It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Yixuan Zou walks into room 214 of the White Hall Classroom Building with undergraduate students. He picks a seat at the back of the room. Perhaps people think he is also an undergraduate, but he is not. He is the teaching assistant of Statistics 210.

Zou, who is a second year statistics graduate student, has been a TA since fall 2014.

There are 75 students at STA 210-049 (Intro to Statistical Reasoning), and they are divided into three sections. As a TA of this class, Zou’s job is regular and trivial. He needs to attend every class, and follow his professor’s schedule. Once a week, Zou will help students understand the content in a recitation.

“I enjoy the time when I help students,” he said. “ I need to explain some complicated concepts in a simple and understandable way, which can train my brain and expression ability.”

Moreover, Zou needs to grade every student’s assignment and quiz, and upload the scores online, which takes him about five hours a week.

“Sometimes I feel I am not like a TA, some of what I do is like repeating a boring process, like typing students’ scores one by one,” Zou said. “Some students don’t care about their scores at all, and the scores are nothing for them.”

Last semester, Zou taught STA210-401 independently as an instructor. He usually spent almost two hours per lecture making PowerPoint presentations. He did not have a TA.

“Zou was very professional and knowledgeable,” said William S. Rayens, who is a professor and associate chairperson, the director of undergraduate education, and the director of educational initiatives of College of Arts and Sciences. “He completed all tasks that I needed him to complete and seemed to develop a positive and productive relationship with the 60 or so students that he specifically assisted in recitation sections.”

Rayens worked with Zou last spring in STA 210.

Outside the classroom, Zou is an introverted fitness enthusiast.

“In work, he is very, very smart. In life, he is shy,” said Aisaku Nakamura, Zou’s classmate and fellow statistics TA. “He is very motivated to be lean.”

In addition to working out, Zou enjoys watching his favorite basketball player, Kobe Bryant, play, and he hardly ever misses a game, especially the NBA All-Star game on Feb. 14.

 “Time really flies,” he said. “It did not seem so long time passed when I saw him playing basketball in the 2004 NBA playoffs.”

Zou also loves traveling the world. He traveled alone to Switzerland and Spain. Last winter break, he went to Cuba and Mexico with friends.

“He is good at finding material to learn,” Aisaku said.

To grasp more practice skills on statistics, Zou studies some knowledge about Internet by himself. He also has a lot of experience on searching materials.

This semester, Zou registered for an elementary French course.

“If you can speak English and Chinese, you can travel most of the whole world,” Zou said. “If adding to French, I can travel almost around the world.”