Senior Marissa Taylor said she loved her job as an undergraduate teaching assistant, but at IU, her biggest challenge was the cap on how many hours she could work.
As a UTA, Taylor helped answer students’ questions in class, taught lessons and assisted in lab setup.
By law, the University must offer benefits to employees who work full-time or at least 75 percent of their available hours, according to the school’s human resources website. Taylor said she wanted to have more opportunities for teaching experience in her field, but the University’s regulations prevented this from happening because they would need to give her benefits normally reserved for more senior staff. In addition to her UTA position, she had multiple jobs on campus.
At IU, UTAs are compensated through either hourly wages or credit. Working hourly was a big piece of the difficulty.
Taylor, who studies exercise science, said she first applied to the UTA program as a sophomore and worked in the P215: Basic Human Physiology lab.
Part of Taylor’s difficulty arose in how she was compensated. Typically the academic department pays the hourly wage a UTA would earn, but she said due to a merit-based scholarship program, her position counted toward an internship with different compensation instead.
“I understand the purpose of them making that stipulation, but I think that it was doing a disservice to a lot of people who wanted to be involved in more areas on campus,” Taylor said.
The rules for her scholarship have changed, and Taylor said she is no longer working in the same capacity she was in previous semesters. When asked if she felt like the University’s cap on hours exploited students, she said it was most detrimental to students’ opportunities for experience on campus.
She also said her job in the past was not a bad position to be in. Instead of just grading student work, she taught labs and got to know professors and lab staff better. Her role was primarily as a set of extra hands and not the grading spokesperson.
Because many of the students in the program are close to her age, Taylor said it was important for her to balance her level of professionalism with relating to her peers.
For Taylor the benefits of the job far outweigh the complications of the University compensation rules.
“It’s a really good opportunity to make a big campus small,” Taylor said of the experience. “They always say IU is really large and it’s hard to get to know your professors one on one, and this was a really good opportunity to get to know professors and lab directors.”
