This semester, I’m a TA for 15-316, Software Foundations of Security and Privacy taught by Matt Fredrikson, who’s just an absolutely phenomenal professor.

While I have taught the Rust StuCo at CMU for a 2nd semester now, there are a couple of new duties involved in TA-ing that I’d like to give thoughts on.

Creating Homeworks

I am not very good at this (the Rust StuCo has had only around 2 “successful” homeworks in its run so far). Fortunately, Prof. Fredrikson is very good at this, and has a bunch of material to draw from already having taught this course a couple times before. He does most of the writeups, and the other TAs help come up with most of the questions, but I did help create a lot of the infrastructure for a completely-new Lab 1 this semester, so that was fun, and also a lot of time since I was learning things as I went along.

Grading

This part was less strenuous than I thought. We divide up the workload pretty evenly, and I’ve found some good gaps in my schedule where I can just plow through all 60 students once I get into a groove. As a student taking this course, I thought my answers were very clever and unique, and now I realize everyone here is like that, which is good since that means the vast majority of them are correct.

Holding Office Hours

This part is the most interesting part of the job in my view. I get to interact with students directly and try to get them to understand new subjects, something I already had a bit of experience doing from tutoring at CMU. The first couple weeks were extremely hectic, but now it seems people are coming less, I think because there’s less work? I’m not entirely sure, here’s hoping people come in more for this next lab…

In conclusion, TA-ing is a very enjoyable experience, especially since I’m getting paid pretty OK for how much I’m putting in hourly. The professor is nice, the students are smart, and the content is just good stuff that I can get excited about.

Also I’m back baby, post hiatus over! Maybe! I’m still more active on other platforms but I thought I might as well put something out here while I’m on Fall Break since otherwise I just won’t do it!