Learning to teach

Between teaching, doing research for her dissertation, attending meetings and grading exams, Jelena Bradic GS leads the dizzyingly over-packed lifestyle that many of her fellow graduate students can relate to. “Sometimes I’m up until 5 a.m. and don’t even realize it,” the third-year operations research and financial engineering (ORFE) graduate student said.

But for undergraduates, graduate students are most familiar in their role as preceptors. And for many graduate students — just years removed from the opposite end of the classroom — precepting is their first foray into the world of teaching. The experience is highly variable, depending on the individual department and the course’s professor, and preceptors are charged with anything from grading problem sets to leading lectures.

The placement process

Teaching requirements vary widely by department. While the sociology department, for instance, requires graduate students to lead precepts for three courses, the mathematics department encourages graduate students to gain teaching experience but does not have a requirement.

Bradic, who began teaching this year, noted that course selection is straightforward in the ORFE department.

“They give you enough time to think about what you really want to do,” she said. “Mostly everyone I work with got their first choice.”

But in departments with fewer courses that cover a broad scope, it can be more difficult to find a good fit, explained Kyrill Kunakhovich GS, whose research in the history department focuses on Eastern Europe.

“If you do a field that’s narrower, there are just fewer courses,” he explained. “That’s the challenge for us: not what course you are going to teach, but rather finding a class that is suitable for what you specialize in.”

Kunakhovich said he was lucky to be matched with a course in Soviet history, since not every graduate student ends up teaching a class on a familiar topic. For third-, fourth- or fifth-year graduate students in the history department who are not assigned to courses they want, a viable option is to decline the assignment and not teach for a semester, Kunakhovich said.

However, after the fifth year — when University funding decreases and students increasingly rely on outside funding and teaching stipends to pay their bills — students feel more pressure to accept teaching assignments.

“As you progress, your funding is more closely tied to your precepting, so I’ve known people who have ended up having to teach something totally foreign to them,” Kunakhovich said.

Most graduate students only teach one course per term, because of the high number of available preceptors. Unlike Princeton, though, other schools often enlist graduate students to teach introductory courses on their own or to assist in multiple courses simultaneously.

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While this lighter load allows graduate students to devote more time to their research, it also comes at a price.

“You just get less actual teaching experience, which people are worried about a bit, especially because of the job slump,” said third-year chemistry graduate student Matt Naylor.

“This is sort of an apprenticeship for us, how we acquire our skills as teachers,” he explained. “And when you’re applying for jobs, your experience and what kind of reviews you have are things that university committees look at quite closely.”

Into the classroom

After being matched with a course, a preceptor’s role varies widely. Though professors nearly always construct course outlines before meeting their preceptors, some graduate students are given the freedom to personalize course components such as precepts or review sessions.

Economics professor Elizabeth Bogan said that she now assigns fewer responsibilities to her preceptors than she did when she first began teaching.

“When I first came to Princeton in the early 1990s, I thought, ‘It’s so important that the graduate students should learn to write problem sets and answer sheets and participate in forming what we’re going to cover in the precepts,’ ” Bogan explained. But, she added, she dropped that model upon realizing how burdensome a typical graduate student’s workload is.

“My graduate students are writing Ph.D. dissertations, they are then later looking for jobs, their time commitments are really tight,” she said. “And I’m not convinced that writing problem sets would be all that useful to them, both as growing teachers and as growing economists.”

While Bogan has moved away from assigning graduate students heavy responsibilities, Naylor said that in chemistry courses, he is responsible for creating problem sets and even exams.

“It’s fascinating being on the other side ... designing good problem sets and good exams with good example problems,” he said. “It’s both a blast and challenging — and sometimes frustrating.”

Bradic said that increasing graduate student involvement in choosing course topics or teaching materials would be “unfair” to undergraduate students who enroll in classes expecting to learn about the professor’s view. But at the same time, Bradic said she feels that graduate students are more attuned to students’ needs.

“Sometimes it’s frustrating because we’re younger, and the way we would teach things is more current, maybe more in line with what students might want,” she said.

Professors may also encourage graduate students to provide perspectives on lecture material that are informed by their own research.

“Especially with the advanced courses, I tell my students to draw on their own background and education,” Bogan said. “I had a TA [teaching assistant] last fall in [WWS 307: Economics and Public Policy] who is Canadian, and one of the examples I was bringing up was health care in Canada, and I encouraged her to talk about it ... I think the students enjoyed it very much."

Psychology student Yu-Wei Chen GS explained that a preceptor’s role in a class also varies with the level of the course.

“For labs in [PSY 101: Introduction to Psychology], we actually have a set outline, and the lab coordinators tell us exactly which topics we should talk about and which activities we will be doing,” she said. “So for that kind of course, we don’t have a lot of freedom.”

But, she added, graduate students have “more freedom to create discussion topics from the chapters and articles” in smaller, more advanced psychology courses that emphasize discussions rather than labs.

Some professors even allow preceptors to take on the role of lecturer.

Linguistics professor Adele Goldberg, for example, said she asks her preceptors to lead one lecture.

“I generally give them an outline of the material, but they have a lot of leeway in that they choose how to implement it,” she explained.

Lessons from teaching

For graduate students, teaching a precept is a learning experience in itself.

“You never learn more than [you do] when you teach — every tutor knows that,” Goldberg said, “So it’s a real opportunity for [graduate students].”

Goldberg added that she found her own experience as a graduate student has influenced her teaching style today.

“When I began teaching, I would be more formal because I was trying to be ‘the grown-up professor,’ ” she said. “But now that I’ve been teaching for 15 years, I actually have more of the informal style that I did as an AI [assistant instructor], so I’m having more of a good time, which means students also tend to have more of a good time.”

Though preceptors may not play a key role in shaping a course’s direction, their importance should not be underestimated, English professor Sophie Gee said.

“Preceptors, almost as much as the lecturers, influence the feeling of a class, especially in the humanities,” Gee explained. “They’re the people who the students spend the most time with, by far, and the style with which they teach their precepts is what gives the students their in-depth experience.”

Bradic, who won the Excellence in Teaching Award for her work as head AI of ORF 245: Fundamentals of Engineering Statistics this year, noted that graduate students get as much reward from helping undergraduates as undergraduates do from seeking their help.

“Even though it took 10 hours, I was so proud after grading the [final] exams, because you could see where the student who came to office hours without a clue took what I taught and just knew exactly what to do,” she said. “That’s when I feel I’m really making a difference for them.”

This is the first in a five-part series on the lives of graduate students.