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Mike Clancy

Senior Lecturer
EECS Computer Science Division
UC Berkeley

Mike Clancy

Course staffing opportunities

A variety of staff positions are available in CS courses.

Graduate student instructors (GSIs)

GSIs are often referred to as teaching assistants at other institutions. They do X, Y, Z.

Undergrad students may be appointed to GSI positions. Such students are required to

GSI application

Reader application for upper-division courses
Reader application for lower-division courses
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/appointments/pdf/apptknow.pdf
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/appointments/exception_request.shtml

Opportunities are available in all the lower division CS programming courses to earn credit in CS 300 for tutoring or helping answer questions in a lab section. The workload is generally three hours per unit, sometimes including a staff meeting. Contact Cindy Palwick in 385 Soda or Audrey Raya in 369 Soda (email 385-soda@cs) to sign up. Information on staff meetings for these courses will be distributed by the instructors.

There are also paid readership positions ranging from 6 to 10 hours per week of work. For these, fill out the online application at

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Forms/cs.low.reader.app.shtml
Generally, one needs previous CS 300 experience working for units, demonstrable familiarity with the material of the course, and at least a 3.0 grade point average to get hired for pay. We expect readers to be selected sometime next week.

Here's what the various tutors/lab assistants/readers do:

  • In CS 3 and 61ABC, lab assistants set up a weekly schedule of hours in the lab, answer student questions, and help find bugs. Occasionally they do online grading of short programming exercises. Readers grade the bigger assignments, either by taking home and marking up a bunch of listings or by running programs online and keeping track of what goes wrong with them. Staff are expected to know (or to be able to learn very quickly) Scheme for CS 3 and 61A, Java for 61B, and C and SPIM assembler language for CS 61C. CS 3 and CS 61A use computers in C30 and C50 Hearst Field Annex, respectively; CS 61B and CS 61C use EECS computers in Soda Hall.
  • In the self-paced courses, tutors staff the Self-Paced Center, doing face- to-face consultation and evaluation of programming assignments and quizzes. The self-paced courses are run as an administrative unit, so tutors deal with a gamut of assignments and programming languages, and should know more than one of Matlab, Pascal, C, C++, Scheme, Java, and UNIX. In contrast to working with a lecture course, where staff see a lot of one particular problem (the assignment due in a particular week), self- paced staff will see a wide variety of programs throughout the semester. This makes some people very insecure, and they burn out quickly; others thrive on the challenge of saying something intelligent about a program they've never seen before. Staff meetings are Wednesdays noon-1pm; attendance is required of all self-paced staff. Positions are for a minimum of 6 hours per week.
Last modified: $Date: 2005/08/30 08:52:21 $ by Mike Clancy