Sun Moon Stars Girl )-(

Welcome to my little place to vent…

W00t!!! I will start off by saying: this week has been hellish. School started on Friday, which means my time in the lab (ie getting stuff done) has dwindled down to next to nothing. I have two required seminars to attend every week, to which I must sign in. I feel like I’m being treated as a kindegardener with that requirement, but at least the seminars have been interesting so far. I am fufilling my TA requirement as a teaching assistant for two classes this quarter - Human Anatomy and Introductory Biology. I should note here that first: my background is molecular biology, not larger scale physiology or anything, so I’m not sure why I got stuck with Human Anatomy, and second: there was this whole confusion last year with which people should be TAing, and how many classes each of us had to TA, and what classes we were each assigned…well, they asked us for our “preferences” for this year, and basically ignored what everyone asked for. I had REALLY wanted to TA the Molecular Biology Lab I had last quarter again, but nope. Whatever, if they don’t want to align people’s backgrounds and interests to make better TAs is NOT my problem. My problem IS the daily interruption of TA requirements.

At least the professor for the Human Anatomy class isn’t requiring me to go to every class. “I want you to spend your time in the lab.” Sounds good to me. I’m mainly an administrative teaching assistant - photcopies, deliver required readings to the library, proctor and grade exams, that sort of thing. And it’s an excuse to leave work early - if I need one. The only “bad” part is that I have to have an office hour - but I can have it where I want and when I want. So I used it this week to work on my lab notebook. One person actually showed up - I couldn’t believe it!

However, the organizers of the Intro Bio class are a bit more nazi-esque, even for the non-teaching, administrative TAs (of which I am one). We are required to attend all classes, take notes, grade assignments from EVERY class (about 150 students), proctor and grade exams, and even have a dress code! If you can’t attend so many classes, or can’t be available to grade from 9-6pm after the exam is over - you don’t get credit for TAing. This made me have a mini-panic attack, as we already have plans to attend a rally in early December, and I almost would have missed proctoring the exam. Luckily I got a section that has their exam in the earliest time slot possible - so I should be ready to go to the rally. But we also have a weekly TA meeting, where we discuss exam questions, and how the class is going. My section is at noon on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so I’ve had to walk across campus in the blistering heat at the hottest time of the day all week. Not to mention it takes like a half hour to get there or back, so an hour class takes more like two hours out of my day, PLUS it hit 100 here in beautiful Southern CA on Wednesday, right when I had to walk to class! (Side note, power in our apartment area went out for four hours that night - what an experience that was. Thank goodness no fires burned the place down!)

Well, relief finally came today. I was about to leave for class when our admin told me to take the golf cart. I only recently even found out we had one, and I didn’t think I could really take it to class. She told me it was totally fine to do so; one of our work study students apparently uses it to go to class all the time. I got the key, was shown where it was, and off I went! One of the coolest things ever is getting use of equipment you shouldn’t normally get to use. I felt like a celebrity driving in the bike lane on the road to class! It was a little weird at first, driving this little open-air thing, but with a seatbelt on, and it was really easy to use. I probably won’t take it ALL the time, but it will definately help on hot or rainy days when I have to go somewhere.

w00t! The golf cart rules!