In his first two years of undergrad, Tyler Tâm Trần, Comm ’25, worked remotely as a Revenue Assistant (RAA) for the City of Ottawa.
“I just applied off LinkedIn. Before I was coming to Queen’s, I was looking for any job that I could find. I applied to a lot of retail jobs, a lot of fast-food jobs. I didn’t get any of those,” Trần said in an interview with The Journal.
Trần lucked out with this job—the City of Ottawa made an exception so he could work remotely during the school year. He worked 16 hours each week to supplement tuition and living costs.
As an RAA, Trần’s main responsibility was to validate the water billing data. He was tasked with identifying if a water bill for a household was unusually high or low so it could be further investigated.
His income was further supplemented by the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), a ed Education Savings Plan (RESP), and a low-income bursary offered by Queen’s.
To make everything work, Trần would cram all his classes into three weekdays and work nine-to-five on the other two weekdays.
Trần commented his professors accommodated his work schedule. Many of his professors would meet with him at other times if office hours conflicted with a work shift, although Trần said he usually adjusted his schedule to meet professors early in the mornings or late in evenings to discuss course material. He would like to see this accommodating approach institutionalized in course syllabi to encourage better understanding among peers in group-project heavy programs.
While Trần would prefer to work on campus, he pointed to one key benefit of working off campus—having a life beyond the Queen’s University bubble.
“You’re going to class on campus, all your friends are on campus. Your whole life could just devolve into university and the campus and that’s not healthy for anyone. It’s good to have ions outside of university,” he said.
Trần struggled when it came to balancing a part-time job with extracurricular commitments. He found working during the school year often restricted his ability to participate in extracurriculars and attend events.
While gaining work experience as a student has always been valuable, inflationary costs are making it more expensive than ever to be a student. The Kingston Whig Standard reported Kingston’s average monthly rent in July 2022 was up 17.9 percent from the previous year. In February 2023, food inflation was above 10 per cent from the previous year, which is more than twice as much as the overall inflation rate. Though food inflation has slowed to 3.1 per cent in Canada as of December 2023, prices are still up.
READ MORE: Data suggests increased food bank use across the board
While programs such as OSAP offer to students looking to supplement the cost of tuition, the funding isn’t always sufficient to keep students afloat throughout the year.
The maximum weekly OSAP assistance in 2023-24 for single students with no dependents enrolled at a public university such as Queen’s is $510 per week. These numbers mark a 20 per cent increase from 2022-23, where the maximum weekly assistance was $410 for single students.
Building experience
As a research assistant at Kingston General Hospital (KGH), Abhay Katoch, ArtSci ’25, conducts computational analysis in a pathology lab. While he currently works 10 to 15 hours each week, he started working full-time this past summer.
“A lot of my day-to-day responsibilities are going to meetings, meeting with my professor and the other students, doing analyses with genomic data, and I’m told to figure out anything interesting in the data set,” Katoch told The Journal in an interview.
While he appreciates the money this job provides, Katoch is primarily doing it so he can gain experience.
“It’s for the experience. Getting on research papers, knowing what a research lab is like, and essentially having something to put on the resume,” he said.
He believes his time at this lab will help prepare him for a science-related graduate program after undergrad.
Katoch’s job is currently hybrid—his meetings are in-person but the rest of his work can be completed remotely. However, his workplace is flexible even with in-person meetings—they allow him to attend meetings remotely if necessary.
He has found his principal investigator (PI)—the researcher responsible for overseeing his lab—to be understanding about his academic commitments.
“My [PI] is like ‘Abhay, maybe you should prioritize school for a bit. What we’re working on right now isn’t that urgent. Prioritize yourself a bit and make sure that you get everything done for school since that’s the biggest priority.’”
As a Politics, Philosophy, and Economics student, Ashleigh Arnold, ArtSci ’25, also works at a job that’s relevant to her academic interests—she’s a constituency assistant at the office of Kingston’s Member of Parliament (MP) Mark Gerretsen.
Arnold is responsible for answering phone calls and emails from constituents, making social media posts, and drafting community outreach letters. Out of everything she has done as a constituency assistant, she is especially proud of helping create a calendar for constituents.
“I was in charge of finding artwork from Kingston constituents to add to our calendar. I put it all together and it should be out this December which is exciting,” Arnold said in an interview with The Journal.
She got her job by networking with her now boss and his wife at an event organized by the Ontario Liberal Party. She introduced herself and was encouraged by Gerretsen’s wife to apply for the constituency assistant position.
Arnold landed the position this past summer and has stayed on during the school year to supplement the cost of living and interest on her student loans.
“Since I don’t have a lot of from funding sources like OSAP, I had to get out a student loan with my bank which isn’t the best since I have to pay interest on it every month,” she said.
Prior to working as a constituency assistant, Arnold worked at Walmart during the school year. She finds her current job is the polar opposite when compared to her stressful experience working at Walmart.
“[At Walmart], I was in a constant battle with management trying to reduce my hours so I could focus on school,” Arnold said.
At one point, she stated Walmart scheduled her for 30 hours during a week in which she had three exams.
While Katoch isn’t working out of necessity this year, he believes the University should be more lenient towards those who do.
“I think the University should accommodate people who have to work for tuition. By not doing so, this creates almost a dichotomy where you’re giving an advantage to students who don’t have to work for their tuition,” he said.
Katoch believes whether students work or not during the school year is indicative of wealth and income disparities.
“The people who need to work to pay for tuition are likely those who come from backgrounds who can’t pay for that. I think it is a form of elitism on the part of Queen’s, though I don’t think it’s intentional,” Katoch said.
Putting in the hours
Though students like Katoch and Arnold’s workplaces offer direct means of preparation for their future careers, many students pivot to entry level work to supplement the cost of living.
Ella Alvarado de Catleugh, ArtSci ’26, often finds herself at a pool operated by the City of Kingston where she works as a lifeguard.
Alvarado de Catleugh works during the school year out of necessity. Her income helps pay for tuition, rent, and car insurance. On average, she puts in about 24 hours of work each week.
She has found balancing her work commitments with her other commitments to be challenging.
“It’s hard to schedule clubs around my work commitments so a lot of the times, I won’t be able to club meetings. [When it comes to] social life, I work on weekends so I can’t really go out on weekends. Whatever time I have left, it’s normally for studying,” she said in an interview with The Journal.
In of assistance programs like OSAP, Alvarado de Catleugh believes they leave much to be desired when it comes to providing sufficient funds for students.
“I don’t think [the other funding sources] do a great job considering that I have to put so much time into working just so that I can afford to live in Kingston,” Alvarado de Catleugh said.
She’s not the only one.
The summer before her first year, Emily* knew she would have to herself financially at Queen’s. At times, she would work 10 hours a day as a telephone operator to save up for the school year. This money, paired with scholarships, helped Emily pay for her expenses during first year, and she would study in between calls during shifts.
With her yearly expenses being $20,000, Emily received $15,000 in assistance, leaving her to come up with an extra $5,000 shortfall by working part-time during the school year.
When the next summer rolled around, she realized her financial situation might put an in-person second year out of reach. Through a friend, Emily learned about OSAP—a potential way for her to continue in-person schooling.
She approached a social worker as well as the OSAP office at Queen’s and explained her situation. While researching the OSAP requirements, Emily discovered she would have to get letters from her circles to help explain her situation.
“OSAP is like ‘this is how much your tuition costs, this is how much food might cost’ but those numbers vary very often. I feel like there’s very little wiggle room. You’d have to budget very frugally with no room for error,” she said.
Gathering the necessary documentation and waiting for approval for assistance from OSAP was draining for Emily, who said the process took a month to get approved.
In her case, Alvarado de Catleugh said working off campus is usually more financially advantageous than working on campus. She mentioned lifeguard pay rates at the City of Kingston pools are higher than those at the Athletics and Recreation Centre.
At the same time, working off campus means Alvarado de Catleugh must walk 25 minutes just to get to her workplace. In fact, she has even had to pay out of her own pocket to make the commute work—one of the times her job is not financially advantageous compared to working on campus.
“I would say that the biggest disadvantage for me is that if I’m scheduled to work at 4:30 and my class ends at 4:20, I’m normally Ubering there and that wastes money,” she said.
She has found working during the school year often means she misses out on in-person office hours with her teaching assistant (TA).
“It was annoying that I couldn’t talk to them in person. It was more emails and then they’d reply in one to two days. I would say it wasn’t as accessible as going to in-person office hours,” Alvarado de Catleugh said.
Like Katoch, Alvarado de Catleugh believes that the university could be more accommodating to students who work during the school year. As someone who works to herself financially, she has found the accommodations in her courses to be lacking.
“I think being more lenient with deadlines would be my best recommendation because I think it would help me out a lot, especially when the workload is a lot heavier near midterm season or at the end of the year when work is always constant.”
A balancing act
Anaya Deosaran, Comm ’26, currently works as a Keyholder at Bulk Barn to herself. She’s responsible for opening the store, tallying up the money in each cash , restocking, and cleaning.
Deosaran works 30 hours per week along with school. While she said her boss works around her academic schedule, working with her peers to keep up with her heavily group-work-based academic program has been less forgiving.
“When you have group work [for classes] and they do spontaneous meetings, they conflict with my work schedule,” Deosaran told The Journal.
“There really isn’t a way for me to work around it because it’s not fair to my boss if I asked him to cover for me so last minute, but it’s also not fair to my group. It’s kind of hard to pick and choose where my time and effort goes for that day.”
Deosaran also stated that her boss is flexible with how many hours she works during exam season, but he would expect her to make up for working less hours in the future.
When it comes to advice for students who want to work off campus during the school year, Deosaran suggests that they apply for jobs earlier on in the semester.
“Since working at Bulk Barn, there have been a lot of students who have come in mid-semester asking for a job and I would give my boss their application and [my boss] would say ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t take it’ because he does most of the hiring at the beginning of the year.”
She also recommends keeping a calendar that tracks every commitment. According to Deosaran, a calendar can help keep a visual balance of what one is doing, to help streamline scheduling and avoiding conflicts between schedules.
As someone who didn’t work in her first year, Deosaran has discovered that working during the school year has changed how she studies. While she was able to spend all day at the library in her first year, Deosaran must now study late into the night or early in the morning.
“When you’re working, studying can be very time consuming because you need to make up for the time you’re losing when you’re at your job,” Deosaran said.
*Name changed for anonymity to protect the source’s emotional safety.
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