CAMPUS
IS GRADUATE SCHOOL BAD FOR YOUR (MENTAL) HEALTH? The percentage of graduate students who experience moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety and depression is more than three times the general population average.
WORDS BY Abigail Miller PHOTOS BY Kamryn Rowe
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UIETLY WORKING ALONE inside the basement of Kent State’s Science Research Building is Mitch Powers, a doctoral candidate in physics. It’s just past noon, but Powers has been in the lab since early morning working on the mundane task of moving a little bit of material from one end of a small tube to the other.
On top of a thesis or dissertation, graduate students are commonly required to teach and conduct research. Students teaching courses are only compensated for the 20 hours they are required to work. This means that when students have to work overtime in order to get all of their research, teaching and coursework done, as they often do, they aren’t being paid.
Currently in his sixth year of graduate studies, Powers knows better than most what being a graduate student can do to one’s mental health.
“There’s kind of a disconnect between the work we do and the work we’re paid for,” Powers says. “I know grad students who are the instructor on record of two classes, if not more, at once and on top of that they have to do their own research, and I’m sure they have other small responsibilities on top of that. They’re doing the work of an adjunct professor – in some cases they’re even called adjunct professors – while still working on their dissertations and they’re getting paid, say, $14,000 a year.”
“Grad students generally are overworked, underpaid and if we don’t have a great relationship with our advisor, it’s easy for us to get overstressed about things,” he says. “Depression is a real thing and impostor syndrome [a psychological issue in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments] is a real thing.”
In addition to being paid below the poverty line, graduate students frequently feel that their work isn’t crucial to their department. In fact, Harvard found only 26 percent of students report thinking their work is useful always or most of the time.
A report by Harvard University published last November found the widespread presence of depression and anxiety seen in doctoral students is comparable to the prevalence in incarcerated populations, with loneliness and isolation cited as major issues. “There’s a lot of faith on my part that this is all going to be worth it and work out,” Powers says. “A lot of it is it can take so long, These feelings are often attributed to grad students’ indepen- and we spend so much time on the immediate problem we have dent projects that start after several years of class work, which at hand that it can very much feel like we’re rolling boulders includes a thesis for master’s students and a dissertation for up hills. It’s not even that they roll back down, it’s that there’s doctoral students. always another boulder to roll up another hill.” “So many of them, they’ve had maybe three, four, five years of coursework and a cohort with their fellow graduate students, and have built a really nice community with their colleagues there,” Director of Graduate Student Services, Kyle Reynolds, says. “But, then you start your dissertation and everyone is working on these independent projects. You don’t see your colleagues as much.”
10 | THE BURR MAGAZINE
To be a graduate student at any college campus is to worry about money. But to be a Kent State graduate student, one of the lowest paid graduate students in the state of Ohio, is to worry more than usual. At last year’s graduate student orientation, Tim Rose, a doctoral candidate in sociology, conducted a survey and found that the median income of students was less than their median expen-
