With reports of food and housing insecurity, graduate students have long been speaking out about their quality of life.
This week, The Journal spoke to five graduate students about their experiences working during the school year. Many of them are struggling under the cost-of-living crisis and stagnant.
Handling the workload
As a PhD student in the chemistry department, Neil Grenade balances his research responsibilities with his work commitments as a teaching assistant (TA) at Queen’s and chemistry tutor on the side. Grenade said tutoring fits well into his schedule. However, that isn’t to say he doesn’t face challenges managing his workload—particularly his TA commitments.
“Sometimes, situations evolve in an unpredictable way. For instance, TAing can be more complex than just being at a certain place and time in the week and then giving a tutorial or being in a lab to supervise an experiment. You have to mark, and that can take up quite a bit of time, quite more time than being in a tutorial or a lab,” Grenade said in an interview with The Journal.
Grenade commented on how certain weeks are often much busier than others.
“You could have a very front-loaded semester where you have so much work to do and then you don’t have time to tutor and do research and you’re bagged down with all this unpredicted workload that has to get done,” he said.
In discussing the biggest challenge of being a working graduate student, he discussed unanticipated life events. For example, an injury once significantly set back his ability to serve as a TA.
“Whenever you have a life that encomes so many different obligations, when one thing is impacted, it usually trickles down into the others, and you have to make it up somehow or you have to find a way to readjust.”
As a senior PhD student, Grenade enjoys the agency he has over how his week looks. Grenade mentioned that rather than heavily depending on others, it’s more about them depending on him, which has provided him with a greater ability to accommodate unexpected changes in his weekly schedule.
As a TA, Pheerawich Chitnelawong, a PhD student in the physics, engineering physics, and astronomy department, spends a lot of his time marking.
He described the grading workload as uneven. Despite having a contractual limit of 120 working hours per semester, he shared staying within this limit is sometimes difficult.
He’s found his time as TA to be a rewarding experience. Having TAed third and fourth-year courses in engineering and physics, Chitnelawong has appreciated the opportunity to develop his teaching skills.
“It’s very useful to see what’s going on. Teaching helps you understand a lot if you are able to explain yourself to your students or explain the theory,” he said in an interview with The Journal. “It means you at least have some semblance of understanding, so I think it’s good for professional development and personal growth.”
Veronica Sewilski, an MA student in the gender studies department, has taken on a range of jobs during her time as a graduate student. She has worked in customer service roles, istrative positions, and as a TA.
Due to the rising cost of living, Sewilski was forced to work, and works upwards of 60 to 70 hours per week, whereas she dedicates six to 20 hours each week for school.
She encourages graduate students to talk with their supervisors. In her case, her supervisor worked full-time during graduate school and thus was understanding and flexible
about deadlines.
Managing finances
Due to funding from various scholarships, Grenade doesn’t work out of necessity. His main scholarships include the School of Graduate Studies’ doctoral award, which provides $15,000 in funding annually, and the NSERC postgraduate scholarship, which provides $63,000 in funding across three years.
Despite additional comforts to supplement the cost of tuition, he still faces the financial strain of Kingston’s rising cost of living, and has been particularly impacted by higher grocery prices.
“It’s crazy how much things have changed. When I just started, I would pay $100 for two weeks of groceries and now it’s closer to $150, $160 for two weeks of groceries,” he said.
As a result of these rising costs, Grenade feels pressure to be more proactive about securing additional funding sources like scholarships and other sources of income.
He’s not alone—Chitnelawong shares many of Grenade’s frustrations with the rising cost of living.
Chitnelawong has been able to maintain his lifestyle due to his frugality, and he’s been living in the same place for the past few years. However, he has found it challenging to save.
While he once used to tutor, he’s no longer able to due to his changing schedule.
“Graduate school is quite difficult and there’s a lot more going on in my more senior years of my PhD so there’s a lot more I need to get done,” Chitnelawong said. “Money isn’t really a problem for me now so I think it’s fine for me to focus on finishing my PhD.”
Levi Duhaime is a Master’s student in the department of biology and the vice-president (community relations) at PSAC 901.
Duhaime finds the University’s funding packages for graduate students to be insufficient. He has seen many of his fellow graduate students take on additional TA assignments in order to make ends meet.
He commented on financial challenges posed by the contractual limits on maximum hours TAs are allowed to work.
“When people hear that TAs are making $44 an hour, which is a pretty good wage, they think ‘oh, that’s quite a bit of money,’” Duhaime said in an interview with The Journal.
“We’re capped on the number of hours that we can actually work as a part of our funding packages. Usually, you only TA something like 120, 130 hours a semester and that doesn’t add up to all that much because you’re not [paid for] working 20 to 40 hours a week.”
While his daily schedule is packed, Duhaime often spends up to nine consecutive hours on campus. His day usually begins at 8 a.m. when he gets up and does work around the house. Then, he goes for his morning meetings, starts his lab work, or goes to class. Once he returns home in the evening, he answers any emails and completes leftover remote work tasks.
Duhaime has been hit hard by the rising cost of living, especially given he’s unable to take on additional hours of work to make more money. Instead, he’s been forced to cut costs by accessing free food services like the Good Times Diner, the AMS Food Bank, and the PSAC 901 Food Fund.
Noah James, an MSc student in translational medicine, finds the funding he receives as a graduate student isn’t enough to cover essentials such as groceries, let alone extracurriculars.
“I really enjoy extracurriculars, whether it’s skating, going to the gym, playing hockey, things like that. Shinny hockey is $10 a night, so costs add up,” he said in an interview with The Journal.
Zhiyun Yang, a PhD student in biomedical and molecular sciences, finds the stipend for graduate students insufficient to keep up with the cost of living. However, with a TAship or two, she has been able to secure enough income to live.
One of the biggest rising costs in Kingston, rent, is not a concern for Yang—she and her husband purchased a house in Kingston.
As a mother to a seven-month-old baby, Yang is currently on maternity leave. She receives $10,000 for maternity leave from the University—$5,000 per semester for a maximum of two semesters.
While she anticipates some challenges after she returns to work, Yang discussed how her mother will be helping take care of her child to alleviate the pressures on her as a graduate student.
Addressing the crisis
To ensure graduate students aren’t doing work without compensation, Duhaime advises them to thoroughly check the Teaching Assistant Form (TAF)—a form that stipulates a TA’s duties and expected hourly commitments.
“Oftentimes, the duties you’re asked to do by your employment supervisor, or the professor will not match the TAF. That’s when you run into issues getting compensated for work you’ve already done but they might not necessarily think is within the bounds of your contract.”
In of what he believes to be the biggest challenge graduate students face, he pointed to the relationship with the University.
“As students, we pay tuition, but in other universities and other countries, that’s not necessarily the case for Master’s students or PhD students where they are classified solely as skilled workers. That’s true, that’s what we’re doing. We’re creating the research that gets published and the University likes to tout their research as being world-class, but the majority of that’s being done not by faculty, but by postdocs and graduate students.”
To address this challenge, he believes there must be a provincial-level reclassification of graduate students as workers rather than students. Duhaime contends that such a reform would provide graduate students with more comprehensive employment protections and rights.
Duhaime is critical of the working conditions graduate students often experience. He pointed to health and safety as a prime concern.
“There’s been a lot of construction going on that’s been displacing graduate students. For instance, in the English department, their student offices are an active building site right now where they’re doing some renovations, but there aren’t appropriate spaces for [graduate] students to be relocated to do their work. So, they’re coming to campus and to their graduate student offices and there’s active construction, noise, dust, and debris going on right next to them,” Duhaime said.
When it comes to how the university can better graduate students, Sewilski pointed to the School of Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs’ (SGPSA) policy stipulating graduate students can’t as full-time students while maintaining full-time employment greater than 30 hours per week elsewhere.
She found the policy to be unreasonable and found it frustrating that it was not clearly outlined to her or the graduate students in her cohort.
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