I thought I would return this week to my previous discussion on financial aid for doc students, specifically the GRAs. New doc students can apply for a Graduate Research Assistantship as part of their financial aid package, and they can request either a 10-hour or 20-hour GRA. Often the 20 hour GRA is actually two 10-hour GRAs, meaning you have two supervisors and you work for each of them 10 hours/week. There are many different GRAs available (I believe you can see a sample list on the UMB website). Incoming students rank their choices of GRAs, and the program director does her best to match students up with their preferred choices. A research assistant gets to do quite a variety of tasks, depending on the their GRA. Tasks may include doing literature searches for their supervisor's current projects, helping to write and publish journal articles, collecting data (i.e. interviewing) families in Baltimore, analyzing data, and the list goes on and on. Students typically meet with their supervisors about once a week, and many students can do some or even most of their work from home. Financially, the GRA covers full tuition for a 20-hour GRA and half tuition for a 10-hour GRA. It also covers your health insurance and pays you a stipend that is enough to cover my rent, car payment and most of my groceries each month. (I get student loans to cover the rest of my bills). If you have a 20-hour GRA, the school strongly recommends that you don't have another job because of the amount of time needed for full-time schoolwork and a GRA. I believe you're supposed to aim for 3 hours of study time per credit, on average, so for 9 credits you should allow around 27 hours for homework/studying each week. Add that to your 20-hour GRA and travel time (which is 10 additional hours/wk for me), and you can clearly see why you shouldn't work outside of school.

Feel free to leave me a comment if you have further questions on the GRAs or any other topic!

Ann :)