Grad student first?

This semester is going well -- keeping much busier than expected mainly due to the course I'm TAing. For the most part I'm enjoying the course material because it is useful for me to review all the engineering fundamentals but the responsibilities for the TA are really time-consuming. The professor expects all the TAs to put in at least 20 hours of work for this class per week, which I'm definitely doing, but it is a bit excessive. I mean, I should be a grad student first, right? That's 40-50 hours of work every week, so is being a TA really supposed to be half of the grad student experience? Just doing the homework, grading the homework, and holding office hours takes about 20 hours per week, but now we are also to teach recitations before tests, hold extra office hours before tests, and the most time-consuming of all -- find additional lab times. The scheduled lab times for the class are from 2:50-4:05 and then 4:25-5:40, yet we are teaching the labs in groups of 5 students, in 45-minute time slots. However, there are 65 kids in the class, meaning 13 groups in 45 minute slots; notice only 4 time slots will fit into the allotted lab times. We're also holding 15 lab times in case there are scheduling conflicts with students. This week has been devoted almost entirely to TAing stuff -- doing the homework and writing it up nicely to post the solutions on Blackboard after the due date, holding office hours, grading their first assignment, going to the lab to learn the protocol for the first lab session, and teaching a recitation. I do enjoy it, surprisingly, but I'm concerned with the amount of time consumed doing stuff not remotely important to my research and getting my project off the ground (which is of even greater importance now that I have a conference to present at and a hard deadline to meet).

I now also have an undergraduate student working for me; as Monty joked in lab meeting today, we're becoming Alice, Inc. :-) Our lab is not that large, only 5 grad students, but one grad student has 2 undergrads working with him and then there's me, now also with two people working with me. Crazy!

Draft 14 of my paper is underway and will be finished today so I suppose that is something research-related I accomplished this week (although I guess I could be working now... but this will just be my lunch break).

I'm also absolutely loving The Fountainhead. It's like when I read Atlas Shrugged -- I can't fully explain why it is so amazing, it just is. (I will elaborate more in my post on The Fountainhead once I finish it!) And it took me awhile to really dive in to the reading, but I started where I left off over a year ago, around page 100 of the book, on Saturday and since then I've read almost 500 pages and I'm going to be finished with the book before I know it! I'm almost a little sad about that... but then I guess I can go on to read the rest of Ayn Rand's books. :-D March pleasure reading! I know she has many books, but I'll probably start with Anthem and We the Living. I can't wait!