Resume examples/Teaching Assistant Resume
Teaching assistant resumes are some of the easiest to write badly. Most TA work is real and substantive — running discussion sections, grading hundreds of papers, holding office hours, writing rubrics — but it tends to come out on the resume as "assisted the professor" or "graded assignments." Both true. Both invisible to anyone reading the resume against another candidate.
The TA postings that students compete for — paid TAs, graduate TAs, prestigious-course TAs, residential college tutors — are screened by faculty and department coordinators who know what the work actually entails. A bullet that says "led 3 weekly discussion sections of 18 students each, graded 270+ problem sets across the semester, and revised the section worksheet that the course adopted as the standard the following year" reads as someone who taught. A bullet that says "assisted with the course" reads as someone who attended. This page shows how to make that translation honest, plus a free tool that adapts your resume to any specific TA posting in two minutes.
The signal
Section size and frequency: "led 2 weekly sections of 22 students each" — instead of "helped run sections."
Grading volume: number of assignments, exams, or papers graded across the semester. Specifics matter; "graded student work" is invisible.
The course name and level — TA postings often filter for prior experience in the same or adjacent course (e.g., a CS 161 TA position prefers candidates who took CS 161).
Office hours described concretely — total hours per week, average attendance, common questions you handled, any office-hours practices you developed.
Curriculum or material contributions — a worksheet you wrote, a section plan you created, a problem set you authored or revised. These are higher-signal than grading volume alone.
Pedagogy training — Bok Center, CTL, GRADCERT, or department-run TA training. Listing these signals you take teaching seriously.
Before → After
These are the rewrites we actually return. No invented metrics, no buzzword padding — just the original work, surfaced more clearly.
Worked as a TA for an intro biology class.
TA for BIO 101: Introduction to Biology (200-student lecture); led 2 weekly discussion sections of 25 students each, graded 8 problem sets and 2 midterms across the semester (~600 graded artifacts total), held 4 office hours/week with average attendance of 12 students.
Course code, course size, section count and size, exact grading volume, office hours, and attendance. Each is a fact a department coordinator hiring TAs wants to see.
Held office hours and answered student questions.
Held 5 weekly office hours for the CS 162 (Operating Systems) project track; built a shared FAQ document of the 30 most-common debugging issues that the head TA adopted as standard course material the following semester.
Hours, course, the kind of questions, and a specific contribution that lasted past the semester. "Answered student questions" is true of every TA; the FAQ that became standard is the differentiator.
Graded student papers and provided feedback.
Graded 45 essays per round across 4 essay assignments in ENGL 220: American Literature (180 essays total); wrote 200-300 word individualized feedback on each and held 12 one-on-one revision conferences for students requesting them.
Number of essays, course name and level, length of feedback, and a specific high-effort practice (1:1 conferences). The line items quantify what a generic "graded papers" would have hidden.
Helped the professor with various tasks.
Drop. "Helped the professor" is the resume equivalent of background music — present but unrecorded. Replace with one specific contribution: a section you ran, a rubric you wrote, an exam question you authored, an accommodation you supported.
Keyword density
Each of these should appear at least once in your skills line and at least once in a bullet that proves you've used it.
What kills the score
"TA for a chemistry course" hides which level (intro vs. organic vs. PChem) — and intro vs. upper-division TA work is very different. Always include the course code and full name ("CHEM 102: General Chemistry II").
Teaching is communication. Listing it as a skill duplicates what the role implies. Replace with a bullet that demonstrates communication in action — feedback you delivered, a section you ran, a difficult concept you broke down.
Canvas, Gradescope, Piazza, Ed, Blackboard, Moodle — every TA uses one and most TA postings name a specific platform. Listing the LMS you've used and the specific functions (Gradescope rubric design, Canvas SpeedGrader, Piazza moderation) adds direct keywords.
Dropping a 12-class coursework list to claim "prepared to TA any of these" reads thin. Better to list the 3-5 courses you'd actually want to TA, in priority order, with a one-line note on relevant projects or grades for each.
FAQ
Yes — if they're directly relevant to the TA posting. A CS 161 TA application benefits from listing CS 161 (with grade, ideally an A) prominently. A general "Coursework: 14 classes across CS" is much weaker than "Most relevant coursework: CS 161 Operating Systems (A), CS 162 Distributed Systems (A-), CS 168 Networking (A)."
Focus on volume and contribution rather than student outcomes. Number of students you supported, sections you ran, assignments you graded, materials you produced. Outcomes-style claims ("improved student grades by X%") are usually unverifiable and read as inflated to a department reader.
Most undergrad TA roles don't require it. For graduate TA roles, departments often run their own training or require participation in a campus teaching center program (Bok Center at Harvard, CTL at Columbia, etc.). Listing any pedagogy training you've completed is a credibility signal even at the undergrad level.
Course-specific GPA matters more than overall. Departments hiring TAs for CS 161 want to see you got an A in CS 161; they care less whether your overall GPA is 3.6 or 3.9. List both, but lead with the course grade for any course you're applying to TA.
Sometimes. If the course is at your level or below and you've taken adjacent material that covers the same competencies, departments will sometimes hire you. Lead the application by addressing this directly in a 2-line summary or cover letter — "Have not taken CHEM 102 specifically, but completed CHEM 105 Honors which covers the same equilibrium and acid-base curriculum at greater depth."
Lead with the bullet that matches — if you've TA'd a similar course, put it first. Mirror the department's vocabulary (e.g., "problem set" vs. "homework," "section" vs. "recitation" vs. "discussion"). Include any course-specific tools (Gradescope for STEM courses, Canvas SpeedGrader for humanities, Piazza for CS). Or paste the posting into our tailor tool and we'll do the matching in two minutes.
Paste the JD, upload your resume, get the tailored version with match score, missing keywords, and rewritten bullets — usually under fifteen seconds. Your first one is free.
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