The following article by Tanya Basu was posted on the Daily Beast website November 19, 2017:
Emily Slonecker is a second year PhD student student at the University of California, Irvine studying developmental cognitive research. She currently earns about $19,000 per year after taxes. The new tax plan, however, would drop her income from her work at the lab to about $16,000 a year in one of the most expensive places to live in America, or about $1300 a month. With her fixed monthly expenses ringing in at $1680, however, Slonecker is nowhere close to making the money she needs to live—and that doesn’t even begin to cover the loans she’s accumulated from her undergraduate years. “But that’s a whole other can of worms,” she brushed off. “If this thing passes and the school is unable to find a loophole, I will have to walk away from the path I have dreamed about my entire life, as will many students. I don’t know anyone who can survive on a negative net income for six years.”
Slonecker’s dire situation worries of her living costs might be the classic story of the poor graduate student: making ends meet with a patchwork of teaching jobs, grants, and, most importantly, scholarships waiving tuition that make spending long hours in the lab a fair tradeoff. Continue reading “The Government Just Stomped on Science—Right When We Needed It Most”