Updates

The administration plans for graduate students’ economic precarity and denies our rights as tenants to decent housing. We deserve better.

It has been more than a year since MIT’s campus shut down to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. Since then, MIT has implemented a range of transformative pandemic policies: campus testing, vaccination, research closures and ramp-ups, and many other ways of making sure MIT students can safely live and work on campus. Unfortunately, despite MIT’s willingness to offset pandemic impacts, they have steadfastly refused a crucial pandemic relief policy: funding extensions for graduate students.

When advisors lose interest in projects (and students)

International students faced with marginalization, uncertainty and precarity.

MIT is fully aware of abuse, harassment, and mistreatment of its graduate students. It is doing nothing to change it.

The consequences of MIT sheltering abuse behind mentorship.

MIT’s culture is made up of our collective values and beliefs. This means we have the power to shape that culture into one that is more diverse, equitable, and inclusive — but we must all do our part. This July, after years of stagnation, the MIT administration promised again to do its part by hiring a senior officer for diversity at each of its five schools and the new College of Computing. But given the sheer difficulty of addressing each department's unique culture, school-level officers are not enough: Every department deserves diversity.

In the midst of historic uprisings against racist police terror and white supremacy, all major institutions must analyze the role they have played in supporting these systems of oppression. The status quo of tacitly accepting social hierarchies has finally been knocked out of equilibrium, but we are still far from a just society. This moment is crucial as we teeter on the balance between falling back towards the status quo or lurching forward towards progress. It is imperative that our institutions act now towards racial justice or risk seeing this opportunity slip away.

“You’re lucky to be here.”

The words from the MIT administrator hung in the air. I did feel grateful to study at MIT and receive a world-class education that hopefully one day would help me become an academic. But I was trying to explain to this administrator how unbearably difficult it is to pay my MIT bills while supporting my partner and child on an MIT graduate student’s stipend. And here I was, a day late on clearing my balance, being told to feel grateful.

There is a growing mental health crisis among graduate students, both at MIT and around the country. Thirty-nine percent of graduate students suffer from depression and 41 percent suffer from anxiety. A study on the mental health of economics PhD students at top tier research schools, including MIT and Harvard, reported that one in ten had contemplated suicide in the past two weeks. This alarming incidence of mental health issues among graduate students nationwide is equally — if not more — prevalent in the MIT community. In March 2019, the MIT administration sent a survey to current graduate students to assess their experiences at MIT. Of the nearly 2,100 graduate students who responded, nine in ten reported feeling overwhelmed, two in three felt isolated, and one in three felt so depressed it was difficult to function.