$2,100: TA Paycheck (9 months)
$1,413: Rent at subsidized university housing
$200: Mom’s medical premium, copayments, medication (average)
$97.38: Car insurance
$142: Phone bill for me + 2 dependants
$300: Money sent abroad to support sibling and family living in war-torn country
$300: Groceries
$50: Gas
$2,502.38 TOTAL BASIC BILLS* (This does not include laundry, car maintenance, potential savings, smaller incidentals, or any financial or medical family emergencies that have become more common lately.)
*To make up this difference, I have had to take on two additional jobs outside of my TAship.
I live in subsidized university housing, and my rent burden as a TA would be 67%. With my current three jobs, it is at 45%. I don’t personally have children, but I have several family members who financially depend on me. This includes an elderly mother with serious health complications, a younger sibling I care for, and a sibling and family members who live in a war torn country.
These financial responsibilities do not end when my TA paycheck ends in spring quarter, and so I have been forced to work several jobs in the summer to ensure I still have a paycheck coming in. This means being unable to make progress on exam preparation, travel to archives, or do any real work on my research during the summers. It also means constantly being terrified that some medical or family emergency will set my carefully set budget up in flames.
The most recent example of these emergencies took place this week: My mom was in a lot of pain and having difficulty moving. In an effort to avoid the $200 ER copayment, I convinced myself the pain was due to one of her chronic health issues--we could “wait and see her primary doctor.” When the pain got too much, we took her to the ER to discover that she had twisted her knee and fluid had been building up as a result of the long delay.
I realized immediately what this meant: I had asked my mother to remain in tremendous pain, because I couldn’t afford the $200 ER co-payment.
Listing these expenses and experiences repeatedly reminds me that academia was not made for people like me. I constantly ask myself if I have made a grave mistake in entering a PhD given my family obligations. This is extremely disheartening, because I constantly hear the rhetoric in academic spaces, and have been part of these conversations, about the need to diversify higher education. The need to bring in more first-generation, under-represented minorities, and/or students from low-income backgrounds. However, what these conversations are missing is a deep recognition that we need to go beyond just bringing these folks in. We need to be able to financially support those without the safety nets other grads may be coming in with. We need at the very least offer them a living wage that goes beyond the current $20,000 annual TA salary. We need to support a COLA.
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