We have often written about the ‘stickiness’ of FHL, where people return year after year, changing roles with time. Morrigan’s Tide Bite shows that some start this process very early, in this case as a first-year student at UW – and already they have come back as an undergraduate Teaching Assistant (TA). Morrigan argues persuasively for the value of students taking courses with an undergraduate TA, and (from their spring experience) how valuable it is for the TA’s own education.

Eventually we will have a follow-up essay from a graduate TA to talk about the impact on their career. Different roles, each with great value!

Best,
Dr. Megan Dethier, FHL Director
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Leveling Up at FHL: From Undergraduate Student to Teaching Assistant

by Morrigan Havely

Morrigan is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Washington, interested in the intersection between environmental science and education. While their experience in education predominantly deals with dance, their most recent work as an undergraduate teaching assistant at FHL and within the School of Oceanography combined their passions in teaching and the marine environment.

I came up to Friday Harbor Laboratories in Spring 2024 as a student of the Spring Marine Studies program. I was in my first year at UW, and I’d never been to a research station or even had lab experience. The prospect of being at a marine station far from main campus for an entire quarter was both exciting and extremely daunting. On our first day of Novel Marine Ecosystems, Dr. Mar Wonham introduced our class to the undergraduate teaching assistant (UGTA) for the course, Aly Liu.

Courses offered for the first time often need that first run-through to work out their systems. Aly kept us functioning smoothly and efficiently. Amid a snorkeling adventure in Argyle Lagoon, several hundred clams for research and multiple field trips, she was always ready to help us find what we needed to get us to where we wanted to go (Figure 1). She organized field work supplies, helped us hone research topics, and gave a lecture about her research on main campus. Aly’s work inspired me to apply for an FHL UGTA position, and I was accepted in 2026 as the Novel Marine Ecosystems UGTA.

Before Spring 2026, I gained some experience being a UGTA for the School of Oceanography, assisting with a required course for oceanography and marine biology majors and a special topics class on hydrothermal vents. In both, my duties consisted mainly of attending lectures, grading weekly assignments, and hosting office hours.

Courses at FHL are very different from those on main campus, and so was my role as an FHL UGTA. My responsibilities became more focused on fieldwork logistics and planning. I was fortunate enough to work alongside Brenna Rothman, the graduate teaching assistant for Novel Marine Ecosystems as well as Marine Ecology of the Salish Sea (Figure 2). Combining my previous experience as a student and her expertise leading field teams, we were able to organize two snorkel trips, an outreach event, and multiple excursions to Jackson Beach (Figure 3).

Returning to this course as a teaching assistant also put my professor in a different light. When I was a student, Dr. Mar Wonham was a powerful source of inspiration and knowledge, and as a first-year student I was impressed by her ability to call invertebrates by their scientific names without first consulting a textbook. As a UGTA, I realized her brilliance extended into pedagogy and education as well. We spent many hours during the quarter discussing big names in education research, theories behind teaching, and the nuances of different course environments. Her enthusiastic support of my ideas and work not only reinforced my desire to continue in the environmental education sphere, but it also gave me greater insight into what the current professional world of education looks like. This refinement of my skills both in curriculum and career development bled over into my teaching.

I found my role as a teaching assistant became less about leading students to an answer and more about getting them to ask questions. Students surprised me with their enthusiasm and curiosity, often bringing up lecture concepts before I even had time to formulate how we could connect our experience outdoors to the classroom. Their resilience with early morning field trips, hours spent cleaning up data, and the traps full of crabs to be measured consistently renewed my passion for marine science and environmental education.

Unlike on main campus, this immersive experience often extends beyond the standard hours of 9 to 5. There were many pre-morning lectures and post-dinner periods spent cleaning field gear and printing documents. For a class with about eight field trips per quarter, every other week involved prep. During lunches in the dining hall, it wasn’t uncommon for students to come up to the “TA table” and ask questions about their assignments. As a UGTA who also helped with research while up at FHL, the days I wasn’t in class were spent conducting plankton tows and building a larval trap. While every task I completed felt meaningful and deeply connected to environmental science, I also spent many days scrambling to get everything done. This led me to think about helping formalize a system where future UGTAs at FHL could find a balance between their teaching, learning, and research within the first week, not midway through the quarter.

While UW has a few formalized UGTA systems, they are often small and department specific. The School of Oceanography has a dedicated UGTA program which hires 10-22 undergraduates per quarter for only 4-8 hours of work per week. I didn’t learn how rare this is until I started looking into other UGTA programs around UW. The School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) hires UGTAs and provides a flexible for-credit option, but typically only one student applies per quarter. Unlike SAFS or Oceanography, the Marine Biology Program doesn’t have UGTAs. However, because marine biology students are required to take courses outside of their major, there are opportunities for students to become UGTAs in relevant fields (Figure 4).

A number of studies have shown the benefits of having a UGTA in the classroom (or in this case, the field). At the University of Louisville, undergrad-led quiz sections saw more students enrolling in the second class of a series compared to students in graduate TA-led sections (Phillip et al. 2016). This may be because the addition of a UGTA helped normalize mistakes, encouraged participation and built trust within the class, as occurred in a study at the University of Central Florida (Roshandel et al. 2025). Students at Vanderbilt University also reported that UGTAs helped foster a sense of belonging and confidence (Clements et al. 2025). The addition of a UGTA in the classroom, whether the course already had graduate TAs or not, showed positive effects on undergraduate academic and emotional development in all of these studies. As a caveat, many papers reviewing the effects of undergraduate TAs are quasi-experimental and predominantly qualitative. While there aren’t many that complete a direct statistical comparison, this doesn’t mean that student opinion and TA experience aren’t invaluable to understanding how undergrad TAs benefit the classroom.

When I started looking into past UGTAs at FHL, I assumed there would be a rich history of undergraduate TAs. Not so! About 40 years after the Labs’ founding, Richard Norris – then a UW botany undergrad – came to assist with a Phycology course as FHL’s first undergrad TA in 1947. The only other records I could find were from almost 80 years later, when two undergrads (including Aly Liu) came to TA in the spring. I was the only UGTA in Spring 2026, and I was the first to work alongside a graduate teaching assistant.

Due of this lack of history, there haven’t been UGTAs to pass on their knowledge to the next round of undergraduates assisting with classes. I advocated for coming back to FHL as a teaching assistant because I saw Aly do it first, and I want other students to know that the opportunity is available. As an aspiring teacher, this role helped me hone skills in project management, peer facilitation and experiential teaching while also making invaluable connections.

However, I believe that a clear process for hiring and reaping the full benefit of a UGTA is needed. In a perfect world, a UGTA would have both prior FHL and UGTA experience. When it comes to differences in work between undergrad and grad TAs, graduate TAs should be the primary contacts when it comes to classroom logistics and coursework grading, while UGTA duties should focus more on fostering student connections and accountability. Both need to check in with their instructor weekly to allocate work and reevaluate class objectives and goals. Having a few built-in responsibilities that UGTAs are made aware of before arriving at FHL could help set expectations earlier for instructors and both TA types. Through this preparation and standardization, future generations of UGTAs will come to FHL ready to help students before even stepping off the ferry.

FHL is a place that manages to foster an incredible community every quarter. Some students start out as strangers and end their quarter as best friends. It was a privilege to be not only a former student but a facilitator of this community, and I hope that other undergraduate students get this opportunity to continue reinforcing their connection with this amazing place.

References:

Clements K., Vallone K., Clements T., Catania E., Claiborne L., Friedman K., Graham T., Johnson H., Starko S., Todd T., Watkins J., and C. Brame.  2025.  Impacts of Learning Assistants on Student Belonging and Confidence Vary Across Science Disciplines and Course Contexts.  CBE Life Sciences Education: 24(2). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.24-07-0179

Philipp S.B., Tretter T.R., and C.V. Rich.  2016.  Undergraduate teaching assistant impact on student academic achievement.  Electronic Journal of Science Education: 20(2), 1-13.

Roshandel M., Cote,E., and C. Randles.  2025.  Exploring the Professional Relationships between Undergraduate Students and Their Graduate Teaching Assistants and Undergraduate Learning Assistants.  Journal of Chemical Education: 102(3), 1083–1096. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c01172

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