Hiring Staff

Hiring is essential for the success of CS Kickstart’s curriculum. The process for hiring is with an initial google form application and interviews. Each discussion room should have at least one teacher (TA) and at least one lab helper (AI). After TAs for the discussion rooms and seminars are chosen, meetings are held throughout the summer with them describing the curriculum materials to them. Previous experience has found that supplying TAs with individual, personalized schedules of what they have to teach and when works much better.

Hiring Application

The application for TAs and AIs inquires about student interest and experience in teaching, time commitment over the week of CS Kickstart, and housing needs.

Some example questions are:

1. Why are you interested in participating as a CSK TA? (< 200 words)

2. What do you believe you can bring to newly admitted students as a CSK TA? (< 200 words)

3. Briefly describe your teaching and computer science experience in less than 200 words.

Students with more experience in teaching, upperclassmen students, and those willing to commit more time into the program are preferred.

Hiring Interviews

Interviews are meant to handle logistics with the program, such as asking them their specific time commitments over the summer and if they are able to make each of their discussion section times.

Some example questions are:

1. CS Kickstart now has a Beginner and Advanced track, so TAs will be separated into different discussion rooms that will solely teach beginner problems and advanced problems. How would you adjust your teaching style for these two different levels?

2. We are still looking for people to teach our Web Dev part 1 and 2 seminars along with our Electrical Engineering part 1 and part 2 seminars. Would you be interested in teaching one of these seminars? If so, please state your experience in these topics.

3. Please state your summer schedule over the CSK Week and any times you are unavailable. If you are taking a summer class, also let us know.

4. CSK includes a project at the end of the week in either Python, Web Dev, and Data Science and you will likely have to help these students debug their projects. Please state your comfort levels in each of the three topics out of 5 (5 being the most comfortable)

5. CS Kickstart has many events and topics collapsed in a week, causing students to become very exhausted when learning new material. How would you help your students pay more attention and improve their motivation during your sections?

6. Any questions?

Personalized Schedules

TAs and AIs will then need to be split up into their respective sections. TAs and AIs should be paired based on their time commitments, so if a TA has a summer class final, there will still be an AI in the discussion room. After pairing the TAs and AIs, these pairs need to be put into their respective beginner or advanced sections.

Everyone on staff should be given their own color-coded personalized schedule, highlighting the times they need to show up and the location for each time with the material they will be teaching linked.

Make sure to book teaching rooms for the program far in advance. For 100-150 people, 8-10 rooms will suffice, so there are 10-20 students in each room.