Student and Postdoc walkout

[Kron3007]

Interesting to see students and postdocs here walking out to push for higher wages.  Would love to see the government actually listen.  I remember pushing for this when I was a grad student here, and the scholarships have almost remained the same as then, about 15 years ago....

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01453-8

[Kron3007]

Also, for the non-Canadian readers, it is also worth noting that tuition wavers are rare here, so most grad students pay about 10k CAD in tuition and fees out of their stipend.  I started a PhD in the US, and while the stipend was not that much better, there was no tuition and the cost of living was much lower.  I was RICH!

[marshwiggle]

Was the funding mentioned in the article NSERCs and SHERCs? It wasn't mentioned so I couldn't tell.

[Kron3007]

Was the funding mentioned in the article NSERCs and SHERCs? It wasn't mentioned so I couldn't tell.

I am only really familiar with NSERC, but the numbers match up.  I would assume they are the same across all three agencies, but don't know for sure.

[MarathonRunner]

Was the funding mentioned in the article NSERCs and SHERCs? It wasn't mentioned so I couldn't tell.

The tri-agencies. So CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC.

Not to mention, most Canadian grad students don't win tri-agency scholarships, so they receive even less funding. My Canadian university only guarantees $20,000 Cdn/year for PhD students, and you have to deduct tuition and fees from that.

Also, tri-agency funding seems very biased. My first application I had one reviewer rate me highly and one rated me poorly, mainly because my supervisor had yet to graduate a PhD student (so I guess no one should ever agree to be among a prof's first handful of PhD students?) The following year, my application hadn't changed, and I was highly rated by both reviewers and secured a doctoral award. Seems like a broken system that is subject to the reviewers' personal biases and whims. I also noted that students with "hot" areas of research were funded more often than those with important research topics, but their research wasn't the "hot" thing at the moment.

[Parasaurolophus]

Was the funding mentioned in the article NSERCs and SHERCs? It wasn't mentioned so I couldn't tell.

I am only really familiar with NSERC, but the numbers match up.  I would assume they are the same across all three agencies, but don't know for sure.

I can confirm it's $45k for SSHRC.

Also, just a few years ago the stipend in my department was $19.5k. from which we paid tuition, of course