Statement on Teaching
Some of the department's graduates will enter academic professions where formal teaching is part of their responsibility, while others will embark upon consulting, governmental, or business careers and do no formal teaching at all. Every graduate will, however, have to "teach" in the sense that his or her ideas will have to be imparted to others. By itself, this would suggest that some formal teaching experience is valuable for every graduate, but there is another reason as well. Everyone who has ever taught anything has learned something; the very act of organizing information for someone else's benefit helps one to understand it better. This is particularly valuable for a graduate student trying to organize a body of knowledge for self benefit. Finally, prospective academic employers usually request recommendations which evaluate the student's promise for teaching as well as for research, and it is helpful to have some teaching performance upon which to base such recommendations. For these reasons the department requires some supervised teaching experience for each student.