Additional Teaching Opportunities

As part of their initial five-year fellowship package, PhD students are obliged to teach as a course assistant and tutorial leader in the undergraduate program. But there are many other opportunities for Philosophy PhD students to teach different kinds of classes and student populations.

PhD students past their fifth year in the program will often be invited to teach again in the departmental curriculum as a course assistant or a tutorial leader. The department also employs advanced graduate students as year-long preceptors for college students who are writing BA theses. These positions offer PhD students an opportunity to become deeply engaged in the workings of the undergraduate concentration and to help individual majors improve their philosophical writing skills.

The Division of Humanities sponsors seven prize seminars a year (Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowships and Whiting Undergraduate Teaching Fellowships) that give PhD students the opportunity to design their own courses for upper-level undergraduates.

Philosophy students in PhD candidacy are also hired to be preceptors who work with first-year graduate students in MAPH's active multidisciplinary community. Together with the MAPH faculty and staff, each preceptor guides a group of 12-14 masters students throughout the academic year, advising and running weekly discussion groups (and also leading thesis writing workshops during the winter and spring quarters). Some preceptors teach a standalone winter quarter course through MAPH and receive an additional salary at the University's standard lecturer rate.

Each section of each Humanities Common Core course is assigned a graduate student Writing Intern, who gives extensive writing instruction to first-year college students. Writing Interns also provide a for-credit seminar sequence, Humanities 19100, in which students critique their peers’ work and develop their skills at academic writing and argumentation at the university level. PhD students in Philosophy typically work as writing interns in any one of the following three Humanities Core Sequences: Greek Thought and Literature, Human Being and Citizen, or Philosophical Perspectives.

Some departmental PhD students also teach their own lectureships in Common Core classes, or in the university’s Human Rights or Gender Studies programs. They also occasionally work as course assistants in a variety of courses listed by other programs.

Advanced PhD students who want experience teaching different student populations can also do adjunct teaching at various Chicago-area academic institutions. Philosophy PhD students have recently taught courses at a local art school (the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), commuter schools with many first-generation college students (Roosevelt University and the City Colleges of Chicago), and traditional liberal arts universities (DePaul University).