As PhD students we’re often looking for ways to make extra money: I know I was! One of the most common ways is for students to work as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTA).
Not only can it be rewarding but it’s usually easy to get involved. In fact, academic departments often actively encourage their PhD students to become graduate teaching assistants.
In this post we’ll dive into what the role involves (and how well it pays!) and learn from others who have previously taken on GTA roles.
What are Graduate Teaching Assistants?
Graduate teaching assistants (GTA) are graduate students (e.g. PhD students) who assist the delivery of content to undergraduate or Masters students. You are assisting the course leader (i.e a professor) in the teaching of their course: hence the name!
If you’re studying for a PhD, working as a GTA is a pretty typical way to make some money. Most of the PhD students I’ve known have done GTA work in some form or another during their PhD.
Later in this post you’ll hear from some of these researchers about their experiences.
Typical duties
Graduate teaching assistants are often required to help with tasks such as:
- Lab demonstrations
- Running seminars or delivering tutorials
- Providing students with feedback
- Exam invigilation
- Marking exams and coursework
You’ll typically sign up for a specific duty which is stated in the advert. For example: “three hours of exam invigilation”. It’s uncommon to blindly sign up to help a certain course without knowing what is expected, but it does happen.
How much do graduate teaching assistants get paid?
When I was doing my PhD at Imperial (finished in 2020), the pay for graduate teaching assistants was around £15-30 per hour. It looks like levels of pay are still broadly the same:
From 1st August 2023, GTA pay rates are below:
Imperial’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering webpage on working as a GTA
- £18.48 – Ambassador work; General administration; Panopto; PG Campus Tour;
- £22.74 – Marking (incl. second marking); Lab demonstration; Tutorial support and Tutorial delivery;
- £30.41 – Development of teaching materials (e.g: creating new questions and/or new tasks for tutorials)
You should be able to find a similar page for your own university. For example, here is Bristol’s.
As shown, there are usually several tiers of hourly rate, and the different duties will be split across them. Work with lower responsibility, or that is perceived to require less expertise, receives a lower rate of pay.
How you get paid
GTA work is typically considered “casual”, since the hours are variable and low. Usually you’ll log your hours by submitting a time sheet. Often there are tight bounds on what is an acceptable number of hours to log. For instance they may be willing to pay you for 20 minutes of your time to mark each piece of coursework.
If you’re helping to run classes, not only will they pay you for your time during the class (e.g. an hour) but also preparation and administrative time. This could involve logging student attendance and answering e-mails etc and can often add up to a similar amount of time as the actual teaching itself.
Benefits
One benefit is of course the money! As touched on above, the pay for graduate teaching assistants is usually pretty good and can be a great way to help top up your existing stipend. P.S. I’ve written a separate post about other ways of making some extra money as a PhD student.
However, on top of financial incentives, working as a GTA also gives you a valuable opportunity to develop both domain-specific expertise and broader soft skills.
Working as a GTA can enable you to support classes you’re trying to solidify your knowledge in, or demonstrate existing know-how, techniques or topics you know would be useful for future job applications.
Having to mark exams on a particular topic can be a great way of reinforcing your understanding. If you’re like me, it also more than likely means having to refresh your memory on the topic!
Furthermore, graduate teaching assistant roles are an ideal setting to work on soft skills such as public speaking, team working, troubleshooting and time management. It goes without saying that the experience is incredibly relevant for anyone considering an academic career.
Experiences from Graduate Teaching Assistants
I taught in a variety of courses and tutorials, including Solidworks and engineering drawing where I was able to help build some small lectures, and thermal analysis techniques where I also did some marking.
I was fairly picky with my teaching roles and which supervisor I worked with, this meant I was given a degree of freedom which taught me a lot about lecturing, and most of my experiences were not as time consuming as other laboratory-based roles.
Doing these teaching roles helped me get my AFHEA (great if you’re interested in teaching in the future) and did help financially. I think GTA is a great opportunity and would definitely recommend it, but remember to not over commit and keep plenty of time for your own work.
I first got involved with teaching as a way to learn and sharpen my skills in artificial intelligence. As part of a team of fellow PhD students, we worked with the unit director and a lead TA to assist students to better grasp the learning material. My biggest duties have always been to answer questions students have during labs and drop-in sessions. Upon gaining enough experience, I had the rare opportunity to support students in need of special adjustments in one-to-one sessions as well.
I’ve had a great experience teaching and realising the positive impact I can have on the learning journey of a student. Given my main motivation to learn by teaching, I tend to spend more time than I’m paid for on familiarising myself with the teaching material, which I hugely enjoy. Working as a TA has also allowed me to deeply interact with students and university staff, so much so that I see myself pursuing a career as an academic.
Teaching is not without its own challenges, especially with regards to managing those duties in parallel with one’s own research. It can be extremely time-consuming. So, assuming one selects units that directly complement their PhD research, I strongly recommend teaching assistantship, especially during the early years of the PhD.
I worked as a biochemistry supervisor for first year medical students during 2 years of my PhD. My role was to lead one hour tutorials for 2 groups of 3 undergraduate students every week to help them understand and learn the lecture materials and prepare for exams.
I really enjoyed it. It felt really good to sort of “give back” to the college, because at the time of teaching, I had been a first year medical student only 4 years previously so the memory of it was really fresh in my mind. Also, I formed lasting relationships with my students (who actually eventually became my classmates/friends when I went back into medical school after the PhD) – it really added to my college experience in many ways both academically and socially.
I would recommend it. It is a bit time consuming at first – but once you have the lesson plans in place, it becomes less of a time investment!
Dr Hassal Lee, Neuroscience PhD graduate, Cambridge – Read Hasssal’s PhD Profile here
During my PhD I did a variety of GTA work: leading classes, assisting during labs and marking. I was a bit nervous at first – it can be intimidating knowing that you’re expected to be the person with all the answers! However it turned out to be great fun and really rewarding. I recommend that all PhD students give it a go, even if it is just for one course.
Me! Medical Engineering PhD graduate, Imperial
Want more detail? There is a whole section detailing my experiences later in this post, you can skip to it here.
Considerations
Generally, I think that doing some graduate teaching assistant work is a good idea for all PhD students. However there are a few things to be aware of:
1) Maximum hours
Sometimes there are certain limitations on the amount of paid work you may be able to take on in addition to your PhD. This can be at the university or department level, tied to PhD funding sources or for overseas students: visas.
For example, at Imperial, students on a Tier 4 visa are restricted to working 20 hours per week or less: which to me sounds like loads on top of a full time PhD!
It goes without saying that you must also have a right to work in the country.
2) Valuing your time
Although GTA work can be well paid, I don’t personally think it is wise to max out as many hours as possible. Instead, make sure you’re valuing your time in the context of:
- Avoiding burnout. A PhD can already be intense, and adding additional academic duties can only add to the pressure. Read my whole post here: PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health.
- Enjoying being a PhD student. There is more to life as a PhD student than spending your whole existence in labs or marking coursework. There are many, non-academic, opportunities afforded to your as a PhD student, make sure you’re aware of them! Read my whole post here: How to make the most of opportunities.
My suggestion:
- Do some GTA work for at least one or two courses during your PhD, but don’t fill up your calendar too much with it (unless you’re desperate for the cash).
- Be strategic: think about which GTA positions provide either the best opportunity for personal growth (such as presenting) or could look best on your CV.
How do you find GTA Roles?
Typically, at the start of the academic year course directors will email a list of opportunities to all PhD students in their department. Alternatively, webpages get populated with all available opportunities.
For example, check out all the positions available at Imperial’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering by scrolling to the bottom of this page:
Some positions get snapped up very quickly. My experience however has generally been that if you want to earn money as a GTA, the opportunities are there.
It’s worth bearing in mind that you’ll usually be committing to work a certain number of hours per week for a whole term or semester (as shown in the example above), so don’t over commit!
Personally I helped on about one course per year for a few hours per week on average. This felt like a nice manageable amount.
In addition to these more structured commitments, I used to often receive emails stating that a small amount of help was required at short notice. This could be collating course material or preparing a room for an exam, so not all GTA opportunities require a large time commitment nor are they always advertised well in advance.
My Experiences as a Graduate Teaching Assistant
What I was doing
During my PhD I did a few different kinds of work as a GTA:
1. Leading a journal club for Masters students
Context
Leading a class for MSc students, helping them to build experience digesting and critically evaluating research papers. Across the term, each student would give two presentations on different papers and then their fellow students would ask them questions about the research.
Time commitment
Two hours a week for 11 weeks. This consisted of one hour in class and one hour outside of class, both of which I was paid for.
Tasks in the class
- Leading the session: inviting students to give their presentations and encouraging other students to ask them questions.
- Inevitably asking my own questions, since often the other students were a bit shy or uninterested in asking their own!
- Keeping track of time, each presentation couldn’t overrun.
- Writing down comments (and a mark) for each student’s presentation.
Tasks outside of class
- Reading the research papers myself and thinking up potential questions ahead of each class.
- Assigning students to give presentations.
- Answering student questions over email.
- Sending individual feedback to students after each presentation.
- Adding student marks to a spreadsheet.
What I learned & enjoyed
It was rewarding seeing the students typically getting more comfortable at giving presentations. After seeing 40+ presentations it also gave me insights as to how to improve my own presentations (tips here!).
2. Assisting in computing lab tutorials
Context
First year undergraduates took a class in computer aided design (CAD), I helped them during the lab sessions.
Time commitment
Weekly two hour long tutorials. We were given a bit of training ahead of the sessions but generally we didn’t have much warning for what types of questions to expect.
Tasks in the class
Answering students’ questions where they had issues using the software. This included diagnosing issues but also trying to prompt them to figure out the issue on their own.
Outside of class
None relating to the tutorials, but I did mark their end of semester coursework. More on that in the next point.
What I learned & enjoyed
It was fun helping the first year students to rapidly get better at using the software, by the end they were designing some sophisticated things! Helping with this lab was also a great refresher of the software for myself.
3. Marking coursework / exams
Context
As a graduate teaching assistant I marked coursework for one course and exams for another:
- The computing lab I mention above
- A fluid dynamics course
Time commitment
When taking on marking work, you get told how many students you’re marking for and how long the department expects for it to take. I forget exact numbers of papers but I think it would have been something like marking submissions from 25 students.
We got told broadly how long it should take to mark each submission (e.g. 20 minutes), and therefore what were the total acceptable number of hours to charge to the department.
Tasks
Usually the course lead will organise a session to explain to all GTAs what is expected, how to mark the exams correctly, common things to look out for and address any questions you may have. Then they’ll provide you with a mark sheet which includes a breakdown of how many marks a student gets for each part of a question (e.g. if they get the answer wrong but did lots of the correct initial workings).
Finally, they assign you to mark a number of students’ work and off you go! Usually they’ll give you a few weeks to complete this.
Don’t worry, the course lead is usually very happy for you to reach out with any questions you may have as you start going through the marking process.
Fun fact, I discovered that two students were cheating because I marked their answers to the same question back to back. Only because I had the previous answer stored in my short term memory was it so obvious that their answers were identical. If the papers hadn’t been submitted right after one another I’m sure I’d never have noticed!
What I learned & enjoyed
I’d never done any marking before this, so it was a great experience! Learning how exams are assessed, for instance the breakdown of marks for achieving certain parts of the answer, and having to try and understand the thought process for certain students’ answers was really interesting.
Summary
- Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are grad students, typically working towards PhDs, who support the teaching of more junior students
- Most GTA roles are specific about what work will need to be undertaken, with typical duties including; lab demos, running seminars, exam invigilation and marking
- You should normally be paid for any preparation time required (within reasonable limits)
- GTA roles are well paid, with the level of pay often varying depending on the complexity of the work
- Taking on a GTA role provides opportunities to enhance both your technical skills and your soft skills
- It’s important to not over-commit, if in doubt start small and look for further opportunities at a later stage
I hope that you’ve found this introduction to GTA work useful. Let me know in the comments if you have any of your own GTA experiences, or if you’ve now been inspired to join your department’s team of graduate teaching assistants!
If you have any other questions not answered in the post, do reach out.
You can subscribe below for more content, including access to my free resource library:
