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Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Grad Students Suffer Pay Delays

MICHELLE XU/THE HOYA Graduate Student Organization President Sam Osea (GRD '14)
MICHELLE XU/THE HOYA
Graduate Student Organization President Sam Osea (GRD ’14)
Graduate students employed by the university have spoken out in an effort to pressure the administration into fixing systemic problems with timely payment.

According to Sheila McMullan, associate dean for administration and finance, students first began to voice concern over pay delays for stipened work after the transition to a new payroll system last winter.

“The issues that we were having were on the hourly side mainly because when the data came over from the old payroll system, it didn’t come over in a complete way,” McMullan said.

Since then, administrators have worked to centralize the payroll system for students on stipend by shifting responsibility for entering stipend hours away from individual departments. The more centralized system put responsibility for all postgraduate stipend salaries onto two employees within McMullan’s office.

“It’s a heavy load, especially when you’re coming into the beginning of the semester,” McMullan said. “It’s a lot of hours to put in for those staff members, but it’s the only way we could control the data.”

Jordan Smith, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History, expressed frustration that he had yet to receive his monthly stipend due Nov. 1, though his previous check in September came a week early.

“The thing that is particularly frustrating is that there is no consistency, I’ve had to pick up checks at different places across campus, and there doesn’t seem to be any sense as to who I should ask about this,” Smith said.

As a result, Smith had to dip into savings to pay his rent this month.“The rent’s due on the first, and I didn’t have a check,” Smith said. “This is our paycheck, and I am sure whoever’s fault it is got their paycheck on time.”

Because the university does not offer summer stipends for research or teaching to post-graduates unlike several peer institutions, a majority of graduate students seek employment through the School of Continuing Studies during the summer.

Fourth-year doctoral candidate Jack Santucci experienced a delay in the remittance of his salary from working as a summer instructor for the SCS this past summer.

“Very succinctly, it takes a very long time to get paid, and that’s a particular problem for graduate students,” Santucci said. “You need the money.”

Santucci originally expected to be paid in biweekly intervals, but he did not get paid for several weeks.

“There’s a divergence between what somebody told me when I took the job and what actually happened,” Santucci said. “My contact in the SCS – when I agreed to take the job – told me I could expect my first payment at the end of the first week of teaching. Some time after that, payroll came up with a plan that said I’d receive it three weeks later, and it would be smaller.”

Associate Dean of the School of Continuing Studies Veronica Donahue was dismayed to learn of students experiencing pay delays while working with the SCS.

“We work to rectify the situations almost immediately if we can fix them. We do hire hundreds of students in the grand scheme of things, so we’re not happy unless everyone gets paid,” Donahue said.

Though the SCS transitioned to its new downtown campus this year, Donahue did not believe this restructuring was relevant to pay delays.

“The move downtown certainly didn’t impact our payroll processes. All of our processes are the same as main campus,” Donahue said.

A recent survey issued by the Graduate Student Organization, the representative body of postgraduates at Georgetown, sought to identify whether pay-delay issues were systemic across departments. The survey received several hundred responses from students representing a cross-section of post-graduate programs.

“We had some idea of who gets what, but if we’re going to focus our resources on advocating for some particular issue, we need to know what the most important thing and it appears it’s the timeliness of payments,” GSO Public Relations Officer Graham Cornwell (GRD ’16) said.

Utilizing momentum from his predecessor’s term in office, GSO President Sam Osea (COL ’12, GRD ’14) said that GSO would use the most recent survey results to analyze the extent of the pay issue before bringing it before the executive committee.

“This pay issue, we realized, is a campus-wide issue, but we wanted to evaluate to what extent,” Osea said. “If it becomes an ongoing thing, we’ll have the documentation to remember it. It serves as data that we can present to the committee.”

A cursory scan over survey results revealed that the issue is on students’ radar.

“I’ve glanced at a few. It does seem to be a concern. Whether it’s a demonstrated concern is yet to be seen,” Osea said.

Despite the complaints, McMullan is proud of the work that has been done to restructure the payroll system since last winter.

“This year has been a huge difference. There’s been some really great administrators dedicated to fixing it and UIS fixing some of the glitches,” McMullan said. “From the number of complaints we received in January of last year to this cycle are so much less.”

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