GSAG has been working on a stipend improvement proposal MSE grad students for the last few months. We presented our proposal at the MSE faculty meeting on September 18th. The goal of this presentation was to gather feedback from the faculty and make them aware of the financial issues that the grad students in MSE are facing. Just to keep you all in the loop, the majority of the faculty recognizes that low stipend levels are a serious issue, both in terms of quality of life and competitiveness with other schools. At the same time, a few faculty members were concerned about the budgetary implications of raising the stipends per GSAG proposal, given that they have to pay overhead on our salaries (i.e. stipends). We presented them with multiple options to incorporate the raise. We are presenting next to the Graduate Committee sometime mid-October and eventually to the external advisory board of MSE, on October 26th.

As a part of bringing transparency in this whole process, we plan to brief all grad students in detail at the GSAG town hall, on October 2nd, 2018 in MRDC 4211 11 AM- 12 PM. As usual, Pizza will be provided!