September is here again, and with it comes the usual russet leaf pile of beginning-of-the-year questions. Which concentration should you pick? Is your synchronized figure-biking team finally going to take Cornell down this year? What was the name of that guy you met at that thing last semester, and why is he suddenly everywhere you go?
And as if life weren't hard enough (was it Chris? It must be Chris. Definitely Chris. Unless it was Will...), there's the stress of class-shopping. That professor in the acrylic cardigan seemed to expect you to do some work before October! Even once you pick the right class, with the right acrylic-cardigan-to-work-before-October ratio, there's the issue of sections. Some of them start in the morning! On a Friday! (And Will might be in one. Or was it Matt?)
Even with the hard-won wisdom accrued from a decade at university — not all at this university, thank you very much — I cannot help you with the above questions. But those creatures at the front of the lecture hall? The ones who look a bit like you but more haggard, more jaded, desperately trying to hold together both their professional demeanor and their threadbare trousers? They're called TAs, and them I can help you with. Heed these words, and perhaps — just perhaps — they won't post the spelling mistakes from your midterm on the interwebs.
The first thing to remember is that TAs are, broadly speaking, like you. They may make bad life decisions and mention "The Simpsons" entirely too much for comfort, but they get their nutrients the same way you do — although they don't have to deal with the intellectual and spiritual chess game that must be required to convince oneself to eat at a place called ‘The Ratty.' But they probably had to do something similar in the not-too-distant past, for TAs are most often graduate students, and graduate students get this name (the most polite that can be applied to them) by graduating from somewhere.
Before the big life mistake, before the hemorrhage of self-esteem, before the debilitating Spaghetti-Os addiction, they were undergrads. They were happy. They were carefree. Frequently, they were drunk. And chances are that they forgot, skipped or spilled Franzia all over at least one assignment and had to come up with an excuse. So too did their friends and classmates. They have had distant-but-sentimentally-un-get-over-able members of their extended family die in freak bog-snorkeling accidents and subsequently return from the grave, only to die again in an equally unlikely manner just before exams. They have had to balance the demands of their water-rugby coach with those of their teachers. They have e-mailed assignments to instructors in bizarre file formats that produce lines of unconnected characters almost as unintelligible as Snooki Polizzi.
Appreciate that, in this area at least, they aren't completely stupid, and they may grow to like and even to respect you — which is a useful thing when your final assignment falls on that fine and peculiarly Brunonian line between a B+++ and an A---.
In other ways, however, TAs are unlike you. They avoid skinny jeans — and those who don't, should. They have, on average, between six and eight friends. They remember 1992. More importantly, the more grown-up among them have lives and houses and families, and some of them made the audacious decision not to live in Providence. They don't, as a rule, have Blackberries or iPhones or Androids or computers that aren't held together with duct tape.
Thus, an Important Note: They do not have e-mail wired directly into their spines. If you e-mail to ask for an extension because your hand is feeling, like, really weird right now, and they don't respond within the hour, it may be for a number of reasons. They might be driving back to Boston. They might be giving the kids a bath. They might be weeping silently and snottily into a can of Narragansett. In all likelihood, they aren't ignoring your e-mail because they're playing table tennis and sampling fine cheeses with Jay-Z. Don't send them six follow-up e-mails asking if they got your previous e-mail about the e-mail you sent them. In their minds, doing this will make you A Problem. You will be added to a laundry list of Problems Great and Small — and, remember, these other problems don't require grading at the end of a long, Spaghetti-O-fuelled semester.
Be nice to your TAs. Don't snigger as you ask what they did over the weekend. Pretend a thirty-second description of their dissertation doesn't make you want to give up on life altogether. Give them Rice Krispie treats. Treat them as you would want to be treated if you had taken a huge detour on the road to Earning A Living. I'm not promising that it'll improve your grades, but perhaps it will imbue them with the self-respect to shower more often. And then everyone's a winner.
Stephen Wicken GS is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the History department. He can be reached at stephen_wicken@brown.edu after he's finished schooling Beyonce at ping pong.
