Staff Editorial: A life less bitter

"In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury." ~ Proverbs 14:23

When involved in the daily routine of undergraduate life at the university, it is often easy to forget the university is home to a legion of more than 10,000 graduate students. These men and women wear many hats - as researchers, teachers, graders and, of course, as students. They also tend to call the university home for a longer period of time than the typical undergraduate.

Smaller institutions often tout their ability to have professors carry a large portion of the teaching load, but at a school as large at this one, this is simply impossible. That legion of graduate students inevitably bears a large part of the responsibility for articulating concepts to students. They serve as indispensable intermediaries between often inaccessible professors and undergraduates. Anyone who has taken a large-lecture course knows this well.

Chances are many students have had an experience with a graduate student teaching assistant who seemed unmotivated or bitter with his or her experience at the university. While many would argue getting paid to study is a privilege, graduate school can certainly be a trying time. Doctorate and masters candidates are often caught in limbo between dependence on their advisers and the responsibility to conduct independent research. Their living conditions are nothing to be envied either; the minimum stipend for a nine-and-a-half-month assistantship is $14,772. This level of support makes living in College Park quite a challenge.

It comes as a relief that the strategic plan placed such heavy emphasis on graduate education. The general goal is to make the university more competitive in recruitment of graduate students. Among the ways in which the plan aims to achieve this is to raise the stipends offered, provide more housing options dedicated to graduate students and make graduate admissions more selective. The plan exhorts the graduate school to "require that Ph.D. and professional graduate programs be right-sized, adjusting enrollment to assure that programs are of high quality, [and] supported by sufficient resources." The impact to be most directly felt will be the proposed stipend increase to at least $18,000 for a nine-and-a-half-month period.

With all of the other problem areas of the strategic plan, it is encouraging to see an aspect of it that is well considered, timely and beneficial to all parties involved. Better supported and distributed graduate students would have a direct effect on the undergraduate experience at the university, as well as the quality of research conducted here.

POLICY: The staff editorial represents the opinion of The Diamondback's editorial board and is the responsibility of the editor in chief.