Last spring, the Department of Computer Science introduced a waitlist hiring process for fall teaching assistant applicants, allowing department leaders to take TAs off reserve when course enrollment numbers are higher than projected.
While the department’s teaching assistants say they understand the intention behind the policy, they raised concerns over the uncertainty of the reserve TAs’ employment status and an unequal training process.
Computer Science Department Chair Roberto Tamassia said that these changes to the hiring schedule will help the department move toward its goal of equipping courses with “the necessary resources to serve our students while utilizing our budget effectively.”
Jasmine Kamara ’27, a teaching assistant for CSCI 0111: “Computing Foundations: Data,” said that while she was not a waitlisted applicant, she thinks the new system can put students in a difficult position when mapping out their semester.
“You don’t really know how your agenda is going to look, which can be a little bit frustrating,” she said.
But Kamara noted that it is also difficult for the department to estimate the number of students who will enroll in each class, explaining that the system ultimately “does make sense, despite the trade-off,” she said.
Still, other ripple effects can arise from the uncertainty over whether or not you will be employed as a TA in the department, said Connor Flick ’26 — the president of the Teaching Assistant Labor Organization, the computer science teaching assistants’ union.
“Being told you are a reserve TA or you’re not fully complete with the hiring process until the next semester starts puts you on worse footing to find other campus jobs or look for options in other departments where you might TA,” Flick explained.
It is unclear how many TAs were waitlisted for courses offered this semester.
The system also leaves the TAs who do end up getting off of the waitlist with less training opportunities. The department typically hosts an in-person TA training camp a few days before the semester begins, but because reserve TAs are officially hired partway through the semester, they miss out on training shared during the camp.
Reserve TAs “don’t have the same amount of time to really dive into the materials, feel comfortable practicing office hours or review assignments that are already there, which makes it harder for them to TA,” Flick said.
Julie Wang ’27, one of the head teaching assistants of CSCI 0170: “Computer Science: An Integrated Introduction,” said that the course’s other head TA did a “speedrun” of training camp for one of the TAs onboarded in the middle of the semester.
“TA camp was four days long, and it was compressed to a period of like three hours,” Wang said, though she added that it doesn’t seem like the TA’s performance has been impacted by the shortened training.
Wang added that the waitlist system also exposes parts of the internal processes of the computer science TA hiring process, which she says involves ranking applicants on a series of metrics.
“That information is supposed to be confidential — you’re not supposed to tell that to applicants,” she said. But the waitlist “has destroyed that notion” since students who are onboarded late will know they were unlikely to be a top-ranked applicant, Wang added.
“I think it is kind of a contradiction to tell us that we need hiring to be fair and that TAs can’t know that they had priority over others while also having an explicit waitlist,” she said.
Emily Feil is a senior staff writer covering staff and student labor. She is a freshman from Long Beach, NY and plans to study economics and English. In her free time, she can be found watching bad TV and reading good books.
