Teaching Assistants

Teaching Assistants

The primary way in which the department helps to fund its graduate students is through employment as a Teaching Assistant (TA). Teaching Assistantships are awarded quarterly. A TA-ship carries a monthly stipend of between $1147 and $2294, and involves a workload of between 10 and 20 hours per week. TAs are also eligible for fee remissions – see below for full details.

New TAs

All new TAs are required to attend the Orientation for New Teaching Assistants organized by the Center for Educational Effectiveness (CEE). Details of how to register can be found at the CEE website. New international TAs must also pass the either the Test of Oral English Proficency (TOEP), or the SPEAK Test of spoken English. These must be registered for beforehand, and passed before a TA position can be started. More details about the English language requirements for TAs can be found on the International Academic English website: https://iae.ucdavis.edu/graduate/qualify

Requirements

To be eligible to be a TA you need to meet certain requirements. The first of these, the Orientation and SPEAK Test or the TOEP, are listed above. All TAs must be registered in at least 12 units; if you are not registered in 12 units, you may not be a TA. If you register for 12 units but subsequently drop a class and fall below 12, you may be in breach of your TA contract. You must be in good academic standing and maintain a GPA of 3.0 or above. If you are on either PELP or Filing Fee status, please remember that you may only hold a TA position for one quarter during your academic career. Furthermore, students may only work as a TA for fifteen quarters in total (by exception this may increase to eighteen). All TAs are required to complete a Graduate Student Eligibility Checklist and return it to the graduate program coordinator before their appointment can be entered.

Once you have been assigned a TA position, the graduate coordinator will provide you with a written contract that includes notification about the course you’ll be working on and the instructor you’ll be working with. As soon as you find out your instructor, it is up to you to contact them to arrange your first meeting. You and your instructor will then be required to agree upon your workload and return the second page of the contract, which is an agreement between the instructor and student on the duties, to the graduate coordinator. Please ask the graduate coordinator if you have any questions.

Salary and Fee Remissions

Teaching Assistants are offered at either 25% or 50%, and are currently paid as follows (2017-18 amounts):

Occasionally, students are given the opportunity to work as an Associate Instructor. This means they are in charge of instruction for the course, and for supervision of Teaching Assistants. An AI works at 50% and is paid more, but has a larger responsibility. They are paid as follows:

TAs and AIs who work 10 hours per week or more are also eligible for remissions on their in-state fees. For 2017-18, quarterly in-state fees stand at $5,963.76 ($4485.99 tuition and $1,477.77 health insurance). After fee remissions, students employed as Teaching Assistants are only required to pay about $276 per quarter. TA fee remissions do not cover out-of state Non-Resident Supplemental Tuition, however. For full details of fees and remissions, please see our page on Tuition.

Resources for Teaching Assistants

Note: To read pdfs, you may need to download Acrobat Reader.

Current Teaching Assistants

TAs hold regular office hours at the TA Office, MSB 1117. Office hours are posted outside the office, or on the individual course websites. Please check the course websites to find out the TA for that course.

We do welcome TA Applications from graduate students in other programs, if positions are available. If you would like to apply for a TA position within the department, please contact the graduate coordinator Andi Carr (MSB 4118E, abcarr@ucdavis.edu). Positions may also be posted on Handshake. Please note that all new TAs must have completed the TA Orientation offered by the CEE (see http://cee.ucdavis.edu/tao/index.html), and must be registered in 12 units as full-time students. International TAs must also meet the current UC Davis standards on spoken English.

TA Supervisor (2019-20): Prof. Jie Peng
Graduate Coordinator: Andi Carr