Technical Assistant Attachment Programme

Welcome to Technical Assistant Attachment Programme

• June 6th, 2006

A warm welcome to all those who is reading this.This is William writing his first post for the site. As you can see the site is still being built up and thus we will need a lot of collaboration with everyone to make it a success.

Skipping the usual “prep talk”. I just wanna let you all know, if you are not prepared to spend at least 30% of your free time with the team, you might as well quit.

This is a hard to digest, straight fact. It might a bit ironic to say this in a welcome note but it’s true!

If you cannot spend at least 30% of your free time with the team, you will miss out most of the activities that make staying on fun and bearable. If you think that being in the team is all about helping others, then you are wrong.
Being in the TA team is more like being in a SIG. You share what you know and learn what you don’t know. Once you are better than the rest, you get to lead them on to better ventures.

I have been with the team for the last 4 years. In fact I was the pioneer batch of TA’s in TPM. I realized that being in the team is like living your life. You have your ups and downs. Halfway through the program, you might even have a midlife crisis and question yourself what is it that you want anyway..

To answer those questions, just keep this in mind.

For the first 6 months, everything is fun. At this point, work more on normal duty. Learn the in and outs of the program. Know all procedures.

For the next 6 months, join more ETR and show of your capabilities and take charge of tasks.

If you did well, by the next year you would have gotten promoted to a post. At this point of time, make improvements to your charge. There will always be some things to improve on. For me, at this time, I have already made changes to all the forms layout and redefined how procedure flows are to be followed, reducing time and paper wastage.

Then for the next couple of phases, you might think that you have did all you could ever do. Midlife crisis. You start asking yourself if you should just quit now. At this point, take not of the below.

After your pondering, if you are still around. This is the best part of the entire program. Shape the team to your ideals. You get to start making real progress towards shaping the team to what you deem is perfection.

Of course you could be in any one of the posts by now, but there’s also a constant of influx of new TA’s and they would be looking at you for guidance. You can thus lead them the way you want and if you are in a position of authority, you can probably even shape the board to your liking.

For me, at this point, I was even shaping the layout of the Epson room so that the place won’t look so packed! I was also building scripts, programs and implementing systems for the team at this point to automate TA work. Automated excel forms, P-Counter systems and printer automation scripts are implemented at this point.

After this phase of your program, you might as well be in your degree.. like me, if you are still staying on, you’d probably be in a position of consulting. Other TA’s look to you for help, for advice and you should help them. For if you don’t all those experience you’ve gained would be lost even to yourself. No kidding.

And if you are still keen, continue in your best efforts to help the team. Some of the most useful scripts are implemented by me at this point. Helping students as well as TA’s to work more efficiently.

As you can see, it’s not all boring and stagnant. Although on some days things are pretty dull, on overall there are still much you can do and contribute to.

The road of the TA program is long and tedious, but along the way, as you make new friends and gain new knowledge, the excitement never ends, just like driving down a long winding scenic route.

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Enjoy your time with the team!

William Soo

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