On Being the TA Who was asked to stay for Two Years

September 2021 through June 2023. MGT 164: Business and Organizational Leadership at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego. Professor Alison Meyer. Two years, which I'm told (by Prof Meyer) was unheard of. This is what that actually looked like.

The thing about teaching a course on organizational leadership is that the subject matter is, in theory, about how to manage people effectively — and in practice, it immediately reveals whether you can. You are in a room full of business students, many of whom are primarily interested in their GPA, some of whom are genuinely curious, and all of whom will form an opinion of you within the first fifteen minutes that is very difficult to revise. The material covers motivation, power, influence, change management, organizational culture. If you can't hold the room, the irony is too obvious to ignore.

Professor Alison Meyer kept me as a TA for two consecutive years, which by Rady School standards was unusual enough to be noteworthy. The practical explanation is straightforward: I had learned the course well enough that I had internalized it — not just the content, which covers organizational theory, leadership frameworks, and change management, but the rhythm of it, the places where students consistently got lost, the concepts that seemed simple until they weren't. By the second year I could anticipate the questions before they were asked and had enough material in reserve to go in any direction the discussion moved.

But I don't think that's the real reason. The real reason is that I was genuinely interested in the students, not just the content. Business and Organizational Leadership is the kind of course that works when students connect the frameworks to something real — a job they've had, a team that failed, a manager they couldn't figure out. My job was to create the conditions for that connection to happen.

I also helped create and manage course materials — presentations, exam questions, content that would actually stick. This sounds administrative and sometimes was, but the exam question development in particular is something I took seriously. A good exam question in a course like this doesn't just test recall; it presents a scenario that requires students to think in the frameworks they've learned without being able to template their way to an answer. Writing those well is harder than it looks and more interesting than most people assume. Getting to work with Prof Meyer & understand her meticulous and generous approach to creating materials was an incredible experience as well.

What I took from two years of this is something I've thought about since: that teaching a course on leadership is one of the better ways to understand what leadership actually requires. It requires knowing the material well enough to hold it lightly. It requires reading the room quickly and accurately. It requires the willingness to be wrong in front of people and correct course without losing credibility. And it requires a genuine belief that the people in front of you are capable of more than they're currently demonstrating — which, if you can communicate it without being condescending about it, tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Professor Meyer gave me the room and the latitude to find that out. Two years was exactly enough time to do it properly. I'm eternally grateful to her for giving me that opportunity -- speaking of, I should send her a message, it's been more a few months.