Does Being a TA for an Irrelevant Course Benefit My Resume?

Question

Would having experience as a TA for a course outside my field be seen as a positive on resume?

How might this experience be perceived by potential employers or academic committees, especially when it's not aligned with my primary area of study?

Are there any particular benefits to teaching in an unrelated discipline that might outweigh the lack of direct relevance to my field?

Answer 1

I doubt that anyone would see this as a negative and many would see it as somewhat, though not profoundly, positive.

The TA experience varies. For some, possibly most, it involves grading and leading question and answer sessions for some portion of a course's students. At the other extreme, once experienced in the above a person might actually have responsibility of teaching a section of a popular course. In math this can happen in the later years of a doctorate, for example. The latter is a much more positive contribution to your CV, but probably less important in a separate field.

However, experience in dealing with students and seeing the complexities of managing the learning of others is a positive thing for those wishing an academic career. And, of course, if your field is, itself, interdisciplinary, then the benefits are greater and more positive in the CV.

Answer 2

See also Is TA-ing worth the opportunity cost (of having more time for research)?

As I wrote in an answer to that question:

If you have teaching experience on your CV, you can claim that you're good at presenting, you know how to mentor juniors, you have worked with people from other cultures, you are able to work in groups towards a common goal (if you didn't teach alone, which you probably don't as a TA), you know how to manage disputes, and so on. Plus you probably get a lot of examples that you can use to illustrate your skills in an interview.

Note all of these things are independent of the subject you taught. If the course is "irrelevant", then you can't say that teaching it made you understand the subject better, but all the remaining benefits above still remain, and you can cite specific examples.

In other words, the answer to the title question is "yes".

Answer 3

Actually I want to ask. What's the course that you're TAing, and what field of study are you in?

I would say, the context behind this is needed to figure out whether your experience is relevant or not. However, I would argue that with TAing a course out of your career path is still relevant.

Reasons:

• Skills are interchangeable. If you learned skills such as public speaking, mentoring, and communication, these are skills you can use no matter what job you are in.
• Plus, take a look at some people working minimum wage jobs, like being a barista when they're looking forward to being a doctor. Being a barista and a doctor can be two completely different things, but as a barista, you learn skills like multitasking, hand eye coordination and working under pressure, which are skills that can be applied to their future job as a doctor.