Funding: Normally, 2nd year students are supported by a University Fellowship. The UF stipend enables and requires the student to be engaged in full-time study (a genuinely fabulous thing), concentrating on courses without the distractions of employment.
(Note: A full-time student is defined as a student who does not work more than 10 hours a week in paid employment.)
- Keep your eye on your requirements— are you meeting your goals (courses, languages, required departmental seminar, required courses for your sub-field)?
- Start thinking, maybe, a little, about your exams…
For example:- Identify areas of special study on which you want to focus
- Have conversations with key faculty members about their expectations for exams (especially the size and range of your reading lists where relevant).
- Have an end of year meeting with your ADGS where you:
- Go over your transcript (ideally you have met the coursework requirement by now).
- Make a concrete plan for meeting the language requirements (if you have not already met them). Remember, for French & German you can take a translation exam at times set by those departments. If a faculty member is going to give you a translation exam instead, be proactive, and ask for an actual date and sit the exam!
- At the end of the second semester, you will receive an e-mail asking you to indicate your teaching preferences from a list of courses in the department and at YDS that will be employing TFs. Please answer that e-mail immediately and continue to update the department and DGS about any changes in your plans, because a change on your part will have a ripple effect. Also, be sure to let Heather and the DGS know if you are pursuing a teaching opportunity through another department. We can sometimes facilitate appointments in another department but not if we don’t know about it. Early and frequent communication about your TF plans is crucial.
- NOTE: Faculty sometimes think that they can “promise” you a teaching slot. They can’t. The department is granted a certain number of teaching slots from the graduate school. These slots must be divided fairly among the faculty asking for teaching fellows and the assignment of students to the slots must also be done as fairly as possible. The distribution of the slots among the courses and the assignment of students to slots are done by a committee consisting of the DGS, the RLST chair, the RLST registrar, the YDS registrar, and the YDS graduate student dean. You won’t always get your first choice, though it is rare for people to be assigned to a course that is not listed somewhere among their preferences. Many students value the opportunity to teach in the diverse settings of Yale College and the Yale Divinity School.