A thread on Berkeley teaching assistants. TLDR: hire them, you will not regret it (1/n)
Berkeley has large classes. 350 is considered medium. Undergraduate teaching assistants work for 20 hours in addition to a full course load. That's not unusual, but still difficult to manage.
They teach and know operating systems as well as the faculty. Their understanding of low-level code is impressive. They regularly debug complex pieces of software to help out students.
They are immensely organised and great managers. The head TA is at the head of 20 people and must ensure that the course runs smoothly.
For large classes, there needs to be a large amount of tooling, test harnesses, VMs, servers. The TAs manage all that. They are solid DevOps engineer in the making.
There are constantly fires. Whether it's students' personal situations, cheating, or technical mishaps. They are always on top of things.
I can only speak for CS162 Operating Systems TAs but I'm sure this extends to other courses/schools. Watch out of them. You won't regret it.
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