During your time at Georgia Tech, as a STEM major, one of the things that you might choose to do is to TA a class. TAing a class can be extremely rewarding, despite being a lot of work and it can teach you a lot of concepts that you may not have understood when you took a class. It can also teach you how to communicate your understanding, and the insights that you have taken away/obtained from going through a specific class can also enable you to adapt to new and innovative ways of thinking about and solving a problem, based on the input that you obtain from other individuals. You may or may not TA during your time at Georgia Tech. However, just in case you do, I would like to provide my insight TAing for a core STEM class in my BME curriculum to provide insight into how I felt, what I learned about TA/teacher – student interaction, and how to make the most out of the experience. I am hoping that this inspires more people to become TAs for STEM classes, or just to understand how being a STEM TA is from a former STEM TA’s perspective.
Last year, specifically, I was a TA for an Introduction to Biomedical Engineering Design class. A lot of people have asked me what that experience was like, and what I learned and what kind of growth I experienced as a result, both personally and professionally. Thus, I would like to share some key takeaways and insights that I have gained and how I felt doing this TA job, as someone who had never previously done it before.
I was excited and nervous, as I surveyed the room around me. It was my first day as a BMED 2310 TA in Spring 2023 and a TA, in general, and I had no idea what to expect. I walked into a class full of unknown people, and it only became more daunting as it went from there. It was the first day of class, and everyone was staring at their phones, almost in boredom and a complete lack of interest in being there. We were beginning to do ice-breakers, and everyone was asked to name a fun fact about themselves, and the origins of their name. I was never a person who liked icebreakers. For a long time, I found them pointless, and talking comfortably in front of strangers was not my jam. However, I was here in this situation. I could not just not participate in an icebreaker. So, I told the students my name, and the origin of it, and tried to crack a joke and tell something funny about myself. However, I was just faced with blank stares. I did not know if I was just awkward, or if the students were not interested in what I had to say. Regardless, it was daunting, but I tried not to get discouraged. After all, it was just my first day. Leaving class, I tried to have more hope for the next day, but I was not sure that anything was going to improve.
Walking into class the next day, I tried to be more optimistic. Maybe the kids were just tired. Maybe they did not like the class, or maybe they did not like other classes they were taking this semester. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. So, I went ahead and started explaining the lesson plan for the second day. I explained to them how their lab notebooks should look, and what type of information was expected to be seen in that notebook. I also introduced them to their Fusion Assignment and explained what they should look into, and how they should seek help if they needed it. However, students still looked uninterested and were extremely quiet. Later on in the class, as students were working on their Fusion Assignments, one of them asked me a Fusion-related question. They were having trouble with a certain step involved in the conversion between the 2D schematic and the 3D creation of the structure, and they wanted my advice as to how I could help them. I told them that I unfortunately did not know the answer, as my Fusion skills were rusty, and I needed a refresher on it. I asked the other TA’s if they could help more effectively. The students looked at me in an annoyed manner, and I just felt more out of place. Why had I chosen to TA this class? Why did students think that I was such an ineffective TA if they did? How could I become a better TA? It was then that I thought of trying something else.
I decided that during the next class, I was not going to try to act like a professor or a person of higher authority. Rather, I was going to act more as a friend of the students. I was going to be more open, and try to be more relatable. From then on, during every class, I would ask the students how they were doing, how their semester was going and how their classes that semester were going, and what I could do to help them. From then on, I found that they slowly became more open and began to come out of their shells more. Suddenly, they were much more engaged in class and much more engaged in what I was saying, and I was still not necessarily able to explain everything nor did I know everything. However, things were generally off on a better track.
So, what were my key takeaways from this experience you ask? One of the largest takeaways was that one of the most rewarding parts of being a BME TA is the potential that you get to see, as to what students can innovate and create, and how the ideas that students have shape up into larger prototypes and physical and computational models. Another key takeaway was that BME design classes help prepare students for greater and larger challenges, ahead in industry and in the workplace, and being a TA is important as you can guide students through these experiences and help push them to take on new challenges, and push the envelope on the tasks that they pursue. TAing this class also deepened my understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of concepts, and how they all tie together to ultimately solve problems/issues. For example, when I talked to a group that was doing a Laparscopic surgery project, they told me how the physics of the Laparascopic stapler and the material properties behind the Laparoscopic staples tied into their decisions about how they designed the stapler and what parts they ultimately chose to utilize and what method they used to create it. This was really a eureka moment for me because I had done a project on improving Laprascopic surgery, but I had only looked at it from the vantage point of Biology and Biomedical Engineering. I had not done deep introspection into how multiple concepts could tie into the success of this Laparoscopic stapler. This was widely insightful for me, and it really got me to consider how multiple areas of science could converge and intersect to ultimately solve poorly-defined, and complicated problems.
