Consider Graduate‐Student Life

Beyond the general feeling that “students should live only as well as I did when I was in school,” the physics community apparently gives little consideration to graduatestudent life. As chairman of the physicsgraduate‐student organization at Cornell University, I recently completed a survey of the living expenses of physics graduate students at Cornell. This survey was the latest in a series conducted annually to monitor how well salaries for teaching and research assistants keep up with the cost of living. While preparing my report I found that there seems to be no way of determining whether such support is adequate other than comparing the value of the support from year to year. Through discussions with administrators, faculty and other graduate students it became apparent that departments give little thought to what kind of life graduate students lead.