Twelve credit hours, a 20-plus hour work week and a social life if you have time left. These are the requirements of a University graduate student.
“The general requirement for graduate students in all departments is 20 work hours, and a schedule not exceeding 12 credit hours,” according to Shelley Clagg, president of Graduate Student Senate (GSS).
Many graduate students feel that 12 credit hours are too much to handle at times when working 20 hours or more during the week while trying to do homework and concentrate on classes.
“Most schools only have their graduate students take five-nine credit hours while working as part of their graduate contracts, while Bowling Green pushes students to take 12,” Clagg added.
Within different departments, each graduate student is expected to perform a variety of tasks related to their majors, ranging from classroom teaching to administrative duties like the students of the GSS. Hours for each of these assigned assistantships — required employment of graduate students — are supposed to reach a maximum of 20 hours a week.
“I think a solution to the problem is not to equal the work hours necessarily, but to possibly get the 12 credit hours switched to a lesser amount or to provide a possible compensation for the students that work over the required amount because of their duties,” Clagg said.
According to Clagg, the problem does not seem to be the difference in hours among different students, it is the hours themselves.
When students have to work 20 hours a week and sometimes more then that when they have extra duties or exceed their required hours, it leaves them less time to concentrate on their own studies.
“Our primary goal here is to get an education, working is just a added requirement, but the education comes first,” GSS vice president Deirdre Rogers said.
She feels that sometimes graduate students in all the different departments are overworked.
“Graduate students don’t get upset at each other if someone has more work to do than another person,” Rogers said.
The issue is not how the work hours differ, but rather what GSS can do to possibly change the required amount of credit hours to a lower amount giving graduate students time work, study and have social time.
“We have lives outside of being grad students, contradictory to what some people think” Rogers said.
