Teaching Assistant

Updated 2025-12-17

I've worked as a teaching assistant (under various titles) for 4 semesters, and am about to begin my 5th. For the same reason they put their shiniest achievement on top of their resumes, I'm listing them in reverse chronological order.

EECS 473, Advanced Embedded Systems

  • Uni: UM
  • Semester: Fall 2025
  • Title: GSI (Graduate Student Instructor)

EECS 473 covers embedded systems comprehensively. A bucket of topics including hardware interfaces, PCBs, power, wireless, etc. Culminates in a team project with the goal of making a "real" product.

We had a record-breaking enrollment of 110 (though a handful might have dropped), which means we have 19 groups of 5 or 6.

Compared to 370, 473 has a much smaller team, but we get along so well. I'm with Prof. Mark Brehob, lab managers James Carl and Matt Smith (this was his last semester before retirement), and fellow GSIs Anna Huang and Alec Zettel. Usually I'm the silent one, but the small size basically forced me to voice my concerns when needed.

Highlights of the job:

  • Hired three graders out of six applicants, managed grading
  • Caught a scheduling conflict on a spreadsheet
  • With Anna, helped Alec improve the design problem on midterm
  • Noticed a midterm room was in a different, similar sounding building than the one everyone assumed it was in
  • Correctly identified a suspiciously small inductor as the source of power issues in a boost converter
  • Found three undesirable shorts with a multimeter, gaining the nickname "Freddy with a Multimeter"
  • One of the shorts led to the discovery of a wrong label on a schematic by Waveshare
  • Helped Alec transplant an ESP32 twice by blowing it with hot air guns on both sides
  • Fixed a USB-C connector with nothing but a soldering iron and flux
  • With Anna, convinced Mark to make design problem more reasonable on final
  • Noticed a final room wasn't allotted the full duration we asked for, and coordinating with Mark to move everyone to another room mid-exam

EECS 370, Intro to Computer Organization

  • Uni: UM
  • Semesters: Fall 2024 and Winter 2025
  • Title: Instructional Aide (IA)

EECS 370 covers the internals of a computer, including registers, instructions, processors, pipelines, caches, and virtual memory. I wrote my course review back in Fall 2023. Gateway drug to computer architecture.

I was one of the last two hires to jump on the boat, so I consider myself incredibly lucky.

Highlights of the job:

  • Managed to drop a joke every few labs
  • Designed an LC2K (the ISA we use for teaching) shirt that ended up not being made due to tariffs
  • Once stretched an office hour past 21:00 just to make sure everyone gets a virtual memory question
  • Was among the top staff on Piazza

Didn't write any blogposts about it, though.

VG151, Accelerated Intro to Computers & Programming

  • Uni: SJTU
  • Semester: Fall 2022
  • Title: Teaching Assistant (TA)

VG151 (aka ENGR1510J) covers basic concepts of programming like loops, pointers, and OOP, and crams three languages into one semester (MATLAB, C, C++). This was my first TA experience, so naturally I did many things differently than what I would do now. Anyway, I decided to keep the posts.

Highlights of the job:

  • I drew the professor (Dr. Manuel Charlemagne) in South Park-style and put him in my original lab slides
  • I maintained an autograder script that almost didn't require human intervention

Here's what used to be on this index page in December 2022:

For some reason, I managed to become a TA for VG151, Accelerated Introduction to Computers and Programming. There are a few possible reasons. One of my guesses is that the professor is also a Linux user.

Our course infrastructure is almost exclusively FOSS:

  • Video conference: Zhumu (Chinese Zoom), non-FOSS
  • SCM: git, FOSS
  • Git forge: self-hosted Gitea, FOSS
  • Instant messaging: self-hosted Mattermost, FOSS
  • Online judge: self-hosted JOJ, FOSS
  • Canvas, FOSS[citation needed]
  • MATLAB, non-FOSS
  • C/C++ Compiler: gcc, FOSS
  • Build system: GNU Make and CMake, FOSS

On 2022-08-19, I received an email from the undergraduate education office (UEO) that I got the offer. Naturally I went "woo-hoo party timeeeee". Later I met my colleagues, two sophomores and one junior, plus another junior whose title is "volunteer assistant" (thanks Mack!).

On 2022-09-13 the semester began with a campus lockdown due to a positive case of Covid. As a result all lectures that afternoon switched to online mode, just like the previous summer semester except now I'm at school rather than home. This sucks ass. This might be reversed if circumstances go the good way, or it just might stay.

Update: we switched to "hybrid mode" in late October, and then offline only (save for international students). I went to VG151 classroom twice, it was pretty populated.

Update: whoops, back to online.

Anyway, enjoy my compilation of blogposts on life being a TA:

VG151 came to an end in December 2022.