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What's an assistantship?
Teaching and research assistantships cover tuition and provide a stipend in return for work in the classroom or the laboratory.
Assistantships cover tuition fees and provide a monthly stipend. An assistantship may be:
- Quarter time (10 hours/week)
- Half time (20 hours/week)
- Three quarter time (30 hours/week).
Teaching assistantships
These require you to assist in classroom or field instruction. This might involve one or more of:
- Assisting a professor in a large lecture class (maybe containing hundreds of students)
- Teaching in a laboratory/recitation section with a few dozen students
- Giving lectures
- Preparing / administering / proctoring exams
- Preparing laboratory experiments and demonstrations
- Generating homework
- Grading
- Holding office hours
Why teach?
Being a teaching assistant is a great opportunity to learn or enhance your oral communication, organizational, and leadership skills regardless of your career goals.
Don't have much teaching experience? Don't worry
If you have never taught before, there are many resources that can support you, including:
- The faculty supervisor of the course you are teaching
- The Huck Institutes Teaching Assistant training sessions
- Assistance from Penn State's Schreyer Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence
Research assistantships
These require you to perform duties in a laboratory or field setting. Your exact responsibilities will vary with your program, your faculty advisor and (sometimes) the granting agency funding the assistantship. In some cases, your thesis research may be directly funded by the grant. In other cases, you may carry out research for a faculty member while simultaneously designing and conducting your own research project.
Appointments are made at several grades, depending on your experience and qualifications.