New Teaching Fellowship Program Allows Honors Students to Serve as Teaching Assistants

This fall, the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program will offer senior honor students and newcomers alike a rare opportunity: to mentor and be mentored by their own. Dr. Gabriel Cwilich, director of the Honors Program, has announced a new teaching fellowship program in which senior honors students in the process of writing their final theses are assigned to select courses that typically enroll a high number of incoming honors students. As teaching assistants, seniors will help professors flesh out courses and curriculums in addition to coordinating supplementary extracurricular activities and holding review sessions or tutoring individual students, depending on the course’s requirements. “The student acts as a teaching assistant,” Cwilich explained, “but at the same time, he acts as a role model for incoming freshmen and is able to share with them insights into the process of writing a thesis and discuss his particular research.” The student-initiated program has several objectives. By providing faculty with enthusiastic and motivated teaching assistants, the program aims to develop more comprehensive courses whose activities expand beyond the classroom. The program will also forge a critical connection between upper and lower classmen, as new honors students will have the chance to observe seniors in the final stages of the thesis-writing process and share experiences with upper classmen who have recently been in their place. The program is equally valuable for the senior honors students, many of whom intend to pursue graduate study. “To be on the ‘other side’ of the instructor’s desk is a rare opportunity that I think will not only help my studies this year but hopefully give me a deeper understanding of collegiate education as a whole—a perfect culmination to my four years here,” said Jonathan Schwab ’11 YC, a member of the program’s inaugural cohort and the Honors Student Council, who proposed the idea to the Honors Steering Committee last year. He will be assigned to Dr. David Lavinsky’s Conversion and Religious Identities in Medieval Literature class. For the program’s first year, teaching fellows have been assigned to eight courses, including Freshman Honors Seminar in Art and Literature in the Age of Photography, Freshman Honors Seminar in Reading Medicine and General Honors Physics.This fall, the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program will offer senior honor students and newcomers alike a rare opportunity: to mentor and be mentored by their own. Dr. Gabriel Cwilich, director of the Honors Program, has announced a new teaching fellowship program in which senior honors students in the process of writing their final theses are assigned to select courses that typically enroll a high number of incoming honors students. As teaching assistants, seniors will help professors flesh out courses and curriculums in addition to coordinating supplementary extracurricular activities and holding review sessions or tutoring individual students, depending on the course’s requirements. “The student acts as a teaching assistant,” Cwilich explained, “but at the same time, he acts as a role model for incoming freshmen and is able to share with them insights into the process of writing a thesis and discuss his particular research.” This fall, the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program will offer senior honor students and newcomers alike a rare opportunity: to mentor and be mentored by their own. Dr. Gabriel Cwilich, director of the Honors Program, has announced a new teaching fellowship program in which senior honors students in the process of writing their final theses are assigned to select courses that typically enroll a high number of incoming honors students. As teaching assistants, seniors will help professors flesh out courses and curriculums in addition to coordinating supplementary extracurricular activities and holding review sessions or tutoring individual students, depending on the course’s requirements. “The student acts as a teaching assistant,” Cwilich explained, “but at the same time, he acts as a role model for incoming freshmen and is able to share with them insights into the process of writing a thesis and discuss his particular research.” The student-initiated program has several objectives. By providing faculty with enthusiastic and motivated teaching assistants, the program aims to develop more comprehensive courses whose activities expand beyond the classroom. The program will also forge a critical connection between upper and lower classmen, as new honors students will have the chance to observe seniors in the final stages of the thesis-writing process and share experiences with upper classmen who have recently been in their place. The program is equally valuable for the senior honors students, many of whom intend to pursue graduate study. “To be on the ‘other side’ of the instructor’s desk is a rare opportunity that I think will not only help my studies this year but hopefully give me a deeper understanding of collegiate education as a whole—a perfect culmination to my four years here,” said Jonathan Schwab ’11 YC, a member of the program’s inaugural cohort and the Honors Student Council, who proposed the idea to the Honors Steering Committee last year. He will be assigned to Dr. David Lavinsky’s Conversion and Religious Identities in Medieval Literature class. For the program’s first year, teaching fellows have been assigned to eight courses, including Freshman Honors Seminar in Art and Literature in the Age of Photography, Freshman Honors Seminar in Reading Medicine and General Honors Physics.The student-initiated program has several objectives. By providing faculty with enthusiastic and motivated teaching assistants, the program aims to develop more comprehensive courses whose activities expand beyond the classroom. The program will also forge a critical connection between upper and lower classmen, as new honors students will have the chance to observe seniors in the final stages of the thesis-writing process and share experiences with upper classmen who have recently been in their place. The program is equally valuable for the senior honors students, many of whom intend to pursue graduate study. “To be on the ‘other side’ of the instructor’s desk is a rare opportunity that I think will not only help my studies this year but hopefully give me a deeper understanding of collegiate education as a whole—a perfect culmination to my four years here,” said Jonathan Schwab ’11 YC, a member of the program’s inaugural cohort and the Honors Student Council, who proposed the idea to the Honors Steering Committee last year. He will be assigned to Dr. David Lavinsky’s Conversion and Religious Identities in Medieval Literature class. For the program’s first year, teaching fellows have been assigned to eight courses, including Freshman Honors Seminar in Art and Literature in the Age of Photography, Freshman Honors Seminar in Reading Medicine and General Honors Physics.