Interactions with Students

This section will deal with two ideas: 1) the interactions that you are committing to having with students, and 2) the unique complications and benefits that arise with being a student teaching other students.

 

Now hopefully this doesn’t come as a shock, but you will have to interact with students consistently. The lower bound for this is during your class sessions, but I anticipate that you might have to (gasp) talk to students outside of that - during office hours, when students need additional assistance, or that awkward time when you said good-bye to your student but you turn out to be walking in the same direction anyways.

 

Even if you have a sufficient number of course assistants, it’s beneficial to remain “on-call” during those hours or to host supplemental hours yourself (that is, if your course warrants holding hours). You will have more overarching knowledge about the class content and structure that your CAs can’t answer, but furthermore you have a responsibility to aid the students in your class. Committing to a SLC means you are obligated to helping participants learn and fulfill the learning goals for your course. This may manifest itself in you holding additional help sessions for students or agreeing to 1:1 meetings with an individual. By no means should you feel compelled to put your students over yourself or your own wellbeing. Naturally, though, as a professor, you will (hopefully) feel some sort of yearning to help students succeed to the best of their and your ability.

 

Which brings us to our next point. The dynamic between your status as a nominal professor and the students will naturally differ than the archetype of a professor-student working relationship. Despite Olin already being fairly lackadaisical in terms of certain student and faculty boundaries (first name basis, casual outings with professors, etc.), students will view you as, though unintentionally, even more casually than they might an Olin professor. The degree to which this occurs varies and also can be dependent on other factors (i.e. age gap, social distance from students, having been in ‘authority’ over them prior via being a course assistant or project team leader, etc.).

 

This has negative and positive consequences. This more casual dynamic might yield in you being taken less seriously, having to deal with more critically harsh feedback, and being bothered more often for assistance. There is also the obvious awkward case of having a student in your class that is not just a peer - but a friend, a project partner, or dare I say, a dating partner - and having your interactions bleed into each other. Arising from all of these are implicit positives to a more casual dynamic. Students may feel more comfortable giving feedback or talking with you about the course, be disinclined to just stew over problems needlessly if they feel comfortable approaching you for help, and might generally “buy-in” to the course a lot more if they already have a positive acquaintanceship with you. (To flip it back once again, you want to make sure that there aren’t students who won’t bother you because they don’t want to sully your friendship.) 

 

As with any relationship dynamic, the responsibility to making sure it's healthy is placed on the two members within it: you and the student. Enacting boundaries, having consistent and effective communication, and generally just being ‘good people,’ will help make every interaction with students positive (and mitigate any less-than-ideal repercussions of being a peer and having to teach your peers).