Get to Know Your Profs

Your Profs are not like your High School teachers. What you notice first is that most don't know you, won't know you, and can't know you. Especially in first year, classes are much too big for that to ever happen. That doesn't mean that you can never communicate with them though. There are office hours, and there are TAs, whose job it is to work with you. In my courses, I've always been able to find someone who could help me when I needed it. There was one awful course that I really shouldn't have taken because I didn't have the background. I couldn't understand anything at all about what was going on. Help! I didn't even know what questions to ask. I was going to talk to my Academic Advisor and drop the course, but then I thought, well, maybe it's worth one more try. So I went and had a talk with the TA; much to my surprise, she seemed to understand exactly what was going on (or not going on) in my brain, and she seemed to want to help and to think she could. She was right; it took a lot of her time and mine, and I never did at all well in the course, but my mark ended up being respectable.

Now, from my position of enormous experience and wisdom as a second year student, I make a point at the beginning of every course to see who there is to talk to about it. Sometimes it's the Prof, but most often it's a TA. If I do have questions or problems later on, I have someone who can help. It hasn't happened to me very much, but if I found someone who didn't seem to know the work or couldn't explain it, I'd look around for someone else. But it's better to find someone at the beginning of the course, so that all the way through, you know that there's the Prof or a TA who can help with any problems. I also make a point of talking to a TA whenever I get a major piece of work handed back; it's good for them to know you're serious about your marks, and it can be surprising how useful their comments can be. Even if they can tell you that the mark you were upset about is actually quite good for that course, it can make you feel better.

Sure there are vindictive Profs, worn-out Profs who don't care about their students, Profs who don’t want assignments based on your opinion but rather on theirs, and Profs who are just plain lazy and disorganized. One of mine always seems to jump from one topic to another, and to go off on a tangent. Either he just reads from his slides, or he just babbles on. You ask him a question about one of his slides, and he doesn't seem to know what to say about it. He contradicts the text, and contradicts what he's just said. You think, "How did this guy ever get a PhD? How did he get hired? What were they thinking of when they chose him to teach us this work?".

But here at least, there aren't many bad Profs. Most of the ones who seem that way at first are quite different once you get to know them a bit. There was one of mine who seemed quite distant and unfriendly, and I got the impression he didn't care about how we did, or even maybe was pleased when people didn't do well. It was getting to me; it made it hard to go to the class, and hard to concentrate properly on what he was explaining -- quite difficult things actually, even on a good day. I went after class to ask him a question; he seemed quite friendly and eager to explain the answer. He even thanked me for asking the question, and said that it would help him explain that point better in the future. I also found a fourth year student who had been in some of his smaller upper-year classes; I found out that this Prof was a shy person, and found our enormous first year class quite intimidating. The previous year, a Prof-rating website had trashed him, which made him feel nervous and insecure. Also, he was depressed about his research, which wasn't going well at all. After hearing about this, I began to look at these lectures in a different light; I enjoyed them better and learned more too.

Another advantage of getting to know Profs and TAs is that they have contacts that can be useful to you in ways you can't necessarily foresee. One of my Profs gave me a Reference letter, and a friend of mine got summer work as a lab assistant. The Prof wanted someone he was sure could do the job, and he was working closely with the TA my friend knew.

So getting to know your Profs, or at least something about them, pays off in many ways. It's well worth the time and effort you put into it.