Although the Core program attempts to inform graduate students about potential teaching opportunities far in advance, some departments do not alert their graduate students about course offerings until the course catalogue is published, according to Director of the Core Program Susan W. Lewis.

"They don't even know in any given department what's going to be offered," Lewis says.

And for students in departments which have no undergraduate counterparts, like Comparative Literature, finding a job can be an even greater challenge. These departments offer few undergraduate courses, and their students must look to other programs for teaching opportunities.

"Because we don't have our own undergraduate program, we didn't have enough courses to provide them all with teaching," says Judith L. Ryan, chair of the Comparative Literature Department.

But many departments, including the English Department, give preference to their own graduate students before they open their doors to those from programs like Comparative Literature. And this preferential treatment means many graduate students are prevented from teaching courses in their specialty areas, locked out by less qualified students.

"There's no reason why they should be hiring someone from the department first and keeping out somebody who's more qualified," says Camille Lizarribar, a third-year Comp Lit student who struggled to find work this semester. "You're hurting the undergraduates."

Even the English Department, which has a large undergraduate program and makes tentative teaching fellow assignments before the semester begins, is not immune to the chaos that erupts during shopping period.

"We think we're all set, everyone's happy, everything's hunky-dory," says Gwen Urdang-Brown, coordinator of graduate studies for the English Department. "Then the semester hits with the shopping period and everything changes."

Although department coordinators use previous enrollment figures to predict course sizes and numbers of sections needed, their estimates are often far from accurate.

The unpredictability, Pilbeam says, is increased because of the nature of the Core. Core course offerings may very dramatically from year to year, and undergraduates often use core courses to fulfill concentration requirements.

"An unusually large enrollment in a Core course can have a very significant and unpredictable spill-over effect in the enrollment in concentration courses," Pilbeam says.

Until undergraduates turn in their study cards, many teaching fellow placements remain uncertain. And after final class sizes are determined, some teaching fellows who thought they had jobs are forced back to the drawing board.

And unlike the Core, which does not fire teaching fellows it has already hired, some departments, have to rescind job offers, Urdang-Brown says.

This semester, she says, enrollment for the English Department's introductory survey course, English 10b, dropped so low that several section--and several teaching jobs--were eliminated.

When course enrollment is down and section are dropped, the graduate students assigned to those sections are left without the jobs they had been promised. The result, many graduate students and faculty members say, is a scramble from professor to professor, from teaching fellow to teaching fellow, in hope of finding an over-enrolled course or an unfilled position.