Steps You Can Take Serve as Head Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Managing a classroom involves many skills that are transferable to other contexts. These include public speaking, answering questions clearly and accurately, maintaining records, time management, assessing work and giving constructive feedback, creating objectives and goals for your work and the work of others, working with a supervisor, and assessing your own performance. Being a Head GSI gives you the added responsibility of coordinating the work of junior colleagues who make up the teach team and exercising leadership skills such as negotiation, conflict management, complex data management. Serve as an Acting Instructor-Graduate Student (AI-GS) for a Course You Have Designed As an Acting Instructor-Graduate Student you serve as the Instructor of Record for a particular upper division course. Although you are still under faculty supervision, you have the autonomy to design and run every aspect of the course. Consider speaking to the Graduate Student Affairs Officer (GSAO) in your department to learn about openings for teaching opportunities in your field. You can also learn more about this position in the GSI, GSR, Reader and Tutor Guide. Serve as a Formal Mentor for an Undergraduate Mentoring undergraduate students will help you develop skills that are transferable to mentoring junior colleagues in other organizational settings. One aspect of mentoring is concerned with the substantive aspects of the tasks at hand. The other is about motivating people to do their best work, guiding them through challenging situations, and giving them constructive feedback. There are training programs and courses on campus that will help you develop these skills and give you an opportunity to apply them in practice. These include a graduate course on mentoring (GSPDP 301), Student Mentoring and Research Teams (SMART), Berkeley Connect, and Getting into Grad School (GiGS). You’ll find information on these programs on the Graduate Division’s page on Mentoring.
Steps You Can Take Serve as Head Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Managing a classroom involves many skills that are transferable to other contexts. These include public speaking, answering questions clearly and accurately, maintaining records, time management, assessing work and giving constructive feedback, creating objectives and goals for your work and the work of others, working with a supervisor, and assessing your own performance. Being a Head GSI gives you the added responsibility of coordinating the work of junior colleagues who make up the teach team and exercising leadership skills such as negotiation, conflict management, complex data management. Serve as an Acting Instructor-Graduate Student (AI-GS) for a Course You Have Designed As an Acting Instructor-Graduate Student you serve as the Instructor of Record for a particular upper division course. Although you are still under faculty supervision, you have the autonomy to design and run every aspect of the course. Consider speaking to the Graduate Student Affairs Officer (GSAO) in your department to learn about openings for teaching opportunities in your field. You can also learn more about this position in the GSI, GSR, Reader and Tutor Guide. Serve as a Formal Mentor for an Undergraduate Mentoring undergraduate students will help you develop skills that are transferable to mentoring junior colleagues in other organizational settings. One aspect of mentoring is concerned with the substantive aspects of the tasks at hand. The other is about motivating people to do their best work, guiding them through challenging situations, and giving them constructive feedback. There are training programs and courses on campus that will help you develop these skills and give you an opportunity to apply them in practice. These include a graduate course on mentoring (GSPDP 301), Student Mentoring and Research Teams (SMART), Berkeley Connect, and Getting into Grad School (GiGS). You’ll find information on these programs on the Graduate Division’s page on Mentoring.