Research Assistantships in Photonics

Research assistantships are given by individual faculty members. If you are seeking a research assistantship in my lab, please send me an email with a succint description of your qualifications and interests in the body of the email and attach a CV. When I have research assistant positions open, I generally go through the files of applicants or admitted students and sort them by speciality/interest area, then go through those. Some of my funding requires American citizenship. Sadly, because I receive so many such requests, I cannot read individual resumes and evaluate your probability of admission. I encourage you to apply, and indicate CLEARLY your primary research interest(s).

Teaching Assistantships in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

If you are seeking a teaching assistantship, those are administered by the department, not by the individual faculty. I am, however, currently the Associate Chair and thus I also assign those.

We hire TA's quarter by quarter. Typically, I will send out application forms (electronically) to all currently matriculated graduate students in the department. These will be sent out in the middle of the preceding quarter (middle spring for autumn). Only students who return the form will be considered for TA even if they have been a TA in the past.

In general, however, we have very few TA positions (typically 20 per quarter, but we have about 300 graduate students). The priority list is as follows:

Fellowship students with funding promises

• PhD students who have been on RA in the past but whose advisors are experiencing gaps in funding students with special skills (e.g., they have the background experience to teach a specialized graduate lab)
• Other PhD students
• MS students who have been on RA in the past but whose advisors are experiencing gaps in funding
• Other MS Students

It is thus unlikely for a new incoming student to be a TA. Also, no one should count on TA's as a reliable means to fund their graduate education.

In out department, TA's mostly teach labs. On the application, where it asks for preferred courses, if your not farmiliar with our courses you can put something like "circuits lab" or "Digital lab".

Note that by Ohio Law, any GTA is required to demonstrate proficiency in spoken English. This can be done in one of three ways:

1. Get a 28, 29, or 30 on the spoken component of the iBT TOEFL exam (administered by ETS)
2. Pass the SPEAK test (given on campus for a fee of $75)
3. Those who take and do not pass the SPEAK test will be placed in a spoken English class, either EDUTL 504 or 505. At the end of 505 is a Mock Teaching Test. Passing this test makes one eligible to teach.

You can return the application either on a hard copy (put it in my mailbox in room 205 Dreese) or electronically. Either way is OK. When you pass the English test, please give me a copy of the results. Each quarter I will send out new applications for TA's for the following quarter.

Finally, we do additionally hire graders, which don't require student contact and therefore do not require spoken English proficiency. These are hourly positions(a few hours/week) and do not include tuition or fees. The first week of the quarter I send out information on those positions (the number of hours depends on the size of the course).

If you have any further questions, please let me know.