Teaching

In many graduate programs, teaching fellowships are a necessary part of one's PhD experience: in exchange for a generous stipend and (hopefully) access to all of the college/university's vast resources, PhD students get the privilege of helping educate some America's best and brightest.

For many graduate students, the (mandatory) opportunity to teach brings both excitement and apprehension. I know I definitely had mixed feelings. On the one hand, the psychic benefits of educating eager students and capitalizing on all the perks that come with authority are attractive features of the teaching fellowship or teaching assistant program. On the other hand, the more time you spend helping other people, the less time you have for your own research.

In my program, we are required to teach 40 hours. At first glance, this seems like a really good deal. However, that 40 hours actually means four 10-hr/week semesters of teaching. Apparently, compared to those "poor, unfortunate souls" in humanities programs, this isn't too bad, either.

So far I have completed 35/40 hours required. I have to make a decision about the remaining 5 hours. Should I fulfill that by teaching? By a research assistant job? Should I get an outside grant and buy my way out of these responsibilities altogether? Here are the pros and cons of teaching, as I see them:

Pros
1) Teaching students is rewarding, especially when they notice the effort and reciprocate by getting excited about the material. I've had some phenomenal students thus far, especially in the undergraduate health politics and health economics courses. It was great to be able to inspire them and get to know them before they go on to do big things.

2) You can reinforce your knowledge in a subject you already know or learn something completely new. I've TAed health policy and health systems, health and political science, and health econ courses. All of them are centered around U.S. health care, something I knew comparatively little about. Now I have a good handle on how everything works. Not only that, I also have a sense of where the interesting research questions are. So if I can't get a job doing international stuff, I could always study Medicaid or P4P or something.

Cons
1) 10 hours/week is more of a time commitment than you'd think. Actually, it wasn't a big deal during second year, when I TAed in addition to taking a full load of courses, but was more so this past semester, my first year of "full dissertation time." I'm obsessed with finishing this program as quickly as possible - after all, I need to go back to med school! - and in order to do so, I think you need to get off to a strong start early on in the third year. There were many times when I felt that teaching responsibilities (writing exams, grading exams, holding section, etc) were destroying any momentum I was picking up. As such, I've taken this semester off to focus fully on research work.

2) For most students, TAing responsibilities involving teaching section, coming up with exam questions, and grading exams and problem sets. I think you can get pretty good at those things, as well as skills like explaining things well, connecting with students, etc, after two semesters of teaching. After this, I think there are diminishing returns to TAing as far as it making you a better teacher. I was lucky in my third iteration in that the professor I TAed for expanded my responsibilities into helping come up with the syllabus, give lectures, and work with guest speakers. I don't think I'll be as fortunate on the fourth go.

3) Diminishing returns also apply to labor market returns to graduate experiences in teaching. At the research powerhouses, I think they care a lot less about your teaching experience than what papers you've written; this also applies for tenure. If this is true, it might be better to spend time RAing and get on some random publication (or get a grant and focus fully on my own work) than teaching.

(Many of you may have had graduate student TAs that seemed less than happy to be teaching you. Reasons 1-3 may explain their long faces.)

I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I'm definitely applying for the grant, but there is no guarantee I will get one. If it comes down to it, the decision between TA and RA is tougher. I'll keep you posted.