SCRAMBLING FOR A JOB

During shopping period this winter, while hundreds of undergraduates scurried around campus trying to fill their schedules, Kristin Poole and other graduate students like her watched, waited and hoped.

Poole, a third-year graduate student in the English Department, says she needed a job as a teaching fellow in order to pay the bills. But because of fluctuations in enrollment, increasing numbers of graduate students and changes in section size, she wasn't certain until the very last minute--when undergraduates turned in their study cards--that she would get work at all.

Prospective teaching fellows are at the mercy of these undergraduates, whose course choices will determine whether graduate students sink or swim.

And some now say the solution to the problem of graduate student job insecurity may be the elimination of shopping period and the institution of preregistration for undergraduates.

More Students, Fewer Jobs

Graduate students rely on teaching fellow jobs to help pay for everything from tuition to rent. In addition, many need the teaching experience to prepare them for future careers in academia.

But due to recent trends in the numbers and sizes of sections, fewer job opportunities are available for graduate students in search of teaching jobs.

In the past four or five years, standards for section sizes have been codified and better enforced, according to Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education David Pilbeam. Many graduate students say the new guidelines often lead to fewer sections and subsequently to fewer teaching fellow positions.

The guidelines vary from department to department and depend upon the type of course, Pilbeam says. In a typical humanities course, he says, a single section may contain up to 20 students.

In addition, a course is often not granted any section leaders unless at least 33 students enroll, graduate students says.

When these changes are compounded with fewer undergraduates in some departments, prospective teaching fellows are hit hard, graduate students and department coordinators say. And the problems, they say, can only get worse as the recession prompts more college graduates to pursue higher degrees.

Both the English and Comparative Literature departments have seen increases in the size of their first-year graduate classes. And while these graduate students will only begin teaching in their third years, their colleagues have begun to fear for the future.

"God only knows what we're going to do when it's their time to teach," Poole says. "We're already wondering, are we going to be employed?"

The Scramble

The process of finding a teaching fellow job varies among departments and students.

Although the Core program attempts to inform graduate students about potential teaching opportunities far in advance, some departments do not alert their graduate students about course offerings until the course catalogue is published, according to Director of the Core Program Susan W. Lewis.

"They don't even know in any given department what's going to be offered," Lewis says.

And for students in departments which have no undergraduate counterparts, like Comparative Literature, finding a job can be an even greater challenge. These departments offer few undergraduate courses, and their students must look to other programs for teaching opportunities.

"Because we don't have our own undergraduate program, we didn't have enough courses to provide them all with teaching," says Judith L. Ryan, chair of the Comparative Literature Department.

But many departments, including the English Department, give preference to their own graduate students before they open their doors to those from programs like Comparative Literature. And this preferential treatment means many graduate students are prevented from teaching courses in their specialty areas, locked out by less qualified students.

"There's no reason why they should be hiring someone from the department first and keeping out somebody who's more qualified," says Camille Lizarribar, a third-year Comp Lit student who struggled to find work this semester. "You're hurting the undergraduates."

Even the English Department, which has a large undergraduate program and makes tentative teaching fellow assignments before the semester begins, is not immune to the chaos that erupts during shopping period.

"We think we're all set, everyone's happy, everything's hunky-dory," says Gwen Urdang-Brown, coordinator of graduate studies for the English Department. "Then the semester hits with the shopping period and everything changes."

Although department coordinators use previous enrollment figures to predict course sizes and numbers of sections needed, their estimates are often far from accurate.

The unpredictability, Pilbeam says, is increased because of the nature of the Core. Core course offerings may very dramatically from year to year, and undergraduates often use core courses to fulfill concentration requirements.

"An unusually large enrollment in a Core course can have a very significant and unpredictable spill-over effect in the enrollment in concentration courses," Pilbeam says.

Until undergraduates turn in their study cards, many teaching fellow placements remain uncertain. And after final class sizes are determined, some teaching fellows who thought they had jobs are forced back to the drawing board.

And unlike the Core, which does not fire teaching fellows it has already hired, some departments, have to rescind job offers, Urdang-Brown says.

This semester, she says, enrollment for the English Department's introductory survey course, English 10b, dropped so low that several section--and several teaching jobs--were eliminated.

When course enrollment is down and section are dropped, the graduate students assigned to those sections are left without the jobs they had been promised. The result, many graduate students and faculty members say, is a scramble from professor to professor, from teaching fellow to teaching fellow, in hope of finding an over-enrolled course or an unfilled position.

Poole experienced that scramble. "There I was the day of registration, running around trying to drudge up teaching," she recalls.

This confusion and frustration, many say, has been a part of graduate student life for a long time. But in her three years on the job, Urdang-Brown says, the situation has never been this bleak. "It seems unnecessary," she says. "I'm sure there's a better way to do that. The one word that keeps popping up is preregistration."

The Solution?

Shopping period is a time-worn Harvard institution in the tradition of post-winter break exams and John Harvard statue photo opportunities.

But the demise of shopping period, and its replacement with preregistration, "would make things drastically better," Poole says.

Many others agree that preregistration is the only way to ensure class size beforehand, guaranteeing teaching fellow jobs and eliminating the anxiety for graduate students.

Shopping period can also be difficult for professors, says Jo Ann Hackett, professor of the practice of Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic epigraphy. Faculty members waste vast amounts of paper in unused syllabi. For an entire week attendance in lectures and seminars fluctuates.

"Sometimes you feel like you're wasting your time," Hackett says.

Some graduate students and faculty members say preregistration would be beneficial to undergraduates, allowing teaching fellows more sufficient time to prepare for the classes they will teach.

"You want to be taught by people who know something about the subject area, people who have been thinking about it during the summer," Ryan says.

Currently, Ryan says, undergraduates are in danger of getting teaching fellows "who are only half a step ahead of [them]selves."

Last semester, Poole says, she learned about her teaching assignment only 24 hours before the course began. The subject matter did not fall under her area of expertise.

"I ended up playing catch-up all semester long," she says.

The preregistration debate is far from new. It is raised about every three years, according to Director of the Physics Laboratories Margaret E. Law, the former registrar.

But Law says the plan some are suggesting--preregistration with an unlimited drop-add period--would have no impact on the crunch that comes with each new semester.

"At those universities which I'm familiar with, preregistration does not preclude shopping," she says. "It gives you a ballpark figure."

Ryan suggests that a drop-add period, with no penalty attached, would provide administrators with enough information to make more accurate estimates of class size.

But Law says the success of such a system is unlikely. Many undergraduates, she says, would not adhere to preregistration decisions because "there's no incentive for the students to take it seriously."

Pilbeam says preregistration raises logistical problems as well. It would require that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) prepare its course catalogue in the spring--too early to be feasible.

Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brendan A. Maher says he is planning to create a database to assist in teaching fellow assignments. The database, which Maher says will be available in the fall, will contain lists of available teaching fellow openings, as well as lists of graduate students looking for employment in the FAS.

And Pilbeam says a solution may be to cut back on the number of courses that require sections at all, and to support more graduate students through stipends.

"My guess is that we wouldn't need to shift a lot of resources in order to create a kind of cushion," he says.

Pilbeam says he and Maher are currently talking to faculty members about the extent of the graduate students' problems.

No matter what solution finally emerges, it will be too late for Ted Ruehl, a third-year Comp Lit graduate student. Although Ruehl had several job opportunities lined up, when the confusion of shopping period cleared, he found that he was out of a job.

"For the life of me I couldn't find teaching," Ruehl says. "And I tried very hard."