Graduate student workers at the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program (MIT-WHOI) decided overwhelmingly to unionize when a huge majority of us signed union cards over the last few weeks. After seeing what unionization did for my community growing up, I am confident unionization can be a tool for building a graduate experience of greater stability, security, and support for all of us, regardless of our backgrounds.
I arrived at WHOI as a first-gen student in 2020, 3,000 miles away from my friends and family, in the middle of a global pandemic and a national reckoning with police brutality and institutional racism. As I tried to find my bearings in an unfamiliar environment, feeling isolated and insecure, I came across a statistic on graduate student attrition rates (rates at which students leave the program without a degree) in the earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences (EAPS) department: a shocking 25% average and an incredibly disheartening 42% for under-represented minorities like myself.