Some jobs require an interview, currently this includes the following jobs:

• COS 126 Lab TA
• COS 2xx Lab TA

Because scheduling and giving interviews takes time, these jobs usually have an earlier deadline than most jobs.

Information about the COS Lab Interview Process #

Julia Ruskin BSE ‘22, Head Lab TA in 2021, describes the interview process for the Intro COS Lab in the following way:

We interview to get a sense for how the candidates would act when interacting with students. Since we get so many more applicants than we can realistically hire, we need to differentiate between them, and assessing their ability to debug in real time along with their ability to explain concepts and their general helping manner is a much better way to differentiate than just looking at grades. [Currently,] we split the interviews between me and 4 other interviewers, two for 126 and two for 226/217,

First, applicants apply on TigerUHR. Then, I reach out to all the applicants who meet the grades criteria (I don’t know what grade it corresponds to, but a 3/5 or higher on TigerUHR) to schedule interviews on a Calendly like. We split the interviews evenly between the interviewers and conduct them remotely, screensharing a code file with 3 bugs and having the candidate walk us through the code as if they were a TA. We use a predetermined rubric to assign a score to each candidate, and we also record comments about their approach and general helping manner. Then, we determine how many TAs we need to hire, and we hire the TAs with the highest scores.

TAs can be hired for 226/217 or 126, either as full time (2 shifts/week), part time (1 shift/week), or subs. […]

As the Head TA, I am in charge of conducting interviews and hiring TAs, coordinating training for new TAs, creating the schedule, overseeing TA shadowing, and being the general point person for anything that comes up throughout the semester.