through the summer as the other one does.) Huh, they answered all my questions before I could even ask most of them, though the fourth one still stands.

Now Playing: I’ll Be You from Don’t Tell A Soul by The Replacements