Students in my program are “guaranteed” funding for “five years”. Basically, the department will give students a stipend and tuition waiver for TAing. (Most students will drop TAing like a stone if they can get a fellowship or their advisor has grant money to give them an RA (either for hourly work on the advisor’s projects or for work on the student’s thesis research)). However, this doesn’t necessarily include summers. For the most part, students who have needed summer funding have gotten it, but there’s always some drama in April while it gets sorted out.
This year, the summer schedule changed. They added a second session and it really jacked up the TAships. I don’t know if there were fewer TAs needed or if there were more students wanting to TA than usual, but the result was that there were more students than TA positions. Some people didn’t get TAships. Some of those were international students who aren’t allowed to work outside the university. That’s crappy.
Neither EGM nor I have had to worry about this much because we’ve had other funding. This year, though, EGM is on the department’s dime. There was all this confusion about summer pay – how much it would be and when they would get it. EGM finally found out about 6-8 weeks ago that there would be no paycheck in June. The July and August ones will be bigger than usual, so it’s not so bad. But rent is still due each and every month whether they decide to pay us that often or not. He saved what he could to prepare, but seriously, how many people could come up with a month’s worth of expenses on 6 weeks’ notice even if they were paid well?
Sigh…We’ll manage, hopefully without EGM incurring too much debt. It’s sad to dip into that savings I’ve been working so hard to accumulate for something so not fun. Still, I guess this is the kind of thing you save for and I should be glad I can help him out instead of either of us building new credit card debt. It’s just so crappy that our pay is lousy and unreliable.
I’m sorry if this post seems insensitive to readers in humanities departments who get a raw deal compared to science students. FWIW, my university is starting to rectify this by getting a grad student union.
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3 comments:
Solidarity from a humanities student! Seriously, good for your university (or rather, to your grad students, since I'm sure it's not the university itself!) for putting together a union so that this kind of salary BS can be stopped across the board. I may post soon about my own summer funding situation, actually, which a union would have (I hope) prevented.
Yes, I guess that is what a savings is for but it's always sad because we want to believe we are saving for fun things.
This happens in my dept. every summer as most people (citizens) switch from research funding to state funding. Fortunately we don't have to TA in the summer we just get work study through the university as financial aid. However we are told well in advance, usually by previous students and sometime by the department admin., that we will be without a paycheck for a month and while it's cool to get a huge paycheck it doesn't change when the bills are due.
Good luck!
Totally agree with Jennie. You are really saving that rainy-day fund for the hard times, but for some reason you fool yourself into thinking that you're saving for a bonus vacation to the Caribbean or something. I am glad that you and EGM won't have too hard of a time with the situation. You were smart to put away money in the first place.
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