TakeruK

My field has a similar acceptance rate too. However, this does not mean that only the top 7% of *all* students get into graduate schools. Remember that many students apply to anywhere between 5 to 15 schools. Even the best students do not get into every school they apply to (I'm sure there are the top 1% that do but not most of the "best" students). In my field, with a 5-10% acceptance rate for most graduate programs, I would say that the students that end up in grad programs are generally in the top 30%-40% or so of their graduating class. This doesn't mean that 30%-40% of undergrads go into grad programs of course, many do not do grad school. Getting into grad school is not "easy" by any means, but it's also not reserved only for the best of the best!

I don't think it should be one or the other. Why not both? I applied to about 8 schools and all of them had both. In order to find places with both though, you can't be too stringent on the criteria: For some of my schools, the "name" of the school is only well known in my field, but for academic careers, the department/professor's reputation is far more important than the school's overall reputation--I think it is pretty difficult to find schools that have a great reputation in your field and a great overall reputation, unless you plan on putting all your eggs in the top 10! I also defined my topic of interest to be pretty broad. I don't know what a good analogy to your field would be though. But perhaps we can compare it to our national society's annual meetings/conferences. I would say that at the start of grad school, my interests would be more specific than my society's entire annual meeting (~1000 people) but would probably span the same range of topics as a session with the title of my field of interest (perhaps 200-ish people). In my opinion, it is a mistake to be so specific in your PhD studies that you can count the number of people that work on your topic on one hand. After all, if that's how many people are doing that work, that's how many people are interested in hiring you to do that work post-PhD! My advice would be to try to gauge your field and figure out what will be the topics of interest in 5-7 years and work on projects that will train you in the skills to be employable post-PhD. I think it's important that you have some interest in what you're working on, but it's not necessary that the topic is your favourite/most passionate interest. And I think it's much much easier to change/alter your own interests than it is to change the quality/usefulness of the grad program. So, pick a program that will best help you achieve your goals! Finally, I also considered how my school name would look on paper if I were to work outside of my field/academia. So I did consider the prestige of the school overall, as perceived by non-academics, in addition to the school's standing in academic circles.

Just want to add that if you know that the course is directly useful to your research, it would generally be worth spending more time on it! A foreign language related to your work could be one of those things. For me, I happily spent 12-15 hours per week on a course last year that was directly relevant to my research (the code I wrote for the problem sets were directly useful in my own work).

Your reasons for applying to Colorado schools seem sound to me and I don't think it's a bad idea at all.

As Eigen and Gnome said, it's hard to give an exact number. I agree with "0-9 hours", where the most important part of this range is that there is a maximum and for programs in my field, spending more than 9 hours on a course usually means you are in the realm of diminishing returns and it would probably be better to spend that time elsewhere.

I also do not like Evernote! Just saying I don't really have a use for an app that just allows me to jot down notes since for research purposes, I prefer to do that in my lab notebooks and keep everything in one place. I take notes for courses in paper notebooks because there are lots of diagrams and equations that I can't replicate digitally fast enough without a tablet. Even for shopping lists I prefer paper because it's annoying to have to constantly turn the screen on on my phone and it's much faster to just glance down at my paper. I can also write faster than I can type on my phone!

I agree with GeoDUDE! and my experience is similar. I spend less time on my course in graduate school than I did in undergrad. During undergrad, I usually took 5 courses at once and probably spent 10-15 hours total (including attending class) per class, for a total of probably 50-60 hours per week on my courses. But this was only viable because in undergrad, the only thing I did was courses. Except for my honours thesis (taken in my last year where I took only 3-4 classes), all of my research was full time (summers and co-op program where I did a year of just work). In grad school, I still spend around 10 hours per course, but I only have 3 courses at once. I then spend another 20-30 hours on research during the year when I have coursework, so a total of 50-60 hours work altogether--same as before. Since last fall, I have no more courses so I can just spend 40 ish hours per week just doing work, leaving me with time to pursue my other interests. Although the material in graduate courses are indeed harder, you are more prepared at this point than you were when you started college. I am pretty sure that I can now do 2 hours of undergrad-me work in about an hour now, armed with experience on how to efficiently tackle problems and analyze readings. In addition, the expectations are different since (in my field at least), the focus is completing research, not taking classes. In most grad classes, grades close to 100% are awarded for meeting expectations, and going beyond usually will not give you any more points. This is not to say that grad students should slack off on all of their classes. Instead, this means that grad students are not expected to put extra effort just to get an A--the grading is such that anyone who tries will get an A and the only reason to go beyond expectations is for your own good. As adults and professionals we are trusted to decide for ourselves when we want to put the extra effort in. So, in general, my grades in grad school are about the same as undergrad (or even better) and I would say I put in about 60-70% of the effort in my classes now than I did in undergrad. I also agree with GeoDUDE! that I think a person might not be ready for graduate school if they are not able to prioritize and manage their time so that they can balance both work and personal life and sleep. The ratio that is "balanced" would depend on each person (I'm not judging anyone who chooses to work 12+ hours per day as long as they are happy with it!). Personally, my ideal balance is something close to 1:1:1 for work:personal:sleep, where personal includes fun things like socialization and keeping active as well as other important things like cooking, cleaning my home, keeping in touch with friends/family, doing taxes and other random errands etc. My philosophy is that grad school is my job/career and being a healthy person means I have a good work/life balance. After all, the reason I have/want a career is so that I can earn money to follow my non-work related passions in life. It sure is nice, right now, that my career happens to be one of my passions too, but I don't want to make that my only passion! If it ever comes to the point where one passion is preventing me from enjoying my other passions, I'll have to give up the one that is being too needy.

I agree with fuzzy, especially about determining how long you can have access to your old email account. I still have full access to my institution email account from my last grad school, and according to the IT staff, I can continue to access it indefinitely, without charge. At my undergrad, we can keep our school email addresses only if we pay a certain annual fee, though.

Canadian students do not have to submit TOEFL scores, so I don't have any experience there to help you, sorry!

Yes, I think this is something you could include on your CV if you want to and feel proud of it/think that it deserves to be there. Ideally, written work listed in a CV should be accessible by the people reading it so probably best if you can link to the paper if it's put online somewhere. Another way you can judge whether you want it on a CV is whether you would feel proud to describe your work in an interview or something similar. In my field, some students do put technical reports that they have written for internal use (i.e. their research groups) on their CVs. They might put something like this in "non peer-reviewed work" or just as an item under the job listing where they did this work. I think something like this is good to have at the beginning if you don't have any peer reviewed work to show. But if you have a paper or two, having an extra white paper on your CV isn't going to do much more--you already proven your ability to produce academic written work. I would say that this kind of item is something you would want to slowly phase out of your CV. Of course, all this depends on the impact of your work too. Most of the above assumes low impact white papers / reports meant for your group only. If you are working for a large organization that will use your work to inform high level decisions, then I'd say it's a big deal and to definitely include it / keep it around.

I haven't heard of Venmo but looking it up, I see that it's only available in the US! I started using PayPal when I was in Canada so I just stuck with it when I moved south (Although you still need to have separate accounts for the two countries--cannot link US bank accounts to a Canadian PayPal account and vice versa!)

In places I've been to in the past, it's like a matching system. The students are asked to rank a list of 3-5 courses they would like to TA and the profs makes a ranked list of students they want to TA their course. Then the TA coordinator combines the two lists to make everyone as happy as possible. Usually what happens is that if a prof wants a specific student to be their TA (usually their own student), they will first check with the student to make sure the student wants to TA and then request it to the TA Coordinator and it's basically a sure thing that you'll get that position, assuming you want it! At my current school, a similar process happens. However, sometimes as a result of your qualifying exam, the committee might make a recommendation that you TA a certain course that covers material that they feel you are not as strong as you could be on. TAing is a good way to learn the material too! I think it's a fallacy to think that TAs must be complete experts on the material they teach. In reality, they just need to know it at one level higher than the students. This is usually true if the TA has taken the same course or a similar course in the past! This year, I asked to teach two of the lectures in the course I was TAing and the material I taught was completely new to me. In the two weeks prior to the lectures, I spent almost about 20 hours learning the material, writing my course notes, and creating a problem set based on the material just to deliver 2 hours worth of lectures! (My experience in the past was about a 4 or 5 to 1 ratio of prep time vs teaching time). So, while it is true that I could have worked 10 fewer hours if I covered something I knew well, I felt it was a good chance for me to learn something new and interesting to me too! So, don't let the higher level of the material discourage you from TAing a course you would be really interested in. Instructors do not have to be all-knowing (and it's unrealistic if you try to project that image). By the way, the professor of the course also did not know the material in my lectures so they also attended the lecture to learn the material! Everyone is learning the material as they teach it.

I don't think you should take a GRE and only complete the AW section, while getting a no-score on the rest of it. In my opinion, this can only send negative messages about you, as it looks like you are trying to "game" the system, and that usually is frowned upon in academia. The exception would be if you know for a fact that the schools you are applying to will be okay with this tactic. In addition, if you are arguing that your AW score in the first exam was a fluke and your second exam can show your AW skills better, how do the schools know that your Verbal score wasn't also a fluke? To me, writing only the AW portion the second time around appears a lot like cherry picking your data!! Therefore, if you want to redo the GRE, you should redo the entire exam. If you feel that the other scores (Q and V) reflect your ability, then your second test scores should be close to your first score. You'll be submitting both sets of scores, I'm assuming, so I think if you show consistent performance in the near-80th percentile in GRE V, you should be fine. That is, if you get e.g. a 4.5 on AW next time but only 157 on GRE V, I don't think it will hurt you. I think it would actually help you!

I find Dropbox on the phone really useful. I find it handy to save PDF confirmations of hotel bookings, flight reservations, eTickets, etc so I can easily access them when I travel (just "favourite" the document on your phone while connected to WiFi or in an area with reception and you can have offline access too). Sometimes when I know I need to go somewhere and wait (e.g. the DMV) and I want to just read a PDF related to coursework or research, I can quickly move the file to my Dropbox on my computer and then it's also on my phone. As I wrote somewhere else, I find it tough to regularly read academic PDFs on a small screen (two columns, figures etc are tough), it's pretty handy for once in a while. I use Google Calendar as my main organizer and basically everything is sync'ed up with my laptop through Google Apps (documents, email, calendar etc.) Not directly related to school, but apps for getting coupons for the grocery store etc. can save you some money on a grad student budget too. And PayPal is a handy one to pay your friends back when you all chip in for pizza or drinks or whatever. My campus is really well mapped on Google Maps, so I find that really handy when I need to go to a new building (grad students don't get around campus much!). Finally, ConnectBot is a really handy app that lets me use ssh to log into my work computer. I can then check that status of any programs I'm writing etc. In theory, you can use it to work on your computer as if you had a full keyboard but it's not very easy to write code on a phone! I use it when I need to check the status of my code while I'm away from a computer. Although I've really only done this a handful of times--it's rare that I need to know the status of something so urgently that it cannot wait until I get back to my desk. That's all I can think of on my phone for now!

I agree with rising_star--for the purposes of a conference presentation, you'll want to list where you are at the time of the meeting, if you know it. In my field, when you do publish the work though, I would list the affiliation as the place where I did the work. If you can only list one for the conference, I'd list your new affiliation if possible. If you are presenting a slideshow or a poster, you can put both schools on that. Sometimes conference registration happens far in advance of the actual meeting so it's not too rare for someone to have moved so that their name badge is no longer up to date. Or, someone might be close to graduation and are planning to start a new job somewhere else that fall. It's pretty common to see that someone has taken a sharpie to their name badge and write like "University X --> University Y" (or do so on their title slides/posters).

Since some astronomers really only require a computer to do their research, it's far less costly to than purchasing actual materials for a lab or an experiment so even if a major change in our PI's funding happens, it's generally possible to scrape together enough funding to continue a current project. However, I have known students who had to change projects completely because the data doesn't come through--either the grant application for telescope time did not get approved, or perhaps the weather did not allow for the quality of data needed, or perhaps our telescope gets decommissioned or breaks!! etc. In general, observational astronomers try to work on at least 2 projects so that if something like this happens, they have a backup plan. Astronomy/planetary science is another field where the dissertation topic is pretty much decided near the end when we look back on our research and try to unite them in a coherent theme--I've seen many defenses where the "theme" is a pretty big stretch but that doesn't really matter. The "meat" of our PhD is the research we did and the skills learned from the process, not the end result. Also interesting to note that in Canadian tax law, RAs can sometimes be considered self-employed persons, which is how a lot of graduate students see themselves--apprentice contractors for hire (except instead of building houses or fixing pipes, we perform academic research).

For me, an e-reader's screen is too small for me to read academic works if I'm just displaying a PDF onto something like a Kindle. Specifically, the double column format means a lot of annoying scrolling and in my field, I often have to refer to figures and plots along side text, which is just really hard to do on a small screen. I prefer academic reading on a full size monitor where I can have multiple windows open and can flip between PDF pages a lot faster etc. But that might just be me! But e-readers are great for recreational reading for me. I really enjoy reading novels and I suppose I can read academic works too if it's in a format specifically designed as an e-book. But I have never tried this because very few academic works appear in book form in my field. My e-reader is a Kindle Paperwhite and I really like it! Would highly recommend!

Maybe this is a difference in field then. The way that others in my field (as written here and from other conversations), is that as a graduate student research, I provide a product (papers, research output whatever) for my supervisor and school. In return, I get paid money for that work. When a plumber completes a job, it helps his/her career because the job provides more experience which allows them to become a better plumber. But they still get paid for their work even though it has benefits for them. When I complete a research "product", I become a better researcher because of the experience, but I should still get paid for all the hours I put into the work. To respond to the part in bold, I agree that a plumber in training should be paid less than a full plumber because the plumber in training will take longer to do things and/or produce less skilled work, and so a graduate student researcher-in-training should be paid less than a full staff scientist for the same reasons. So yes, while I think I should be paid 40 hours per week, I am not saying that I should be paid 40 hours a week at the rate of a FT employee in my field, but instead some fraction of that, which I estimated above to be in the $30k-$40k/year range (the full time employee wage would be in the $50k-$60k range). But I do agree that we are derailing the main problem presented by the OP now. I just wanted to respond to the bolded part because I felt that my words were misinterpreted.

I don't think this is the "majority" of my time. However, I don't see this as "people getting in the way of accomplishing my research". My "research" is not a set ideal path where I see people as "obstacles". In my opinion, research/science is a human endeavor and like any other job, we work with other people in order to accomplish mutual goals. So, I view working out the logistics and reaching agreements between collaborators as an integral component of science/research and just as much a part of my job as writing code, or running experiments is.

I agree with themmases--there's no need to provide specific details of your decision or that you think your own actions are unethical. I would apologize for changing my mind but ultimately, they have to understand that most people need to prioritize paid commitments over volunteer ones. In my opinion, I would reduce your letter to: Dear Ms. YYA and Ms. YYB: Yesterday, I received an unexpected paid internship offer from X. I applied for the position awhile back this past spring, but hadn’t heard anything after I’d followed up with them and assumed I was no longer under consideration. Unfortunately, the time constraints of this position in concert with my current internship position would bar me from volunteering with Y. I want to genuinely thank you for the opportunity and apologize for the inconvenience that I have likely caused. I would have kept you and the staff abreast of my summer situation had I been aware that the X opportunity was still on the table. Sincerely,

You are right that although there's lots of similarities, this is one example where the two countries are a lot different. So it's not valid for me to compare the two directly. What I was trying to explain was that I think grad students should be paid some scaled down version of the wage of a teaching adjunct, for their teaching roles, and a scaled down version of a staff scientist, for their research roles. And my examples were supposed to be an illustration of how it might work (and how it does work elsewhere, not in the US). To give a US example though, introductory staff scientist like positions at my current school pays about double of the grad student stipend. I know this because when a graduate student defends but stays around to finish up a few papers or train a replacement etc., they are sometimes upgraded to a "staff scientist" position. But because the supervisor often cannot afford this, sometimes the arrangement is to hire them as a half-time staff scientist (i.e. twice the wage at half the hours) so the student works ~20 hrs/week to finish up papers and tie up loose ends from their research. I am really surprised to learn that teaching adjuncts might earn less than $2000 per course, even if they are fully and completely responsible for developing course content, especially since these are workers with PhDs! Can we both agree that the problem is that these positions are underpaid? In Canada, it's also true that outside of the "lab" sciences (using "lab" very loosely since my "lab" is a computer where I run computations and simulations), graduate students often earn their RA money by doing work outside of their dissertation. But in Canada and the US, science graduate students are generally paid as RAs to do work towards their dissertation. I know this is not always true--sometimes a student takes on another professor's research project in order to earn RA pay, but in most cases this is true. The way I see it ("justify" it if you will), my labour/effort spent must be compensated in one of two ways: either 1) through course credit towards my degree completion or 2) through paid wages. (I guess there is a third option, where I freely choose to volunteer my time, such as when I choose to serve on committees). So, I don't count my time studying for exams (both course exams and qualifiers), doing homework, or working on my actual physical dissertation** as paid work since it meets category 1. Everything else though counts as paid research work. I would never do research work at my own expense. I do research because it is my profession--it is how I earn my living. To me, research is not a hobby or an interest that I can afford to pursue on my own leisure time at this moment. Even though I enjoy it immensely, I don't work for free. I find this equivalent to any other profession (let's say an event photographer). As much as these professionals enjoy doing their work and as much passion they have for their craft, they cannot be expected to work for free. Sure, they might do some extra photography in their free time, but their main priority is to work as a photographer for hire. I see my relationship with research in a similar way. I am curious as to why you doubt my ability to justify a ~40 hour work week. I don't mean this as an attack, and I don't think you do either--but I am genuinely curious as to why you don't think a graduate student is able to put in 40 hours of work for their school/employer. So I would be interested to hear more on this if you don't mind. My main argument in this thread is that graduate students are indeed full time employees in practice, if not always recognized as such on paper. Most fully funded PhD programs in the sciences expect its graduate students to work as much as a full time employee, require that the student does not have other commitments that would make their PhD work drop below full time equivalency, and pay graduate students enough so that they can be completely dependent on this support for all their expenses. Finally, I just want to clarify the ** note I made above when I mentioned dissertation work as "unpaid work". By this, I mean any work that actually does not have any benefit my "employer" in any way. In the sciences, the most common form of dissertation is to take 3 to 5 papers that the student wrote and published during their time in the program and reformat them to the school's dissertation format. Then, the student needs to add an introduction and conclusion chapter as well as write a little bit of additional text to weave these papers together into a coherent narrative. You might notice this if you read a science PhD student's dissertation--most of the chapters will say something like "This chapter has been reproduced in its entirety, with permission, from [reference to original paper here]" in the beginning. Thus, all of the work described here (formatting, additional text, etc.) is solely to satisfy a one's course/degree requirements and I don't think this counts as time that one can "charge" as "paid work". If a student has been able to write enough papers to meet the minimum for this format, the general amount of time necessary to produce a dissertation, from watching many others do it, is approximately one month of prioritizing this work. An average PhD is ~5 years, so this is 1/60 or less than 2% of the total time in residence. So, while this should be accounted for (i.e. add up the total amount of wages paid throughout a PhD and divide by amount of time that one would actually "charge" for), an entire month working on the dissertation is not going to greatly change the numbers.

So in one episode, they did give their "address", which was something like 2250 N Los Robles Ave, however the northern most address on N Los Robles Ave is 2200 (I don't remember the exact number but the relationships between their "address" and the max number is what's important!). In addition, this is far north of city hall**, which is somehow very prominently visible in their nice big window! I think another reference somewhere else in the series (something related to a Chevron station on Colorado Blvd) would place their apartment at yet another location! I enjoy the show also for references to places I've now been to! The aforementioned Chevron station is kitty corner to my favourite bubble/boba tea place. And sometimes I see buildings in which I work appear in the background/green-screen as they drive around. **Fun side fact: This city hall is also "Pawnee City Hall" from Parks & Rec

I also think it's very entertaining and one of my favourite shows! When I look for entertainment, I don't always make accuracy a top priority. But honestly, I think BBT does do a fairly accurate portrayal of various behaviours of researchers!

Just to clarify -- if being a graduate student means spending most of your time working for yourself (on your dissertation that you choose, independently of your advisor etc.) then a lot of the stipends make sense since like others said above, the graduate student is only putting in about half of a FTE worker. But, in the fields I'm used to, graduate student is a full time entry-level job. In these cases, I think it makes a lot more sense to argue for higher salaries that reflect the quantity and quality of work completed. PS to juilletmercredi, who said: At many major Canadian universities (Canada being small so this is also "most" university jobs in Canada), these numbers are indeed almost true. The minimum starting salary for an assistant professor at Queen's, from the same document I linked above, is around $66.5k, but higher offers can be made to attract some applicants. At my undergrad school, one math prof I talked to said he started at the $80k level. Canadian Postdocs, on average, don't make as much as you would like them to make though, with the median around $45k instead of $50k-$60k (see Fig 12 in http://www.mitacs.ca/sites/default/files/caps-mitacs_postdoc_report-full_oct22013-final.pdf) If you can't run the world, perhaps you could at least run Canada

(and also to the others who asked the same question): Yes, this is a fair point. When I say the University "owns" the research I do, what I mean is that I cannot personally use my work for personal gain separate from the University. That is, let's say I spend my PhD years writing a very useful piece of code that analyzes astronomy images. The University "owns" this code now--I cannot, for example, personally benefit by doing something like turning this code into proprietary software that I then sell as an app or something. (Note: this doesn't mean this can't ever happen: I can reach some agreement with the University to create spinoff from my research). Similarly, the dissertation that I write will be copyrighted to me, but the University also owns a royalty free license to distribute or use it if they ever want to. As for the second part, yes, I will still have a lot to gain from my (hopefully good) work that I produce while I am a PhD student. But this is not a reason for me to be paid less, nor should it be considered a form of compensation. For example, let's say I am a lawyer and I work for Law Firm X and work hard to do really good work with X. My ability is noticed by other firms and eventually, Law Firm Y wants me on their team and they make me a job offer based on my good work record with X. This doesn't mean that I should be happy to work for X at an unfair salary because I'll benefit from doing good work because all this time, X is also gaining a lot from my good work. Maybe this is really a difference in field, but in mine, grad school isn't really about pursuing some pet project that we have. Instead, we are basically hired as research workers to work on our supervisors' projects. Initially, we probably just work on their ideas but eventually we also come up with our own ideas and contribute to the research. So, yes, while publishing paper and presenting at conferences has the benefit of exposure for me, my research output also directly benefits the University and my supervisor's research group, so I should be paid a fair wage for it. I agree that when we are talking about "salary" for graduate students, we should only consider the number of hours that we work "for" the school. But, when I count up my hours, this is about 35-40 hours a week working for the school, equivalent to a full time job. At this point in my grad program, with all coursework completed, pretty much 100% of my working hours are working for the school. Eventually, I will probably spend time working on my dissertation, and if the work is solely on dissertation related things (e.g. formatting the thing, writing extra chapters) then those hours should not count as working hours. However, I expect the majority of my dissertation to be a collection of papers I am currently writing for peer-reviewed journals right now, and those hours do count as work for the school. I actually do think that PhD students should be paid as adjuncts. I think that Canada does something like this, although it's not clearly labelled as "adjunct" work all the time. But basically, my pay in Canada came from 3 parts: TA work, RA work, and fellowships. Each pay source was handled differently and it's a very clear separation of our 3 working roles. Our TA pay comes from the department and our salaries were negotiated by our Union in a Collective Agreement and they were set so that a graduate student's wage is some proportion of the wage of an adjunct. Here are some numbers to compare: At Queen's University, the current Adjunct collective agreement sets the salary for a "0.5 credit course" (this is a standard semester length course in Canada; i.e. 12-13 weeks, 3 hours per week) to be $7406 in 2011 (increases to $7821 in 2015), so a 3/3 load would be around $44k per year. This is the "base level" (with 0 years of experience). An experienced adjunct (let's say 5 years experience) starts at $7961. In addition, there is a ~10% pay raise if your course has more than 120 students enrolled, to compensate for the extra work. Source: QUFA Collective Agreement (http://www.queensu.ca/provost/faculty/facultyrelations/qufa/collectiveagreement/WEBSITECAWITHLINKSSept252012.pdf) At Queen's University, the standard TA rate in 2011 (when I was there) was just under $38/hr. My total salary from TA a "0.5 credit course" (i.e. the same length as above) was 54 hours * $38/hr = $2052. I think this is a fair amount of pay given the amount of hours I put into the course compared to someone who was actually in charge of the course. At Queen's University, in the humanities, graduate students at the PhD level are often fully in charge of a course, and they are called "Teaching Fellows". TFs are basically adjuncts and as you said, they are actually paid exactly the same as an adjunct with 0 years of experience (the only difference is that time as a TF does not count as experience in terms of getting raises in future years). Sources for TA and TF rates: PSAC 901 Collective Agreement in 2011 (http://www.queensu.ca/provost/faculty/facultyrelations/psac/collectiveagreement/CAAug1612updatedwithlinks.pdf) (Note that ALL of the above applies to ALL employees on campus, regardless of the field they work) Our RA pay was also based on a certain amount for a certain amount of hours worked and the remaining pay came from fellowships, which do not come with any work requirements but in effect, are meant to supplement our pay so that we have a livable stipend. Typically, at Canadian schools, undergrad researchers are paid around $15-$20/hour and graduate students in the $20-$25/hour range. Note that in most of Canada, minimum wage is $10.25/hr currently (Ontario is going to go to $13/hour soon). So, I think this is a fair wage to pay someone with the qualifications of a BA or BSc. I agree that this should only be counted on the hours we actually work for the school though! So, my point here is to illustrate an example of a University pay scale that basically pays its students fairly for the work they complete and that paying graduate students as adjuncts make sense if they are doing the work of an adjunct. Overall though, I am surprised to learn that at the places you mentioned, adjuncts actually make less than graduate students! But in my opinion, the problem is that adjuncts are paid too little, not that graduate students are paid too much! There is definitely no rule, but keeping graduate stipends low basically creates a strong disincentive to either keep students from starting a family or discourage those who have families/want to start families from entering graduate studies. If I really put in 10-20 hours of actual work "for" the school each week, then yes, I agree a stipend of $15k-$20k is a fair one. But in my field, this is not true. I try to maintain approximately 35 working hours ("for the school", so coursework etc. is on top of that) each week. My stipend is $30k/year. I get 2 weeks of unpaid vacation, so let's say it's 50 working weeks a year and 35 hours per week makes 1750 working hours per year, which makes my average hourly rate be just over $17/hr. In my opinion, this is a little low compared to how much researchers in Canada get paid, but minimum wage in California is also only $8/hr, so I'm at about 2x minimum wage here, just like when I was at about 2x minimum wage in Canada. So, in that sense, I'm at about the same level. However, the cost of living here is way higher than where I was before, so I think graduate students here are not doing as well as other places when compared to the living wage.