Graduate TA Shortage Solved!
Three months after the campus rag brought the problem to light, it looks like the math department finally has a solution to their shorthandedness:
On Behalf Of Donald DrewRepeat after me: hiking the graduate tuition has improved the education we get at RPI.
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2005 4:47 PM
To: rensserv@rpi.edu
Subject: Re: undergraduate TAs
The Department of Mathematical Sciences may have a number of Teaching Assistant and Grader positions for undergraduates for the F05 semester. The TA job consists of handling a recitation for Calc I or II. Graders are needed for various courses. Anyone having an interest in these positions should send their curriculum vita (make sure it contains the courses you have taken) to Michele Kronau (email: kronam@rpi.edu).
Posted by Professor Donald Drew, Chair, Department of Mathematical Sciences
[emphasis mine]
posted by Bernstein at 1:13 PM
4 Comments:
Possibly a political move by drew?
Drew to SAJ: Look you won't pay my grad student's so I have to pay undergrads and the frosh's parents aren't going to be happy.
SAJ may be backed in to a corner and have to pony up the money to pay some grad students mo' money.
This is ridiculous - it's hard to find good graduate TAs, much less Undergraduate ones. The occasional exceptional individual is one thing, but the idea of making it commonplace reflects poorly on RPI.
If you take a look around the country you'll find that there simply aren't any graduate programs in mathematics where half of the graduate students are supported on research assistantships. Even in the very strongest programs you'll find that tyipcally 80% or more of the graduate students are supported on teaching assistantships or fellowships. In fact, RPI had a good reputation for having relatively large numbers of research assistantships in its graduate program in mathematics. For evidence of this, look at "Assistantships and Fellowships in the Mathematical Sciences", available as a .PDF from the AMS web site.
As a graduate of the program and a professor in an undergraduate program that has had some of its graduates accepted to the program at RPI, I'm no longer willing to recommend the program at RPI to my advisees.
My guess is that either the administration will give in, or the department will be allowed to hire large numbers of "visiting assistant professors" to teach medium sized sections of courses instead of using the lecture/recitation system. Another possibility is that they'll start using large numbers of part time (adjunct) instructors. The visiting assistant professor system is used by many universities, but from the point of view of undergraduates it has some problems (just think about what it would be like to teach four sections of a lower level math course while searching for your next job...) Either way, the number of graduate students in the program (and consequently the number of PhD graduates) will go down substantially.
In defense of SAJ, trust me I don't do this too often, RPI's Dept. of Mathematical Sciences is not like most other math departments. The amount of external funding is gets is huge compared to most other math departments. However, when you look at is as an applied math department, which it is, is get very little external funding compared to other applied math departments. Does this account for 4 incoming students being given TAships, hell fucking no, this is totally going against the Rensselaer Plan which is supposed to increade grad enrollement, not decrease it.
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