What Is an Undergraduate Course Assistant?

In this course, an Undergraduate Course Assistant (UCA) is generally present in addition to your instructor. A UCA is a student, generally in the School of Cyber and Computer Sciences, who successfully passed CSCI 1301 and that is hired by the School to assist other students.

Their duties generally include:

• Helping the students during the labs,
  • To set-up their computers,
  • To find the right resources,
  • To understand their IDE’s error messages,
  • To investigate bugs with them,
  • etc.
• Helping the students outside of the lab (through email, teams, or office hours), for similar tasks as in lab, but also to get ready for an exam or a quiz,
• Reporting to the instructors any issue, mistake or confusion they noticed,
• Suggesting improvements to the resources shared with the students.

Their duties can not include:

• Understanding for you¹,
• Helping you or even commenting on graded material before it was graded,
• Grading students’ work,
• Helping you with other classes,
• Helping you becoming a self-regulated learner and work on your schedule².

How Do I Become One?

A UCA is hired by the School upon recommendation of instructors, after discussion with our Academic Program Coordinator, and possibly our Director of Undergraduate Studies.

A UCA must:

• Be a student, that is, currently enrolled in courses, or, if during the Summer, being enrolled in courses for the next Fall semester,
• Pass our Human Resources background check,
• Have an interest in tutoring,
• Clearly understand the limits and boundaries to the help they can provide to students.

Additionally, if a student wants to help with this particular class, then the student must have successfully passed CSCI 1301 with a grade of B or higher

A UCA will:

• Be able to work up to 25 hours per week (an average of 10 hours per week is typical, but needs to be discussed with the instructor), paid $12.50 per hour, without other benefits,
• Be adequately trained to use our platforms and edit our resources,
• Be able to work on Campus and discuss their schedule with their referent instructor,
• Develop a stronger bond with the instructors, facilitating possible future reference or research projects.

So, in short: talk to any CSCI 1301 instructor if you feel like becoming a UCA.

I Am a UCA, What Should I Do Now?

Congratulations! Once you have done the paperwork (contract, background request form, …) with our Academic Program Coordinator, Wennie Squires, you can start working and clock-in on augusta.edu/oneusg. Please, be on the lookout for monthly “Time Reporting Reminders for Student Assistants” emails from Wennie, that contains important information and reminders. Any question about human resource, pay, hour caps and the like should be directed to our Academic Program Coordinator.

Once this is done, your first task is to get in touch with your instructor, if they have not already done it, to know what they expect from you. You can discuss topics such as the need for (virtual or physical) office hours, whenever you need to seat in class, how to help students, etc.

On top of supporting students and helping the instructor, you are also encouraged to work up to 4 hours per week on the improvement of those resources. Your contribution may range from spell-checking to pointing inconsistencies, from clarifying statements to re-organizing exercises. Thanks to git and pull requests, you do not need to worry (too much) about introducing mistakes or blunders: the changes you suggest will always be reviewed by instructors before being merged in our master document.

Please, follow the instructions in our “Contributing Guidelines” to obtain editing permission, then review Editing instructions for UCAs and start editing!