Temporary | Teaching Assistant - Idea Validation

The Teaching Assistant (TA) serves as the instructor’s teaching partner in a five-session, high intensity graduate course focused on idea validation. The course emphasizes real world experimentation, customer discovery, and evidence based learning. Students are evaluated on the quality of behavioral evidence they generate and their ability to extract honest insights from market interactions.

This role supports approximately 25 teams in a fast paced environment that requires active engagement, strong judgment, and the ability to maintain rigor and continuity across all teams. This is not a grading only role; the TA plays a critical role in ensuring that student work reflects real customer behavior rather than assumptions or narrative bias.

The TA is expected to uphold a rigorous standard of evidence throughout the course. Conversation summaries are not considered evidence, while raw, verbatim notes may be. Compliments do not constitute validation, and statements such as “I would use this” are not treated as meaningful signals. A prototype description is insufficient; only a live, shareable, and functioning product qualifies as a true build. Similarly, a first click does not demonstrate demand. Teams that clearly and honestly disprove their initial hypotheses are performing stronger work than those that attempt to manufacture confirmation.

The role prioritizes verifying that teams understand the tools and prototypes they create, particularly when using AI-assisted development. This includes assessing whether outputs reflect genuine understanding, ensuring alignment between claims and observed data, and requiring teams to clearly explain what they built, how it functions, and what they learned.

You will likely thrive if you care more about evidence than narrative, you are comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete information, you can be rigorous without being performative, you believe that honest disconfirmation is a success condition in early-stage venture work, and you are excited by the chance to influence how students learn, not just how they are graded.

Key responsibilities

Before Each Session

• Review team submissions and identify teams that are off-track, weakly evidenced, or at risk 
• Verify that submitted prototype links are live, accessible, and usable 
• Flag missing, incomplete, or non-credible submissions to the instructor 
• Prepare a short risk summary for the instructor before class, covering: teams with weak outreach rates, teams with unclear customer segments, teams showing signs of fabricated or low-quality evidence, and teams whose prototype scope is too broad 
• Help maintain grading consistency by calibrating against rubric exemplars

During Each Session

• Circulate during breakout work, team exercises, gallery walks, and demo stations
• Listen for recurring errors such as: describing customers by demographics instead of behaviors, treating stated intention as evidence, changing the product concept before sufficiently testing the customer segment, overclaiming from tiny or contaminated samples, and presenting AI-generated work that the team does not actually understand 
• Coach teams briefly and directly during working sessions 
• Escalate recurring patterns or high-risk teams to the instructor 
• Help manage session flow, peer scoring sheets, and final demo logistics

After Each Session

• Grade artifacts within 48 hours using course rubrics 
• Write short, specific, actionable feedback rather than narrative comments
• Maintain a running course risk list for all 25 teams
• Track the same teams across all five sessions so feedback compounds over time 
• Help the instructor identify which teams need intervention before the next class

Required

• Current graduate student 
• Strong organizational discipline and follow-through 
• Ability to assess customer discovery work and distinguish behavioral signals from social courtesy 
• Comfort giving direct, specific, constructive feedback 
• Ability to manage continuity across approximately 25 teams in a compressed course format

Strongly Preferred

• Experience in a startup, product, sales, consulting, user research, or other customer-facing role 
• Familiarity with customer discovery, The Mom Test, or customer development methodology 
• Experience using rapid prototyping tools such as Replit, Google AI Studio, Lovable, Glide, Tally, or similar 
• Prior TA, facilitation, workshop, or teaching experience

Special Instructions to Applicants:

Send the following to german.estrada@nd.edu by April 27, 2026:

• Resume 
• A short statement covering three things: 
• Why do you want to be part of this course? 
• a specific example of a time you gave someone candid feedback they did not want to hear — ideally in a co-founder, team, or high-stakes working relationship — and what happened; 
• A brief answer to this question: why is asking someone about a past behavior more useful than asking them about a future intention? For example, "What did you do the last time you faced this problem?" versus "Would you buy this?"
•  Optional: examples of work related to customer discovery, product validation, rapid prototyping, teaching, or coaching

Program: ESTEEM Graduate Program, University of Notre Dame 

Class meetings: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00–3:30 PM  (July 9 - 23, 2026)

Role period: Remote coordination begins June 1st. In-person attendance is required for all five class sessions in July (July 9–23), plus preparation and grading windows surrounding each session. 

Expected time commitment: 12–15 hours/week Format: Intensive summer course, approximately 50 students / 25 teams 

Rate: $16 an hour

 

The University of Notre Dame seeks to attract, develop, and retain the highest quality faculty, staff and administration. The University is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or age in employment. Moreover, Notre Dame prohibits discrimination against veterans or disabled qualified individuals, and complies with 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-300.5(a). We strongly encourage applications from candidates attracted to a university with a Catholic identity.