You don’t have time to be reading the newspaper, what with all the grading you have to do, the office hours you have to keep, the preparations for your classes and your own homework on top of it all.
Yes, you are a graduate teaching fellow. Or, you are studying, researching and trying to hold down a job or two or three. The application for the latest financial aid package is due. You might not have much time, but you probably have opinions. You might have a few “Tales of Horror” involving teaching or grading or a professor who ought to wear black leather and spikes as fair warning. Perhaps you have time-saving grading tips. Why are you in grad school again? You might have something to say about that, too.
If you have a comment for your comrades with ink-stained fingers, or something to tell the world, this is your place to do it. Come one, come all, and make your views heard. Or read, at least.
This guest column is a brand-new graduate student forum where a new author will have a chance to have their say every other week. The topic is up to the author but ought to have something to do with the graduate school experience or the more generic “student” experience. GTFs are especially encouraged to participate. To loosely paraphrase our contact on the Emerald staff, content can be pretty wide open, as long as it includes a tie-in to campus life or issues which students would find relevant.
A call to action is one example of appropriate material. If you choose to discuss a project that you are working on, we simply ask that the relevance to students is clear. The column should have a first-person perspective.
Any GTF or unsupported graduate student is welcome to contribute. If there is a flood of response, we will save the columns for future use.
If there is only a trickle of incipient authorship, then you’ll hear more from particularly prolific people.
The graduate student community is surprisingly large — more than 3,000 people this term so far (including law students, and registration is still open), approximately 850 of whom are GTFs. (Numbers for last year were about 3,000 and 1,200, respectively.) We are also remarkably provincial; rarely do people cross departmental boundaries or spend much time outside the lab, library or office.
This column is an opportunity for graduate students to share experiences with the entire campus. The details may differ, but we are all in this together. We help make the University run. Our opinions matter. Our experiences, once described to others, help us see that we are not isolated, nor are our troubles and triumphs completely unique.
Public forums can be hard to come by. Let’s make this one work.