Tuesday, September 8th 2015 | uccexpress.ie | Volume 19 | Issue 1
UCC launch mental health booklet Page 5
HOMELESS: Accommodation troubles continue for students in Cork, and UCC SU responds. More on Page 3.
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Postgraduates to suffer pay cuts in SEFS Bryan Danielson - News Writer* The College of SEFS have introduced a new module for all incoming PostGraduate students that means that they will have to do 50 hours of unpaid teaching before being paid for their work. The module, titled “PG6026 Teaching and Demonstrating Skills for College of Science, Engineering and Food Science (SEFS) Postgraduate Students,” means that work done by post-grads through teaching & demonstrating in labs will go unpaid, which was not the case before. For most post-grads, the money earned by demonstrating is their main (if not only) source of income. While individual departments have said that students not in receipt of a grant or other funding can make arrangements with their supervisors to retain this source of funds, it is still a crucial
support for many students. Looking at various different departments in SEFS we discovered that while it depended on the individual department, for most of them it would take anywhere up to a semester to complete the 50 hours of work, costing the students anywhere from €800-€1,100. We spoke to one current post-grad student from the College SEFS (who asked to remain unnamed) who felt that this new measure was unfair, as students are already expected to perform unpaid tasks associated with teaching & demonstrating (preparation for labs, grading of papers etc.), and coupled with other unpaid work done, like supervising the FYPs of undergraduate students, can lead to incredible amounts of stress and can distract from their own course, thus elongating the time spent doing their
post-grad course. The student we spoke to also questioned the point of the module itself, as they felt only those looking for careers in academia would benefit from learning how to teach, and even then, those doing postgraduate courses are individuals with qualifications, and before the introduction of this module have been teaching for years without it. This writer attempted to contact members of staff from the College of Science, Engineering and Food Science, but were unable to get a response to these concerns before we went to print. The student we spoke to was also dissatisfied with the response of the Students’ Union to this issue. “Due to the nature of postgraduate courses, postgrads are hard to mobilise. The Students’ Union seems to have done nothing about this, or at the very least
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seem to know nothing about this.“ This writer attempted to contact Joe Kennedy (SU Education Officer) & Billy McCarthy (SEFS Rep) but were unable to get a comment before this article went to print. The Students’ Union does have a Postgraduate Representative, Patrick Collins, who sits on its executive and the University Governing Body, but according to the current SU Constitution it is also supposed to have individual College Postgraduate Representatives and indeed a Postgraduate Student Council, neither of which at the time of writing they have. *The writer asked to be supplied with a pseudonym, and thus was given one
Neil Willoughby looks at UCC’s year in sport for 2014/15 Page 15
Interview with the Voice of Night Vale Cecil Baldwin Byline
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