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NNadir

(34,659 posts)
Tue May 7, 2024, 05:55 PM May 2024

Hunger on campus: why US PhD students are fighting over food

From my Nature news feed:

Hunger on campus: why US PhD students are fighting over food

Subtitle:

Graduate students are relying on donated and discounted food in the struggle to make ends meet.


Some excerpts:

Jen Cruz’s life as a PhD student is a world away from her childhood. Although not a member of the tribe, she grew up on Yakama Indian reservation land in Wapato, Washington.

Cruz, a first-generation university student, remembers how families, including hers, would often work for local farmers or fishers in exchange for food to supplement the food stamps and free school lunches that most people on the reservation relied on to get by...

Jen Cruz’s life as a PhD student is a world away from her childhood. Although not a member of the tribe, she grew up on Yakama Indian reservation land in Wapato, Washington.

Cruz, a first-generation university student, remembers how families, including hers, would often work for local farmers or fishers in exchange for food to supplement the food stamps and free school lunches that most people on the reservation relied on to get by...

...A study published in February revealed that food insecurity at Harvard is not just anecdotal (N. M. Hammad and C. W. Leung JAMA Netw. Open 7, e2356894; 2024). Commissioned by the dean’s office at Harvard’s School of Public Health, the survey found that 17% of the 1,287 graduate students who responded and 13% of the 458 postdoctoral responders had experienced food insecurity — figures that were on a par with or exceeded those for the general US population (13%)....


I was disappointed when my son failed to follow up on his interview at MIT, and when he turned down Berkeley's offer to fly him out for an interview, but at the end of the day, he made the right choice, a well funded advisor who provided a generous stipend in a livable city. (His Master's advisor told him not to pick the institution, but rather the advisor; good advice.)

Living either in the Cambridge area or the Bay area would have been very difficult; where he is he has a nice apartment all to himself, eats well and lives well while focusing on his work.

This, I find, is unsurprising.

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Hunger on campus: why US PhD students are fighting over food (Original Post) NNadir May 2024 OP
PhD students at some elite institutions in expensive cities are unionizing. spooky3 May 2024 #1
Post #2 was intended as a response to you. n/t. NNadir May 2024 #3
Grad students had a strike at the University where my wife works. NNadir May 2024 #2
Not much has changed, it seems, since my own days as a grad student. nt eppur_se_muova May 2024 #4

NNadir

(34,659 posts)
2. Grad students had a strike at the University where my wife works.
Tue May 7, 2024, 06:03 PM
May 2024

It seems that basically, the grad students one, although the University is taking it out of other places.

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