COLA matters to me because it will allow me and my wife to make plans for our future. My wife and I married during my second year of graduate school here at UCSB. After she moved to Santa Barbara, she began looking for work but could not find reliable employment. She was able to find a job, but her monthly income fluctuated considerably depending on the tasks she received. We were fortunate enough to have some savings together but did not realize how quickly we would have to rely on it to make ends meet.
We spent much of the year living on my $2,100/month stipend while paying $1,338/month in rent to university housing. Roughly 67% of our income went back to my employer. I would occasionally joke that UCSB might as well cut out the middleman and just pay me $760/month. We had to stretch that $760 over groceries, gas, car payments, etc. On top of that, after we married we began the process of changing my wife’s immigration status, which required a filing fee of roughly $2,300. By the end of the academic year, we had gone through virtually all of our savings. When we ran out of our savings in the middle of the summer, we started to use credit cards for small and regular purchases and ended up going further and further into debt as we scrambled, mostly unsuccessfully, to find freelance work. Reflecting on it, I sometimes don’t understand how we made it through that first year.
The following academic year, my wife was able to find more reliable work that brought our net income to roughly $4,200/month. We spent much of that year getting out of debt, rebuilding our savings, sending money to friends and family in need, and managed to put away a good bit of money. We went through much of it in the summer paying for international and domestic travel to visit family, conduct archival research, and several other unexpected emergencies. By the end of the summer, we again found that we had gone through almost all of our savings.
To be a graduate student at UCSB means reliving an annual struggle to figure out how you and your family are going to make it through the summer only to restart from near zero anyway the following November.
This cycle repeats every single year no matter how many extra jobs we take on or the fellowships and funding we receive from the department. To be a graduate student at UCSB means reliving an annual struggle to figure out how you and your family are going to make it through the summer only to restart from near zero anyway the following November. COLA does not mean “X amount of money every month plus your stipend.” It means not having to worry about whether or not my wife and I are going to run out of money before the end of the month or in August. For me and my family, COLA is an opportunity to control our own future and build something for ourselves. For me, it is not only about finishing my degree on time but assuring that we have some kind of support once we leave Santa Barbara.
Comments