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[kid_sister]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone familiar with the CUNY Graduate Center could provide any information about their funding practices. I did some preliminary searching and all that turned up were rather terrifying horror stories about the lack of institutional support given to graduate students (both in terms of money and in terms of faculty direction/availability).

I was extremely grateful/elated to receive an acceptance to CUNY (my first and perhaps last of the season). But I am also growing increasingly worried about the funding situation as it has been related on these fora.

Thank you so much for any information!

PS.: I am not in the humanities.

[blue_eye]

I'd suggest that it depends entirely on the faculty adviser and department.  As far as I know, folks get little or no support directly from CUNY GC, it all comes through your adviser and/or the department.  If you have a good situation with one or both of those, then it can be just fine.  Many grads students I knew in the sciences there had a great experience and were successful.  But I knew just as many who were tied up with too much teaching just to be able to pay the bills, had little time for research, and hardly saw their advisers.  A lot of them never made it to the PhD.

[bread_pirate_naan]

Blue Eye is right.  The funding comes through advisor, or Executive Officer of the program.  

One thing you can know going in is that CUNY, is it is exactly like what Blue Eye said.  Why? CUNY gives 'preference' to doctoral students before hiring adjuncts.  Enrollments are already off at some campuses, so that may impact your employment opportunities should your PI not fund you.

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone familiar with the CUNY Graduate Center could provide any information about their funding practices. I did some preliminary searching and all that turned up were rather terrifying horror stories about the lack of institutional support given to graduate students (both in terms of money and in terms of faculty direction/availability).

I am going to also point, as I did on another thread, to the importance of research methods.  What sort of preliminary search only turns up horror stories? (or nothing at all)*

You do have some agency in your funding.  It is never too early to start a research program and set up a calendar for what sorts of grants and fellowships you will be eligible for through your coursework and candidacy.  Timing matters.  Inside and outside funding go to the prepared and proactive. Look on the page of the Office of Sponsored Research (at CUNY) for more information.  (financial aid generally directs to the appropriate group, which has a different name at almost every institution)

I was extremely grateful/elated to receive an acceptance to CUNY (my first and perhaps last of the season). But I am also growing increasingly worried about the funding situation as it has been related on these fora.

Thank you so much for any information!

The institutional website of any institution is of tremendous help in resolving many such questions, and many others that will come up in the course of your studies.  As you've noticed, funding situations are difficult, and the more intelligent effort you are willing to put into looking for funding the better your chances are.

You will see all sorts of encouraging or scary things depending on your situation and motivation.  The need to seek 'addition' funding after the second year is not encouraging, but at least that info was easy for me to find.  Funding searches should never depend solely on word of mouth or campus resources unless you came in with the best of packages, and still there's a lot of work to be done to keep money coming.  Grant writing is a part of the job.  If you are pursuing and winning [substantive] outside funding your advisor will notice.

*e.g. my institution provides job descriptions and duties for all graduate positions on the web

[gekko]

I was admitted to CUNY-GC seven years ago. Fortunately I am in a field where I could find several current students through either a Google search or knowledge of their attendance through a friend. I talked to two currently enrolled students, both in my department but who spoke of similar situations being common at the GC in general. Here are a few thoughts:

-GC funding is VERY tight and in most fields will come in the form of continued teaching, sometimes impeding times to graduation. (My field had a nine year average time to degree; yours may vary.)

-Very few fellowships are available and many are tied to highly specific criteria including race, field of study, location of origin or any number of other qualifiers. When I applied the view book contained an overview of each of the types of named fellowships, none of which seemed particularly "general" or able to be awarded with much discretion.

-Almost everyone I talked to stated that while theoretically possible, you will NEVER receive a fellowship later on if not upon initial admission. You may be thrown a bone or two with a teaching assignment, but in general they already have you so why not use it as a recruiting tool? That said, this is the case everywhere, not just CUNY.

There was a person (not sure of specific title) that I got on the phone when I initially had questions regarding interpretation of my specific letter. I ended up not attending and then had an informal conversation with this individual who basically stated he saw funding as an issue all the time and that people leave primarily for this reason, including several of his former classmates when enrolled as a student.

My general suggestion would be NOT to under any circumstance attend the GC (or anywhere else) without funding, and in the case of CUNY only a fellowship, not the promise of a class or two here or there. Manhattan is just too expensive and you will waste WAY more time trying to do it this way than holding off for a year and applying again if not offered a fellowship somewhere this time around.

[seniorscholar]

I'm not sure if it's been made clear, but in English at least (only field for which I know some CUNY GC students, ex-students, and faculty), the usual funding is (as someone has said) pay for teaching undergraduate -- usually freshman -- classes. One problem is this: there are no undergraduates at the GC. Thus your teaching can be at just about any college in the system, some of them a very long way from Manhattan, some of them community colleges. It's not often except for people who need to work in their professor's lab that you will be teaching at the same college at which your supervisor may do some undergraduate teaching. Thus the casual interaction with your supervisor that grad students at many/most universities have is not possible, and contributes to what some posters have described as "not much contact with your dissertation director."

[kid_sister]

Thank you all. Right now, the funding situation seems murky, and I am not sure whether I am to be offered a fellowship or not. But it sounds like I shouldn't attend the GC without one, and I won't.

[readandwept]

I don't disagree with much that has been said, but I will add that depending on the type of job you would ultimately like to get, experience teaching the diverse populations of the CUNY undergraduate campuses could be a big plus.

[rebellion_dog]

CUNY GC funding in my humanities discipline (very highly ranked program) was poor to non-existent when I started. I understand from people I know in the department now that it is much improved. It remains largely controlled by the individual department. We had a superb faculty and generally excellent access to them. The teaching opportunities I had were invaluable. I'd do it again, but wish I had gone into it better informed. My own fault that I wasn't, of course.

[glowdart]

CUNY GC funding in my humanities discipline (very highly ranked program) was poor to non-existent when I started. I understand from people I know in the department now that it is much improved. It remains largely controlled by the individual department. We had a superb faculty and generally excellent access to them. The teaching opportunities I had were invaluable. I'd do it again, but wish I had gone into it better informed. My own fault that I wasn't, of course.

This is the case in my humanities discipline, too. 

OP, are you in a field that might have grad students working on grants or long-term funded projects?  If so, then from what I have learned reading these boards over the years, you might have a totally different experience. 

(In our discipline, particularly when all of the other top schools provide stipends and full tuition remission to most if not all of their students, it makes little sense to accept an offer from CUNY unless there are extenuating circumstances (like a trust fund, NYC-employed spouse, family condo, etc.) that make it a cost-effective choice.  Frankly, it is flat-out-dumb to attend grad school in my discipline without full funding, but there are scores of people doing just that every year at CUNY.) 

I assume you asked about non-humanities fields because you suspected that that's where all the griping came from?  In my discipline, the griping you describe is what I hear, too (although the faculty are accessible).  It's simply a lot harder to finish a diss when you're making ends meet and gaining experience while holding adjunct jobs in multiple boroughs and spending your life on the subway.

[kid_sister]

Sorry, I'm in a social science. CUNY isn't ranked nearly as high in my field as it is for many of the humanities (it's around #30) but it does have several faculty with my exact interests, counting a superstar or two. I mentioned not being in the humanities because I didn't want cursory answers about going unfunded, but it looks like I caused a good deal of confusion (sorry).

No, I don't think there will be much funding in the way of grants. Neither do I think my prospects for employment post-doctorate will mitigate the cost of spending 9-10 years unfunded in NYC. The question is, will the less quantifiable rewards of working (presumably) with leaders in my field, in NYC (which is, for reasons other than networking, a hotbed for my research interests), and teaching at the various CUNYs outweigh those things? I'm unsure-to-negative.

Thank you all so much for the advice, even if this is all adding up to a rather bleak situation. Of course, if I do end up being offered a fellowship, or if I get in elsewhere, my picture gets much less muddy.

[natsteel]

(In our discipline, particularly when all of the other top schools provide stipends and full tuition remission to most if not all of their students, it makes little sense to accept an offer from CUNY unless there are extenuating circumstances (like a trust fund, NYC-employed spouse, family condo, etc.) that make it a cost-effective choice.  Frankly, it is flat-out-dumb to attend grad school in my discipline without full funding, but there are scores of people doing just that every year at CUNY.) 

That is spot on, glowdart. My undergraduate mentor is also at the Grad Center and told me she would take me on there and despite the fact that I would love to continue working with her, the lack of funding means I couldn't even seriously consider it. Even taking into account that CUNY is a public university that is funded by the state, it's still a pretty bad situation, as far as funding goes. I study at the GC library often and I can't help but think, when I walk by people there, that most of them are paying to go there. It blows my mind.

[blue_eye]

natsteel's comment reminded me...  Keep in mind that even if you do receive funding and it seems financially reasonable to attend CUNY-GC, many (probably most) of your student colleagues will not.  Morale tends to be low in those situations.  It is not inspiring to watch your classmates struggle and take forever to progress in their research, even if your particular circumstances are good.