Undergrads get chance to note top TAs

Though many students spend just as much time with their teaching assistants as with their professors, there has never been a mechanism to reward the ones who undergraduates say really make a difference. But starting in April, undergraduates will be able to nominate their favorite TA for an award sponsored by the Graduate Students Association Council. GSAC -- an independent student organization representing all graduate students in the School of Arts and Sciences and Ph.D. candidates -- plans to take undergraduate nominations from April 5 through April 10 and determine three award recipients, who will each be awarded $300, by early May. GSAC President Ina Warriner, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate, and Bo Liang, a third-year Chemistry graduate student and SAS representative on the GSAC executive board, suggested the idea of establishing a prize for graduate student TAs that would involve participation from undergraduates. While awards do currently exist for the TAs, they are decided upon by graduate department chairpersons or faculty members, Warriner said --Enot the undergraduates who they teach. Kimberly Killmer, a TA for Operations Programming and Information Management 101 and a fifth-year Engineering graduate student, said, "What an undergraduate wants is very different from what a professor wants and I think it should be recognized." And Warriner added, "Nobody in the past has ever asked undergraduates about their TAs, except for end-of-the-semester surveys, but it's never been used for a TA prize." The nomination process, modeled after those at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Oregon, will involve sending e-mail forms to at least 70 percent of all undergraduate students as well as placing nomination forms in The Daily Pennsylvanian. A committee consisting of undergraduates, as well as the GSAC TA prize committee and SAS Graduate Dean Walter Licht, will evaluate the nominations. Each nominated TA will then receive an application package that will be reviewed to determine the winners. "This is a wonderful time for undergraduates to recognize the TAs who are right on the line in terms of learning," Licht said. Licht expressed his support for the process and explained how teaching by graduate students is at times "more important than some of [the professors] standing there and lecturing." Warriner stressed the importance of undergraduate participation and noted that undergraduates would be able to best evaluate and appreciate a TA's performance, since undergraduates are closer in age to TAs and they find TAs more approachable than professors. Astronomy 1 TA and GSAC representative Nick Sarbu agreed. "This is really a better way to measure the interaction between TAs and students. From my experience, we interact more with students than with professors," the first-year Physics graduate student said. Nominations will be held during Graduate Student Appreciation Week and prizes will be awarded in May.

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