Penn honors 10 TAs for teaching excellence

Undergraduates will provide nominations for the new award, which will provide $500 to 10 outstanding TAs. As the grunt workers at every university, teaching assistants do almost everything from holding recitations and labs to copying and grading exams. Now, the graduate students who especially shine in these duties can be recognized by the very people whom they teach and inspire: undergraduates. Following the success of an award to a TA last year, University President Judith Rodin decided to make $5,000 available to acknowledge not one, but 10 TAs with amounts of $500 each. Undergraduates can nominate their favorite TAs for the award through the next two weeks and the winners will be announced in late April. Organizers say the awards are especially significant because they come not from their departmental bosses, but from the efforts of the students whom the TAs directly affect. "It's an award established from below instead of initiated from the top," award committee chairperson and History Professor Walter Licht said. In order to win the prize, TAs have to be nominated by an undergraduate who must write a short recommendation commenting on how the TA has impacted their academic experience. As Licht noted, however, the impact need not be restricted to how they perform in the classroom. In fact, the committee will not only look at how a TA has been especially innovative in bringing the class material to life, but also how they might have moved their students toward pursuing further study in the field, Licht said. The deadline for submitting a nomination is April 4 and students can send in a letter, an e-mail or visit the Web site at http://pobox.upenn.edu/~taprize. "The whole idea is that it's nominated by and focused on undergraduates," Graduate Student Association Council President and Wharton doctoral candidate Eric Eisenstein said. Licht, a one-time graduate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, said that he was inspired by a graduate student to pursue History. "I know when I ask my colleagues, 'Why did you decide to do this?' invariably there is a TA mentioned," Licht said. The award committee will represent all four undergraduate schools and will be composed of a faculty representative, two undergraduates and four representatives from GSAC. Eisenstein hopes that last year's recipient will sit on the committee and that winners will continue to be involved in future years. Following the undergraduate nomination, the committee will ask for a personal statement from the candidates and then request that a faculty member testify to their professional and personal qualities. "The undergraduates agree that this is important because these are their TAs and the graduate students believe that this is important because this is a big part of what we do and what we will be doing when we become professors," Eisenstein said.

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