Welcome to our TA Professional Development website. This site has been designed to familiarize you with being a Teaching Assistant in the Biology Program at UBC. Although every TAship is different and every course has its own requirements, which the course faculty supervisor will outline for you, we feel that there are enough similarities in all positions that we can address some of the issues here.
Many of you have come from different countries, cultures and campuses. Most of you are taking the big step from being the student to being the TA. We want you to be aware of some of the conditions of your employment as a TA (a TAship is a job) at UBC and we also want to acquaint you with some of the situations you may encounter. We cannot possibly give you solutions to all the potential problems which may arise, but we hope to point you to resources within UBC that are there to support you.
The Biology Program relies heavily on TAs to teach our undergraduate classes and we are fortunate to have had many outstanding TAs in our program. We expect this tradition to continue and hope that this site is a useful reference in your successful teaching career at UBC.
If you have any questions or comments after reading the site, or want to clarify something, please post them here.
Nikta Fay
sunita
knomme
Carol Pollock