Advising Tips

• GradTravelAwards

Procedures for starting out with a student

• Students are told by Joyce that they need to find a supervisor by March 15.
• Students have a tuition waiver deadline that they'll ask you about around April 1. This appears to be a soft deadline. According to Joyce, the real deadline for letting her know what grant you're putting them on is ~ April 8.
• You can start students on one grant and then transfer them (and take the money out retroactively) from another grant. This is particularly relevant since students need to have their appointments settled before the money from new grants for NSERC are available. It is reportedly easiest to change them over if you let them know about it right when the money becomes available.

-- RachelPottinger - 11 Apr 2005

Graduate Student Support

Department's guaranteed stipend:

Master: $17,300 per yr or $1441.67 per month

Ph.D.: $19,700 per yr or $1641.67 per month

New incoming graduate students are automatically assigned TA positions for the first two terms.

By March 15, incoming graduate students should have found a supervisor. At such time, the supervisor will decide on how to support the student. Support may be in the form of Graduate Research Assistants (GRA) or Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTA). GRAs are charged to the supervisor's research grant and GTAs are charged to the dept'l grant. As the GTA salary is below the department's guaranteed salary, the research supervisor is responsible to pay the difference.

-- Joyce Poon - 28 Apr 2005

How much does a grad student cost?

Posted by Kevin Murphy, 7 June 2005.

From: Kevin Leyton-Brown <kevinlb@cs.ubc.ca> To: junior-faculty@csDELETEthisTEXT.ubc.ca Date: Mar 16, 2005 8:09 PM Subject: How much do students cost? Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Add sender to Contacts list | Trash this message | Report phishing | Show original Hi,

After spending a while with Joyce today, I got numbers on how much students cost per year based on the amount of TAing they do. She tended towards breaking things down into months, by term, etc., which was making it confusing to compare to my annual grant budgets. You guys may already know this, but if not these numbers may be helpful. The numbers are rounded off but should give you a sense of how much it would cost to say yes to that Masters student in your class who can't find a supervisor...

During the summer, there are two terms, during each of which they can TA. They actually pay slightly different amounts, but I've picked a number in between the two values to make things simpler.

MSc:

During the school year: $800/term if they TA, $5,800/term if the don't TA During the summer: $2,000 if they TA both periods; $4,000 if they TA one period; $5,800 if they don't TA at all.

Therefore, an MSc student who TAs: - as much as possible: $3,600 / yr - all year and once in the summer: $5,600 / yr - once during the year and not at all in the summer: $12,400 / yr - not at all: $17,300 / yr

PhD:

During the school year: $1,400/term if they TA, $6,600/term if they don't During the summer: $2,700 if they TA twice; $4,500 if they TA once; $6,600 if they don't TA at all.

Therefore, a PhD student who TAs: - as much as possible: $5,500 / yr - all year and once in the summer: $7,300 / yr - once during the year and not at all in the summer: $14,600 / yr - not at all: $19,700 / yr

IMPORTANT: on top of the above salary charges, you will also be charged for benefits. Amazingly, nobody seems to be able to tell you in advance exactly how much the benefits amount to for a specific appointment. As arule of thumb, you should budget about 7-8% of the salary for student appointments.