Professor Discovers Secret TA He Forgot About

“What do you mean there’s a 7th discussion section?”

If you’re in Dr. Michael Statlock’s ENGR:2050 “Fundamentals of Mechanical Solutions” lecture, feeling forlorn, like no one can see you amongst the crowd of aspiring rat racers, turns out that fear’s probably true, because your own professor apparently can’t remember even his own TAs.

During an office hours appointment last week, Dr. Statlock asked a struggling student asking for advice on the upcoming project who their discussion section instructor was. He was shocked to hear the name “Annora Yuen”—a name Dr. Statlock swears he’s never heard in his life.

“It kinda scared me for a second,” the student—who requested to remain anonymous, as his attempt at academic diligence would put him in hot water with his fraternity peers—told our correspondent, “I was like, ‘Is some random person pretending to be my TA?’ Dr. Statlock made me show him my ICON page to prove it.”

“I don’t even know how this happened,” Yuen, a graduate student who has worked with Dr. Statlock for two years, told us, “I’ve gone to every coffee meeting, talked to him after almost every lecture… like, he wrote my letter of recommendation! I was planning on inviting him to my wedding!”

“Honestly, I just thought she was a very active student,” Dr. Statlock told our correspondent, who took great pains to remind him of who they were and what they were there for, “When you’re a professor, thinking about research and tenure, you talk to a lot of people every week, so appointments can sort of blend together. It gets hard to remember things, haha. Just goes to show that you’re never as put together as you think you are.”

In the wake of Dr. Statlock’s incident, departments have been sending emails out to their faculty, urging them to look at their syllabi and confirm that they do, indeed, know all of their TAs. As it turns out, this is a more common phenomenon than expected—data from the University estimates that about 23% of professors are unaware of the existence of at least one discussion section for their lectures. Responses to the emails included a math professor whose pre-term calculations proved that an extra discussion section was a “statistical impossibility”, a business professor who assumed “the assignments [were] graded by AI at this point”, a sociology professor who disagreed with “the ethics of TA work” and thought the university “abolished” it.

So, if your grades aren’t coming in, don’t be too hard on your TA. They’re spending a lot of time fighting to keep existing.