This summer, I arrived in New York to begin my grad school life, studying IDM (Integrated Digital Media). Right at the start of the semester I was in a rush to find a job on campus — because with an SSN you can get a credit card and do all sorts of things — and it felt like getting a kind of proof to myself, knowing I was really putting down roots here. This would count as my first proper paid position, and it went a lot more smoothly than I imagined, so while all the memories of the semester are still piping hot, let me bring you all the gossip and the actual details of what being a TA in New York looks like.

Why Become a TA?

At the start of the semester I'd originally applied for a UX Designer position in the school's IT department. The interview went smoothly, but then — nothing. Total radio silence, ghosted completely. Around the same time I noticed the department was looking for research assistants, so I figured, why not apply for both? I was already doing teaching-related work anyway, and if I could also help a professor out with a project on the side, that sounded like it could be fun.

Before meeting my professor in person, I looked at his photo online and was nearly scared to death — he looked super fierce, like he'd just been released from prison (hey now). But when I actually met him, he turned out to be surprisingly kind, and didn't look anything like his photo. So during the interview with him, I opened up examples from my courses and talked through my programming experience, pulling up CodePen to show off a bit.

At the time I even mentioned that if the IT position came through, I'd resolutely ditch the department and go work in Manhattan instead, to soak up the feeling of a bustling big city — since our campus is in Brooklyn, which is comparatively laid-back and nowhere near as flashy.

After thinking it over for a day, I realized that if I kept just producing design drafts, it would basically be no different from what I'd already been doing in Taiwan, and I really didn't want a job that was just sitting in front of a computer making design drafts someone else assigned me. So I contacted the professor directly and said I wanted this job, lol. Looking back now, thank goodness I made that call — it kicked off this whole, oddly serious (?), evolutionary TA journey that followed.

What I ended up doing over these 12 weeks went way beyond what I ever expected — largely because I couldn't stand just sitting there letting people ask me questions, so I kept inventing more work for myself. This semester I took the department's TA system from having zero structure at the start, to establishing an entire set of operating rules: a booking system, a logging spreadsheet, weekly reports, performance analysis, and how to evaluate and allocate time. I also massively strengthened my own ability to build interpersonal relationships, learned how to cut my losses on time spent per person, and developed a lot of patience — no longer flying into a rage at the sight of a student staring blankly, clearly not thinking at all, lol.

Designing the Booking System and Setting the Rules

TA hours weren't originally supposed to require booking — you'd just pick a table you liked, sit there with your laptop, and fill out the office hours. I didn't realize at first that plenty of grad research assistants don't actually put in their full hours, and the professor still pays for the full 20 hours anyway — so, foolishly, I scheduled a full 20 hours of TA time every single week, and then fell apart, because 20 hours is genuinely way too long, and just sitting around waiting for people to show up is both boring and gives you zero way to predict how to actually help those students.

I remembered that when booking course discussions, I'd used a decent-seeming piece of software called Calendly, so in my spare moments during the first week I started researching how to switch TA hours over to a booking system, requiring bookings at least about a day in advance, so that my calendar would automatically show, from the bookings coming in, exactly when I needed to be on campus.

Thank goodness I thought of the booking system early on — as midterms and finals rolled around and everyone got more and more frazzled, with people showing up laptop in hand one after another, the booking system let me legitimately reserve enough time for each person. Of course, sometimes sessions ended early too, and I'd treat that as my own secret little break. But especially with international students, questions came in with zero holding back — hands thrown up, "I can't do this," dumping the entire problem on me. If the thing was simple, I'd still gently say, you should try a bit more yourself; but more often it was the kind of situation where someone would copy a pile of someone else's code, show it to me, and say they didn't know how to fix it — and then my whole temper would flare up and I'd tell them to go put in some actual effort themselves before coming back to find the TA.

Location and Wandering

I originally thought I'd get my own office, but that dream was shattered in the first week, lol — I was told to just find a corner I liked and felt comfortable in, as long as students could find me there. So at first I stayed outside the department building, and since I had no fixed seat, I had to switch spots every week; after two weeks I was genuinely losing it, feeling like I couldn't keep TA-ing like some kind of nomad. Eventually, I discovered that grad students in the department actually had access to a research room, and the moment I tried out a corner spot there, I was hooked for good — it even had a super high-end external monitor I could use, incredibly convenient, so I settled into that seat for the rest of the semester.

The Birth of the TA Log

As I kept TA-ing, I eventually developed the habit of, whenever someone came in with a question, immediately logging how much time it took and what they'd asked. This habit also meant that the next time the same student came with a question, I could pull up the record from last time and quickly get a handle on their learning state and where their weak points were — and, as a bonus, it served as proof to the professor that I was genuinely working hard, lol. Later, a few students went home after consecutive TA sessions and didn't touch anything, then booked again the following week, coming back to pick up right where we'd left off, without even trying to understand it themselves in between.

Weekly Reports

At the end of the first week, I just had this nagging feeling that the week had ended without leaving anything solid behind. Out of nowhere I remembered a friend telling me, back when we were chatting, that he had to send his boss a tidy summary email every week, reporting what he'd done that week or what ideas he had. Thinking it through carefully, running things that way actually seemed pretty great!

Work abroad is more free-form, and I deeply felt that my professor was actually really busy — completely had no time to deal with me — and had dumped the whole job of mentoring students onto me. So I started a draft to note down what I'd done that week and which students I'd seen, and then opened a spreadsheet to log every question a student asked and what I'd helped resolve. Accumulated over the whole semester, it really added up to something impressive.

Reducing the Times I Got Stuck From Not Having Enough Information

At first the booking form only asked for a name and a question. It wasn't until two weeks in that I realized I wasn't just responsible for my own professor's class — I was actually responsible for every class in the department that semester, and both grad students and undergrads came to me with questions (this course had two versions, one for undergrad and one for grad).

No wonder every student showed up with wildly different assignments and syllabi. When I figured this out, I suffered for quite a while, feeling like I'd been talked into a terrible job — but after I got my head straight, I started thinking about how to manage students across so many classes, so I redesigned the booking form to ask everything up front, all at once.

Sometimes after a TA session ended, I'd need to email a student some reference resources, and at first I did each one seriously, one email at a time. But eventually there were just too many, and I got lazy, so I built a set of canned-email templates — just fill in the name and link, copy, and send.

Getting My First Paycheck

Getting my very first paycheck in America was genuinely moving. Right now the pay can just about cover rent plus living expenses — I have to stretch it hard, and honestly go a little over most of the time. But being able to support myself with my own professional skills in my very first semester felt amazing — even though, compared to tuition, it's really just a drop in the bucket. Still, mentally, it told myself: you actually have the ability to properly live your own life abroad!

Performance Analysis

In the last two weeks, since there was just so much data that you couldn't tell at a glance how many students had come by or how long they'd spent asking questions, I again started inventing more work for myself. First I listed out how many times every student had come that semester, then tallied which professor each of them belonged to. Some of the results were only shocking once I actually crunched the numbers — this semester, one professor sent me a web-dev guy, saying their own professor genuinely couldn't help him, so he kept booking session after session with me the entire semester.

Once I'd finished organizing everything, I found that over forty students had come to see me this semester in total, and I also noticed a lot of students who made frequent use of office hours. Turns out, running office hours on and off like this, I really had taught the same material many, many times over.

The Many Examples and Creations Born Out of Teaching

Over the course of teaching, I myself would actually often suddenly come up with an unexpected way of writing something, or a creative idea, and I'd quickly write it down or implement it whenever I had a spare moment. The code taught in these classes isn't especially difficult, but the professors run the department's courses in a very design-school way — really encouraging students to come up with all sorts of weird ideas, discuss with each other what kind of wonderfully off-the-wall things they could make, and look at lots of case studies. Even though this made the load on me as a TA pretty heavy, I could clearly feel it was very different from the rigid, by-the-book way programming is usually taught in Taiwan!

A Few Small Takeaways

The feeling of gradually finding solid footing in an unfamiliar country is precious, which is exactly why I poured so much thought into wanting to do this first job well. And because a lot of the students who came were actually classmates in my own year, TA sessions would sometimes end with us getting a bit closer, having someone to chat with or grab a meal with, instead of shutting myself away alone at home doing everything by myself. Even though I often practically lived at school until two or three in the morning before heading home, I really was quite happy about it~

There's still a little bit of dissatisfaction in my heart about this job — the original job description said I'd be helping the professor with a project, but in the end all my time got eaten up by TA-ing. The professor also seemed to trust me a little too much, so he barely kept tabs on me at all; every time we did talk it over, he'd just tell me I was working way too hard and there was nothing to nitpick, lol.

Next semester I might help plan out a unified curriculum resource library for the department, and honestly, I'd love to learn the whole thing myself and teach it, ha ha ha. Having been ground down by hundreds of TA hours this semester, I feel like I could recite this entire curriculum backward at this point. I really hope that one day I can bring this whole course back to Taiwan — maybe it could inject some fresh life into programming education there.