Various individuals have asked how my department has handled my injury and absence, and their tones imply they expect a grad student horror story. Just for the record, my department could not possibly be more supportive than they have been. My course section has been covered, I’m still being paid, and my advisors have been very reassuring about my currently reduced work capacity.

Lately, there's been agitation for a grad student union on campus. Having worked at UPS for years before coming to grad school, I’m in favor of unions. But one of the big argumentation points they’ve pushed is our low salaries, and that’s a skewed argument, at least from my viewpoint within this department. I just wrote a grant that required me to wade into the salary and fringe benefit jungle to figure out the budget, so I have a fairly good idea of what standard salary and fringe work out to. Our grad student salaries are fairly low. I was offered more by other departments last year when I was on the Ph.D.-program-market. But here I (and every other grad student in the department) have full medical and dental insurance, for which the department shells out nearly as much as my salary. This is the only program in my area that I know of that offers such benefits, and the total compensation comes to $7,000 more than the best salary offer I received. This insurance just saved me approximately $20,000 in medical bills that would have ruined my chances at completing this Ph.D.

So thanks for asking, but no. I’m not feeling particularly oppressed at the moment. However, I still feel strongly about unionization, because I know just how damn lucky I am. Graduate students, as a rule, do not get health insurance. Every grad student in every department deserves to have basic medical coverage, both for the routine bodily whatnots and the major catastrophes. I cannot begin to imagine how I would deal with the costs of this accident - a capricious accident, one involving an unlucky slip on a bit of ice. It would, simply, have ruined what I have spent these past years working for.